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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Well this is bullshit but is there anything I as a non-developer can do about it?
Choose to play games written in Godot instead.
And how do I know which ones those are?
Barely any commercially successful games are written in Godot right now. But Godot keeps getting better and Unity keeps getting worse, things could look very different in a couple of years.
Go to Godot's website and take a look at the showcase of... pixelart platformers and PS1-graphics boomer shooters. Hope you like those two genres!
I checked out their site and found that Cassette Beasts was made in Godot!
https://godotengine.org/showcase/cassette-beasts/
This is a game I've had my eye on, since after playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and then Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it was a further slap in the face just how crappy the Pokemon games continue to get with each new release (it's basically downhill after X and Y). Sure the story was good, but Scarlet/Violet was tough to enjoy with stutter, frame drops, hitching, and making me motion sick (and that's just visuals, gameplay itself in a boring open world with no incentive to explore is also a factor). I've never played a video game that made me motion sick. I needed an alternative and heard about Cassette Beasts being a better game than Pokemon. I played the demo, loved it, and I was waiting for a sale. Now I'm gonna pay full price for this game to support the devs and their work with Godot.
Don't buy Unity games, encourage developers you like to not buy them. Not much you can do really, but hopefully the financial disincentive will put them off. Users don't want install limits to be placed on their games, and they certainly won't pay developers for every install.
This will probably use some well-defined api endpoint to do their telemetry check-in, so this could probably be effectively circumvented if users were willing and able to do host level overrides to specifically prevent the unity engine from phoning home
You could also imagine a malicious actor phoning home to that API to drive up "installs" for a game and make a small studio or individual deal with massive fees. If a company is making these kinds of changes against the better judgement of their user base AND their internal analysis (lots of stock was sold two weeks ago), I'm doubtful they even care to properly deal with those kinds of problems.
Sail the high seas 🌊
This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.
The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn't legitimate.
So if you pirate a Unity game, it's no longer a victimless crime. You're actively making the developer pay for your piracy.
Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn't hurt Unity the company at all.
I don't think a pirated copy of the game would call home, that's something that hackers should patch really quickly IMO
Crackers often only patch out the DRM to redistribute a pirated copy of a game. If it is a game from a small studio, something like Goldberg is enough to "crack" the game, and it wouldn't remove any of the Unity telemetry.
huh, that's true. I've "forgot" about emulators like Goldberg.
Tho, I can imagine some kind of methods will appear sooner or later for that too.
Like others said, I am sure it will be one of the patches applied to the Unity games. Crackers are not really bad people, and turning off some telemetry should be a piece of cake.
What about all the games that have already been cracked?
Bear in mind this affects every game, including games that have already been released. So if that stuff wasn't patched out before, then devs would be charged for piracy.
I dunno. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree that crackers aren't bad people, but it leaves some unknowns because you're counting on them to go above and beyond, essentially.
Agreed, games would have to be fixed retroactively. That is a problem, but maybe it creates enough uproar people will actively try to block it.
That's even worse for the devs, because they might still need to pay Unity for your install.
As a player, no. And I don't recommend doing anything, this is developer tool among them.
You can donate to Godot I guess? But of course you are not the one using it.