1228
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
Hm. I guess if one can reverse the code and sniff the network then one can probably figure out all but the most sophisticated phone home evasion. Just like with cracking games, eventually someone figures it all out. Game crackers will have to add network monitoring to their toolkit if they haven't yet I guess.
I guess the only way to be sure is to not buy those games.
My only issue there is you, as an end user installing these cracks, don't really have a way to be sure it was removed (unless you yourself know the details of and block the phone home). It'll have no effect on you either way, but it'll certainly effect the dev if you miss it; it's only gotta get through once (per install), maybe it tries until it succeeds.
I very much agree with various developers decisions to change engines. I feel for the ones that don't really have that option.
wouldn't a simple firewall block solve that?
Possibly, but can you expect an entire userbase, potentially millions of people, to:
A) know about the problem
B) care enough to do something
And C) know how+be able to apply that block
Especially when there's no effect for end users whether it does or doesn't go through.
A significant portion of players won't bother. Enough that the ones that do don't really matter.
To be clear, I'm specifically taking about pirated versions, which I figure the people using have enough interest in doing to know how or figure out how to do something like that, or even have it disabled at the start by the game crackers.
When I started Pirating games, I was just a young broke kid that wanted to play some games. I didn't know about or even think to look into stuff like this; I just looked for working cracks.
Even now, if I hadn't already known of this, I wouldn't think to look for it.
I'm just saying that, between standard users and pirates, the latter is much more likely to know about and act on something like this. And, like I said, it's also quite likely that the crackers themselves will have a workaround implemented from the start.