They removed charging again for deleting and reinstalling but are still charging for installing on a different device. So they just realized that there's no way to enforce the former without people abusing it
They could still abuse the latter if they use a VM to tweak the device fingerprint, and you know that'll happen.
The other thing that was brought up, and is a good point, is that this will cause publishers to yank their games from anything like GamePass as the cost will be an unknown liability to them.
It'll probably much easier... In the end, Unity needs to call something to let them know there was an install, like
http://telemetry.unity.com?game=DiabloImmortal&deviceId=acb-123
After installing a game locally or on a VM / Sandboxie, someone will figure out how it works... Then you just generate a lot of calls, either call it locally or through a proxylist / botnet - and you have millions of installs.
That brings up a good point. If they were smart they'd encrypt the fingerprint payload so it can't be easily spoofed. However, I thought I read that this was going to apply to already existing games. So short of the developers (laughably) issuing an update for existing games, how are they going track installs of older games? And that's probably easier to target for the lulz.
well sure, they would probably encrypt the payload, but they'd still have to add the encryption code / key in there to be able to do that.
It wouldn't be as easy as just finding the correct url and calling it loads of times, but someone cracking the game would already be deobfuscating and reverse engineering the code anyways patch out the DRM.
So figuring out how Unity "calls home" and replicating it can't be too complicated
It's going to be to Unity's benefit to make tracking installs a token gesture and overcharge developers, with prohibitively expensive legal action required to claw any overcharges back. So guess what's going to happen ?
I've finally realized why is all of this happening, and it makes so much sense!
For the last few years, Unity is led by a former Electronic Arts CEO...
There's free software equivalents to Unity? Video games are made by programmers, a FOSS alternative would advance quickly give thay its users are all programmers themselves, no?
https://godotengine.org/ released under the MIT license and very similar to Unity in terms of their target users.
Godot and Bevy are both FOSS. Godot is built in C++ and allows using GdScript and C++, or C#. Bevy is built in Rust and allows using Rust
For rust, you can still use godot. There is the godot-rust is complete for godot 3, on development for godot 4.
Hey I made the guitar you used in that song please give me royalties....
Anyone was able to find they telemtry url? We can test that unity was donwloaded 1B times per minute? Just give a message.