The only reason people will continue using Unity is because they’ve already made )or are in the process of making) a game using it and switching to something else would waste massive amounts of time and effort. Unity is depending on this - this is basically them squeezing everything out of existing customers without regard for long term growth.
Remember, the whole idea here is that Unity is demanding payments for already existing games. They clearly don’t care about whether people keep using Unity for new games in the future; the executives who made this decision will have cashed out and will be long gone by the time all the existing Unity games in the pipeline are done and things dry up.
They will try to sell based on future payments owed, or projected earnings. Then they will be sued by a big guy for breach of contract, having changed the terms without consent.
Then the money will disappear. Already, the engine will be abandoned. Unity is dead now.
Foss is available and with the programming community now incentivised to use it, it should do well. That might be their play. They knew the end was nigh.
There is no way they'll just make up a bunch of invoices for small developers. That would be too time consuming, plus they'd need to show reasonable effort in determining the invoice. It's best to just let the devs do all the work with the fear that an audit can cost them so much more money than they'd save if they lied.
They have telemetry. They probably know when a game is downloaded. They probably don’t know if it’s legitimate. They just auto bill based on telemetry and leave devs to dispute or suck the big one. Only effort needs to go into disputes. Big clients will obviously get quicker resolution.
No company would trust devs to be honest about downloads and it would be too expensive to verify.
They don’t need to audit much, just need a steam, epic, and itch total downloads figures.
They'd have to do best effort against charging devs for pirated copies.
Telemetry is also easily blocked. As a business, I'd trust that a lot less. It's why many enterprise licenses are simply self reported. The punishment isn't worth lying enough to make a difference.
Most companies would trust devs as the devs are not big enough to survive a legal fight they'd certainly lose with prejudice, meaning they'd pay court costs as well.
Not really, they just go by if the game isn’t selling well, or rather isn’t selling well enough for them, obviously they have to be careful not to do it too aggressively otherwise otherwise they’ll come off as being greedy or whiny about poor sales, which isn’t a good look on any dev (especially if it’s not actually related to piracy, then it hurts their argument).
They’ve just been careful enough to only whip out the crybaby arguments when it’ll work in their favor and seem enough like piracy, as opposed to doing it too much or at the wrong time and seeming salty about low sales (to be fair that’s exactly what’s happening, but people think they know more about who buys vs who pirates, rather than who buys vs who doesn’t).
I love their response to (paraphrasing) “Are you going to do another Darth Vader and alter the deal on us in the future?” - “Oh yes, potentially every year.”
To me it sounds a lot like “We don’t really want to answer that question, so here’s a bit of technobabble to ease your mind.”
I mean, writing your own linked list in C and then summing its values could be considered as having “a proprietary data model that calculates”, but it has basically nothing to do with the question on how they track such things, just hints that they’re not using an existing - and proven - tracking method.
To clarify; they took the question “How are you tracking installs” to mean “With your tracking data, how are you counting installs”, and then basically answered “We add the numbers together”
This is a complete non-answer, and it seems to suggest that their actual tracking method is likely unreliable.
What do you bet they have an actually figured that part out yet and were just hoping no one would ask, and then that they’d magically be able to come up with something.
Cloudflares blog posts say so so I assume this is true but I would still recommend everyone to verify this for themselves before receiving letters from law firms.
When you visit a site that using Cloudflare, the site receives your IP address in a header. Sites not using Cloudflare do not. When torrenting, it’s possible that one of the trackers uses Cloudflare and gets your IP in that header, but it’s not a concern as other peers only receive the VPN IP.
But right now, according to this, they deny it specically: “WARP replaces your original IP address with a Cloudflare IP […]. This happens regardless of whether the site is on the Cloudflare network or not.”
I don’t know of a checker to individually verify this quickly, but I assume they say the truth.
Anyway, I think you are right in that it wouldn’t be a concern for torrenting, if it was true for the present.
Edit: I found a tool to verify this now: this http header checker is using Cloudflare according to the urlvoid scan. And I can’t see my real IP in the X-Forwarded-For and CF-Connecting-IP HTTP headers
Websites and third party services often infer geolocation from your IP address, and now, 1.1.1.1 + WARP replaces your original IP address with one that consistently and accurately represents your approximate location.
no thanks I don’t want to reveal my approximate location
Red flags are always free. Upfront anyway. You pay for them at an unexpected time in unpleasant ways later. So feel free to have as many as Unity is providing. 😊
This needs to be adapted into a three part movie (think Creepshow) where a seemingly innocuous vendor selling flags rather than balloons is the “host” and the people who buy red ones get them free…but “You pay for them at an unexpected time in unpleasant ways later.” And all the parts are just FULL of red flags the characters don’t see but the audience does (as per usual in most horror films).
On the contrary, I think the incentive would be for Unity to let the pirated install keep existing because that would mean more money they can extort from developers/publishers.
I’ve been using warp since a couple of years. I honestly didn’t care about my IP being leaked to the torrent sites because I no longer try to visit any honeypot. The only thing I wanted was to keep my ISP away from my actions and warp has always done that seamlessly.
I did a test with my pihole where pihole was unable to block any adverts when I was connected to warp which made me realise that it’s not just a custom dns solution but a tunnel to the website where no one else can snoop on your traffic.
Setting 1.1.1.1 as the DNS server on a router will simply use the Cloudflare DNS server instead of your ISP DNS server. It improves speed and makes it harder to the ISP to track your activity, or block sites for you. But still they still see to which IP addreses you are connecting to. And anybody with your IP can see what files you are torrenting (this can be checked at iknowwhatyoudownload.com)
WARP will route all your traffic through the Cloudflare servers (like any other VPN). So your IP is hidden from the public when torrenting, and from the sites you visit. And your ISP doesn’t know what sites you are visiting
I just checked the page for my own ip, my past seedbox IP and my current seedbox IP
My current (dynamic) ISP IP: No downloads. Makes sense, as I do not have torrenting.
My historic seedbox IP: No downloads. Strange but the website claims it tracks the DHT protocol and I am pretty sure I rarely used DHT for my torrents back then
My current seedbox IP: Multiple downloads from today about me supposedly downloading XXX stuff amd various kinds of games and movies.
The site doesn’t know all shit or at least not maps it to the correct IP. I am not interested in torrenting porn anyway and if, I would probably not download it from DHT and more likely be around private trackers
I don’t torrent games ever. The only pieces of software I did are photoshop and illustrator and switch games.
Is my seedbox hacked? Not impossible. I found an open seedbox FTP connection on shodan and have the power to connect to the FTP share. Is kind of interesting to see what others download.
Your seedbox probably shares the same IP address with other people. So those xxx downloads are from them.
the DHT is just a decentralised torrent index that lists all torrents in public trackers, plus the ones seeded by people with DHT enabled in their client, iirc
You are incorrect. If you pay for a seedbox, it is almost guaranteed to be a shared box. Unless your seedbox costs you over $100/mo, you don't have exclusive control over it or the IP it uses.
Private trackers know how seedbox companies operate, therefore don't really give a shit that you're sharing an IP to seed.
rofl seriously? Not only will they charge for the installs, but they won’t even use the actual number of installs - they’ll guess? This is the most hilariously stupid business model I’ve ever heard of
All this makes a lot more sense with the lens of mobile gaming. Effort required is little, and margins are huge. If players don’t partake in microtransactions, you just bombard them with ads.
This is the future of Unity. They are counting on devs not even bothering with the whole monetization model and instead expect them to turn on IronSource ads.
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