Gaming

It may have been more like:

Unity: "We love money and hate our customers, who can we hire to realize that vision?"

EA CEO: "Finally, a job that understands me"

Unity: ~~Everyone really seems to hate EA~~EA sure is making a lot of money

Also Unity: Let's hire the CEO of EA

🤦

Ftfy

Unfortunately a story as old as Wall Street. CEOs designed and hired to kill companies are a thing.

If I buy a new computer, they shouldn't be charged again because I installed on the new machine.

his is ignoring the "we don't collect personal data" but "we will definitely know if you install it once or multiple times "we have ways""

MAC addresses are per network Interface, my computer has three technically and uses two of them on a regular basis.

A terrible tracking method.

MAC addresses are absolutely trivial to spoof, to the point that it's just a drop-down option on linux lmao, so yeah good luck with that one

Except iOS will randomize its mac adress at each boot / after a while to prevent users being tracked by rogue WiFi networks, which is actually a thing being used to track consumers in commercial spaces etc. So that wouldn't work.

There is still a lot of questions. How many components can I change and it still be the same computer and not a new computer? If I replace one component every two months after about a year I'll have a new computer I've kind of ship of Theseused may way to a new rig. At what point would I have to buy a new licence?

If I don't ever have to buy a new licence in that scenario why do I have to buy a new licence if I buy a new computer outright, it's functionally the same difference.

It also tells me that this is the first time their internal devs have heard about these plans. This is the C-level‘s wet dream, not something they have actually implemented yet.

But hey, it can’t be that hard, can it? The code monkeys should be able to get it to work in three months, right?

Which is the opposite of what smart companies like Adobe do. You facilitate the small players in hope that they grow big and keep using your products at a larger scale.

It's also possible that they can't track new installs either.

FAQ:

How is Unity collecting the number of installs?

We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.

Which is some kind of weird nebulous BS.

They're not saying their engine phones home and/or collects data from end-user devices. With the associated data protection nightmares.