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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Is that really how it works? That seems like a pretty egregious oversight if so, couldn’t groups of people bankrupt devs, especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?
Nah, it's per device install. So unless you modify your PC enough to generate a different hardware fingerprint or go install a game on a fleet of laptops or something, most people won't be running up that counter too much.
Depending on how they generate a hardware fingerprint, fabricating random ones every check is a single
LD_PRELOAD(or equivalent) away.After Unity's clarifications, I'm honestly kind of expecting the old "null-route the web address in the HOSTS file" to be a valid method to prevent their installer from phoning home to increment the counter. It's gonna be incredible if people start trying that just to frick with Unity.
The fact that we can even have this discussion should be proof enough to Unity that it's a complete non-starter of an idea to let user behavior influence the developer bottom-line.
I wonder if distributors could get away with doing that automatically. My gut instinct tells me that Unity isn't stupid enough for that to be feasible long term, but... like you say, the C-suite bozos clearly aren't listening to the engineers.