Originally posted by Fuzzy the imperfect:

Originally posted by NeatWolf:

From dev to dev, you have my full understanding on this. What looks to be an innocent and minor change is actually going to mean bankruptcy for many non-success-biased devs.
On top of that, what is stopping some malicious person from batch installing/uninstalling of your game, like 5 times per minute, costing you 1$ per minute, 10 per 10 minutes, 60 per hour, 1440$ per day? What if he's got a machine just for that and leaves it running for a month?
I know you could be thinking "who's going to do that"?
Well. Let's push the absurd to the max, and let's assume it's people paid per install quota by the same engine?
I know it's just speculation but still, we can only "trust" it's not going to happen.
OR - devs are going to find a way to keep part of the game installed so that it doesn't cost any money per copy per user.

I have a security background. Any install counting procedure can be exploited easily. Worst case would be phoning home. Then one could use a replay attack and plausibly get your 1440 per day number to be more like 100-200 per second. If they use encryption for that process and it's good enough not to be cracked, fine. A memory injection attack can execute their own code. Hardware IDs, system IDs, IP, all can be easily randomized. In a way using those methods would be worse since a whole new VM wouldn't need to be created, only the identifiers would need to be changed. If they use numbers ostensibly outside enduser control like number of downloads/installs steam reports, then a malicious actor could initiate the process and toss the data to speed up the process.

I did some quick math. So much as buying 100 bucks of compute time from AWS could cost a developer of a game as small as rogue genesia somewhere between 4,100 and 250k USD. Someone with a very good connection and a midrange rig letting it run indefinitely would pass that amount in less than a week. Though it would be possible to discover and shutdown permanently.

Using per-install pricing is such a disaster there is no plausible way to fix it. Even a fraction of a cent and the best cryptographic algorithms would be easy for a single individual to sink a developer. There is no risk mitigation that would work except to not use unity and delist any existing games.

Absolutely. What I envisioned was just the "poor lamer" solution - I honestly preferred not to suggest any efficient solution to that.

We could reach the point where intentionally distributed pirate copies could be free of any of such code to be sent to Unity.

Honestly, I hope this also is not going to mean that Unity games will *require* internet access to work.

Otherwise, how could they possibly send such usage data, if not by installing a permanent agent detecting the state of connection, sending a whole batch of runs happened on not just one, but several Unity games?

Speculation: Unity could be paving the road to oper their own "platform": Permanently installed on your system, multiplatform, simplifying the export of Unity games so that basically you install a local "Unity Player", and a blob of multiplatform game data gets downloaded by it.

It's speculation, but that would also guarantee a better tracking/anticheat solution to all Unity games.
And yes. We already had a "Unity Player" in the past, even if it worked more like a Flash player.

Besides, this is just one of the many aspects that makes such move absurd.

...and only a company in a monopoly position would dare to do that.

There are cheaper, still trusted, solutions at this point.

Everyone is talking about this. This is also a disaster from a marketing perspective in my opinion.

They've already begun backtracking on this, but honestly even considering that it would be understandable if you wanted to change engines, because this is a tremendous breach of trust.

If the game is taken from steam. Who do we need to sue to get or money back? Steam or the Dev?

Originally posted by NeatWolf:

From dev to dev, you have my full understanding on this. What looks to be an innocent and minor change is actually going to mean bankruptcy for many non-success-biased devs.
On top of that, what is stopping some malicious person from batch installing/uninstalling of your game, like 5 times per minute, costing you 1$ per minute, 10 per 10 minutes, 60 per hour, 1440$ per day? What if he's got a machine just for that and leaves it running for a month?
I know you could be thinking "who's going to do that"?
Well. Let's push the absurd to the max, and let's assume it's people paid per install quota by the same engine?
I know it's just speculation but still, we can only "trust" it's not going to happen.
OR - devs are going to find a way to keep part of the game installed so that it doesn't cost any money per copy per user.

It would happen we all now that
I mean what people already did

Originally posted by Souren:

If the game is taken from steam. Who do we need to sue to get or money back? Steam or the Dev?

Even if removed from steam you'll be able to continue downloading it from Steam,
it'll still belong to you.
Removed from steam mean it won't be sold on Steam nor updated.
again, this is last ressort, and if it reach this points, I'm simply gonna make the game open source

Originally posted by PlexusDuMenton:

Originally posted by Souren:

If the game is taken from steam. Who do we need to sue to get or money back? Steam or the Dev?

Even if removed from steam you'll be able to continue downloading it from Steam,
it'll still belong to you.
Removed from steam mean it won't be sold on Steam nor updated.
again, this is last ressort, and if it reach this points, I'm simply gonna make the game open source

To back this up I have about half a dozen games in my steam library that can't be purchased anymore. Some I have had since 2012. Older hasbro licensed stuff where the reseller's license expired yet I can still download them.

I believe there was some clarification that reinstalls do not count towards the limit, though I am skeptical of Unity's ability to keep track of that. Screw Unity.

The whole Unity situation is wild I hope every dev now starts using other engines im sure itll be a pain in the butt and more things to learn but this really shows how the future of unity could be destructive Im sorry to all devs that works in unity its pretty sad considering how many amazing games come from unity

Even if they change this. The damage is done. Devs are going to be worried about the rug being pulled out from under them again.

Unity has ruined any trust. And it wouldn't make sense to use their engine anymore now or in the future.

They straight up can't legally do this in the EU.

So, good luck to them :D

super shady if you real the whole post

bad move by Unity

Originally posted by Souren:

If the game is taken from steam. Who do we need to sue to get or money back? Steam or the Dev?

Why on earth are you under the impression that you would have any legal basis for suing ANYONE if a game you purchased and will still have access to is taken down from a storefront? What is wrong with you?

Not a hot take. This is just Unity's CEO being a greedy, out-of-touch megaclown. I'm honestly not even sure how it's even legal to enforce something like this, it's nearly extortion depending on how you interpret the law. I've never seen any business get away with distributing a product to customers at no cost/fixed upfront cost/subscription-based cost and then later demanding royalties based on hitting milestones without being sued into oblivion. This isn't like Twitch or game storefronts changing their cut % when streamers/developers reach milestones, because those are contractual changes that the end-user agrees to or doesn't agree to.

Even if that was in the EULA, a EULA cannot create its own laws, and they cannot be above the law or circumvent the law.

I very much want to be the "fly on the wall" in the courtroom when it comes to Microsoft and Nintendo inevitably suing the pants off of Unity when they push this change. As if the Epic Games vs. Apple lawsuit wasn't interesting enough, this one could be just as entertaining to watch.

Same CEO of Unity was the CEO of EA back when they wanted to charge '1 dollar for each reload of your gun'.

Same. Guy.

damn dude sucks for us but sucks even worse for you. Thanks for letting us know whats up