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?

[–] chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 20 points 2 years ago

Hearthstone runs on Unity. I'm ok setting up a little something to let people constantly install and uninstall Hearthstone to bleed Blizzard dry... hell, once it's discovered how your installs are tracked, I could see that leading to insane exploitation.

[–] Fylkir 15 points 2 years ago

especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?

Wouldn't even need a small game technically. I'm pretty sure the only way to properly calculate would be running a postinstall script and someone could presumably just keep running that script

[–] delcake@kbin.social -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.

[–] BURN@lemmy.world 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] delcake@kbin.social 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.

[–] colonial@lemmy.world 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.

[–] delcake@kbin.social 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.

[–] colonial@lemmy.world 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.

[–] aggelalex@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago

Virtual Machines.

[–] TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 12 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.

[–] PixxlMan@lemmy.world -5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's without a doubt not what Unity means here though

[–] Ktanaqui@lemm.ee 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It is exactly what Unity means; they have doubled down on the clarifications. The precise point is to charge the developer for any install a user makes once they earn a (paltry) $200K.

It's not rocket science to see that this is a very bad, very abusive idea and its targeted to hurt indie developers the most (as larger studios like EA would be on the enterprise plan and therefore on the hook for only 1/20th of the same usage).

Some simple math says that you would have to uninstall and reinstall a $5 game 20 times to completely nullify the earnings from your purchase.

It's surprisingly easy to rack up installs; between multiple devices, uninstalls for bug fixing / addressing, the OS breaking it, modded installs having to be reset, making space for other games, refreshing a device... and so on. And that's not even accounting for bad actors actively trying to damage a company.

[–] PixxlMan@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Honestly I just can't believe it. It's so unbelievably stupid and prone to fraud. How did they come to this decision??

[–] Ktanaqui@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

Clearly without consulting anyone with a modicum of common sense.

It's also possible its a move to deliberately piss of the customer base, so they can "back off" and implement a solution that still satisfies them, but looks like they let the "customer" (mostly) win.

For example: "We will charge $.20 for over 200K installs!" Backpedal: "We will charge $.05 for only the initial install after 500K installs!"

Pretty sure there are many documented instances of exactly this occurring, especially in the game dev industry unfortunately. (The goal was never the first offer, but rather to overshadow the real goal.)