Unity: We have to charge for every install because we only see totals. Also Unity: We can tell which install is which, so you won’t be overcharged.
The whole thing seems rushed because the CEO of Unity, John Riccitiello, was the leading advocate of microtransactions when he was at EA, and now he is instilling the same culture at Unity.
How will they differentiate between pirated copies and legitimate copies? How will they distinguish first-time installs from repeat installs? Can we trust their algorithm? It just doesn’t seem possible.
If there was a foolproof way of checking for a pirated copy they wouldn’t be making a game engine they’d be making DRM
Unity: Everyone really seems to hate EA
Also Unity: Let’s hire the CEO of EA
🤦
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”
I’m not sure why they hired him.
“Hey we’re looking for a new captain, why don’t we go for the guy who repeatedly sails into rocks? He’ll be good.”
Unfortunately a story as old as Wall Street. CEOs designed and hired to kill companies are a thing.
Meaning that this is on purpose? If so, who would profit from this? (besides the incompetent CEO themselves)
Short sellers, and the corporation that absorbs them at bargain prices.
You can usually tell a unique machine apart from another via MAC address, but even that has issues, and that’s giving Unity the benefit of the doubt when they haven’t earned it.
Guy just sank the ship
This is wizards of the cost all over again. Unity learned nothing from them.
It’s just capitalism.
The fact that they went forward with this decision means they’re not so wise at lying. It sounds more like last-minute damage control, but I doubt this will stop their greed. What I’m wondering now is how will the Chinese game companies react? Everybody get your popcorns ready.
Lying about collecting that data, because they do (and I block it). Not lying, but backtracking on everything else.
You’re right, they’re absolutely collecting data, but saying they can’t differentiate between activations and then saying “oh yeah, actually, we can when it comes to (piracy/bundles/charity/etc.)” less than 24 hours later tells me that not only do they not care about game devs, but they think we’re stupid too.
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?
Can you share, how are you blocking it? On the firewall?
There’s a couple of ways to block it.
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Via an application Firewall, which will run on your PC. Safing’s Portmaster works on both Linux and Windows. Objective-See’s LuLu is a good Mac option. Both of these tools are free and open source.
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If you know Unity’s IPs, you could block it in your firewall. I’m guessing you do not. Though, with a little work, it can be done.
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If you can’t do either, you could at the very least block it at the DNS level. This will stop the software getting those IPs. It doesn’t really work if the IPs are already baked into the software, but that is incredibly unlikely in games. A great configurable DNS provider is NextDNS. If you have the know how to self-host a Pi-Hole or Adguard Home are great options.
There’s also ways to analyse that traffic, which I won’t go into here.
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Sounds trustworthy to me! /s
Don’t worry bro, if we make a terribly designed system that directly benefits our bottom line, we will totally fix it and make it fair. Trust us.
Was Unity lying yesterday or are they lying today?
Yes and yes. It’s not an either-or situation.
Good point, they can’t both be true…but they CAN both be false. I’m hiring you as my lawyer.
Well it kind of is. Either they can differentiate between a new install and a repeat install, or they can’t.
It’s also possible that they can’t track new installs either. Or have not implemented anything yet, so they have no idea what properties it will have.
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.
Oof. This is corporate lingo for “we’ll pull a number out of our ass and charge the dev accordingly”. “Proprietary data model” makes it clear they intend to remain conveniently (for them) opaque about it.
Ok so if they are now only charging for the first install, why aren’t they just charging an extra fee per sale? Wouldn’t that accomplish effectively the same thing? (And actually work out in unity favour since not everyone who buys a game downloads it)
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That’s probably pretty negligible numbers. In fact I’d suspect that the number of people who buy a single copy that they then install on multiple devices is lower than the number of people who buy a game and never play it.
It’s also much simpler to implement and the numbers are verifiable. Unless… that’s exactly what Unity wants; just “trust me bro this is the correct number” kind of deal.
People eventually upgrade their computers. Swapping out mainboards and/or reinstalling Windows probably counts as a new device.
Because they realize that a huge number of their customers are small indies, and they want to be able to squeeze them - the majority of their customer base - not just the minority of big companies (who are also the most likely to fight back legally).
Just look at how their scheme squeezes smaller, poorer developers way more than big ones. If Unity went by points like, say Epic does with Unreal, they could shake down the big developers… but wouldn’t get much out of the indies.
So what is a better game engine to use now?
Godot is FOSS.
Unreal is decent too i guess but… not free. (Though iirc its free if you publish your game on epic)
Unreal for “commercial, highly documented, also an industry standard”
Godot for “this is actually libre software and you can trust it to not enshittify itself in a couple years”
This is the perfect answer.
So does this mean every single unity game will have unity online drm now? Or how else will they be able to tell? Seem so much more convenient to take a cut from sales instead
Considering it applies to games released before 2024… they would have to already have their own tracking built in
