this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023

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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds (www.gamesindustry.biz)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] [email protected] -66 points 2 years ago (26 children)

This makes sense to me, it looks like it's $0.20 for each install, only if

you have passed a threshold of installs
you yourself are charging for your game

Which, I know Lemmy has issues with proprietary software, but if you are charging for your software and it's built off this, I don't think $0.20 is too much to pay them. Unreal takes a percentage I believe, sounds like this is a "keep the lights on" charge.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (15 children)

Except steam will let you un/re-install something infinite times.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Is that really how it works? That seems like a pretty egregious oversight if so, couldn’t groups of people bankrupt devs, especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Nah, it's per device install. So unless you modify your PC enough to generate a different hardware fingerprint or go install a game on a fleet of laptops or something, most people won't be running up that counter too much.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They’ve clarified this is not the case. Reinstalling counts as a new installation

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

I saw that a short while ago and actually laughed out loud. The only thing left is to get the popcorn ready I guess because this is going to be hilarious.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Depending on how they generate a hardware fingerprint, fabricating random ones every check is a single LD_PRELOAD (or equivalent) away.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

After Unity's clarifications, I'm honestly kind of expecting the old "null-route the web address in the HOSTS file" to be a valid method to prevent their installer from phoning home to increment the counter. It's gonna be incredible if people start trying that just to frick with Unity.

The fact that we can even have this discussion should be proof enough to Unity that it's a complete non-starter of an idea to let user behavior influence the developer bottom-line.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I wonder if distributors could get away with doing that automatically. My gut instinct tells me that Unity isn't stupid enough for that to be feasible long term, but... like you say, the C-suite bozos clearly aren't listening to the engineers.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

How many reinstalls? Because I have games I have bought 4 PCs/laptops ago, not counting some few more when I installed them in family members' computers to play with them. What about OS updates? Windows keeps insisting to move to 11.

Frankly, this doesn't sound reasonable at all. It's not even like Unity is doing any of the hosting to justify squeezing devs like this.

edit: Now it has been confirmed it's not measured on an unique hardware basis, any reinstall counts. It's just madness.