According to what Unity reps said elsewhere, they have no way of knowing what’s a bought install, what’s a demo, what’s a charity bundle, what’s a pirated install, and what is someone loading a webpage with a WebGL program integrated (every page view = 1 install).
Instead, they want to estimate how much people owe them. Using secret methods with no accountability.
Exactly. To me, this explanation sounds like they’ll just magically estimate the numbers without really being able to prove it. And that sucks.
However, we can be sure that developers will have their own analytics, that are probably way more accurate and they know exactly how many people have played or installed their game. And I’m betting that this number will be a lot smaller than the Unity “estimation”, and people will get even more angry.
Doesn’t matter. Regardless of what Unity said their “Enterprise” plan was, it doesn’t matter.
B2B deals just work differently since both companies have more at stake. If a company like EA used Unity, there is no way Unity would want to lose that contract and EA couldn’t afford to drop Unity. Large companies will likely go through a few short renegotiation meetings, if that.
Plus, lawyers. If Unity even tries to force this on its larger customers, they are going to be hauled into court and most likely lose. When they lose, Unity will likely be liable for court costs as well.
When crackers don’t patch out the phone line, they can.
Edit: Only in some cases, though. They can detect popular ways to crack games, like Steam DRM stubs. If the game has zero identifiable information about the buyer and no or an unsupported DRM, they’re SOL.
and how exactly is unity going to know whether it was gotten legitimately or not? the only way the developers wouldn’t get charged is if crackers patched it out
They can’t detect everything, but let’s look at Steam as an example. If the game detects Steam DRM, then the game knows that they should’ve bought the game on Steam. They can check whether the Steam DRM is a stub and therefore a crack, or get your local Steam account ID and cross-check whether you bought the game with a Steam API.
The thing is that most Unity games don’t even have DRM in the first place. At most most will have the Steam DRM which is trivial to bypass. And Unity Games released on GOG will be especially at risk.
It would mean every Unity game was not-so-secretly shipped with code that phones home to the Unity company upon install.
Either they’ve been egregiously spying on gamers for years (and by extension, game developers using Unity have just been fine with that), or they’re lying through their teeth.
Probably the opposite actually. The devs who utilize the feature probably enjoy having some numbers to look at and analyze. They’re trying to make a game that people enjoy after all; the more info they have on how you’re playing the game, the better. The devs who don’t use it probably aren’t even aware that it exists. Additionally, I’m not sure if it requires a subscription to view the telemetry (the page suggests you have to sign up for it in some capacity), but if it does then it makes sense that devs might believe that it’s something that’s disabled until you manually enable it.
Personally, I know if I was a dev I’d be checking that shit every day. I like watching the funny numbers go up and down.
Nah, unity is/was a good engine. The reason why it has a bad reputation is for the same reason that Game maker used to have a bad reputation. Almost everyone who’s learning how to make games uses Unity because it’s easy to use, is extremely well documented, and has a massive store full of add-on scripts, programs, model sets, etc. As such, all the poorly optimized games and 0-effort asset flips end up being made in unity (though I’ve seen some unreal games that make even the most poorly optimized Unity game look good). The result? Even though there are a number of high-quality, highly-regarded games that use unity, it has a reputation for being a shitty engine.
Don’t believe me? Keep an eye on Godot or Unreal. If unity sticks to their new license, then it’s highly likely that one of those engines will become the new “newbie engine” and gain a reputation for being shitty.
I disagree. I’ve been/am working on several pretty large projects in Unity (some of them sold hundreds of thousands copies), and especially once you start porting to consoles, the experience goes to shit. Their support is vague, documentation is plainly wrong in some places - I’ve once spent few days figuring out how to use a documented and explained feature, only to find out later that there’s a closed few years old bug on their issue tracker that it’s actually not supported, and the documentation only does not explains it very well. (The feature was multiple hits per single Raycast in jobs, here are the docs. According to the bug resolution, only one hit per ray is supported, and the docs only don’t explain it very well. The docs are still the same.)
You also inevitably run into issues that you simply don’t have in other engines - it’s closed source. You have no idea how is something implemented, or whether something isn’t working because you are doing it wrong, or if it’s Unity bug/fault. In Unreal, if something doesn’t work, you can always just check the engine code, and either fix it yourself, or better understand why it’s not working. If you need to slightly modify some engine behavior, you’re out of luck with Unity - you have to resort to ugly hacks that sometimes work, but usually at a cost. In Unreal, you just modify the engine code and be done with it.
Trusting Unity with any feature is also a gamble. Have you started developing a multiplayer game on Unet? Tough, we don’t want to support that anymore. But, we will create a better multiplayer system, just wait for it! Then they removed Unet, and the new networking relacement is widely regarded as pretty much unusable - or at lest it was last time I checked. Thankfully, there are a few amazing open source networking addons.
In general, while Unity is an ok-ish game engine for smaller hobby projects (but for that, Godot is better), it’s really an awful and frustrating experience once your project size grows and you need to build bigger games, or if you start porting your games to consoles.
And it’s also really apparent from the way they communicate and threat you company that they don’t give a fuck and only want your money.
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.
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.
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