exactly, this is a non-apology. It’s just the social media manager who come back to work after the weekend and is trying to mitigate the situation.
There’s a chance that they will come out and say “ok we listened to the community, we don’t want the 20 cents per install anymore, we want 15 cents”
BTW if they really have a tech that can distinguish pirated installs with a 100% success rate are and not just lying “trust our numbers, they’re correct”, they should monetize that, developers are paying much more for Denuvo.
Yeah “bad actors” - but they knew what they were doing and didn’t do anything to stop it.
By pure coincidence they started to make more money from freemium games ads so they pivoted to that, and anyway being blocked by Ms defender was a death sentence. It was not “OMG bad actors are abusing our installers, and 99% of our customers are bad actors, let’s discontinue it immediately and find another market”
I mean legally. The devs agreed to a contract, it can’t be changed with different economic terms later
If someone published an Unity game 4 years ago, has now abandoned the project, doesn’t release any update, why needs to pay a per install fee “for supporting the runtime”? The version is now ancient. I could understand if it was “from version xx.yy”
You know what would be hilarious? If pirated copies would be counted as valid installs. If the setup just phones home “hey I got installed, bill 20 cents to the dev” without any additional DRM. It’s in Unity best (short term) interest to count pirated installs as valid
Apps and games that force a login with a Google account get an immediate uninstall/refund/1-star rating from me
I really feel their first idea was “devs will pay for installs and reinstalls because our bottom line is most priority” then now they are in damage control and try to deny that. Unless they have an agreement with Google/apple that tell them the real numbers of downloads from the store and not just the generic range “50-100k downloads” tag
Also on Android theoretically it’s not possible to distinguish new installs from reinstalls unless you’re using some kind of exploit like dummy images with tracking data saved in Pictures like taobao/AliExpress is doing
If they wanted to just give the monopoly to Unreal Engine and be directed on a path to irrelevance, they could just placed a banner on their website “please use Epic Unreal Engine”. Much easier than enraging devs and tracking all the installs via internet (Tracking gamers without consent can be legal in Europe?)
20 cents per install is insane especially for old games bundled with other stuff when they got pennies
while i think that two years of prison for this is completely ridiculous, a “let’s play” video of a visual novel, it’s essentially the same of “playing” a visual novel
Root and myandroidtools. You then go to that specific app, list all the activities it can do, then disable any which has a name related to ads like “adsActivity”. At that point it can’t show full screen ads at all.
Some games they give you the reward immediately but nowadays the ad SDKs they can check if the ad was shown or not so it gives an error