1212
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
wouldn't a simple firewall block solve that?
Possibly, but can you expect an entire userbase, potentially millions of people, to:
A) know about the problem
B) care enough to do something
And C) know how+be able to apply that block
Especially when there's no effect for end users whether it does or doesn't go through.
A significant portion of players won't bother. Enough that the ones that do don't really matter.
To be clear, I'm specifically taking about pirated versions, which I figure the people using have enough interest in doing to know how or figure out how to do something like that, or even have it disabled at the start by the game crackers.
When I started Pirating games, I was just a young broke kid that wanted to play some games. I didn't know about or even think to look into stuff like this; I just looked for working cracks.
Even now, if I hadn't already known of this, I wouldn't think to look for it.
I'm just saying that, between standard users and pirates, the latter is much more likely to know about and act on something like this. And, like I said, it's also quite likely that the crackers themselves will have a workaround implemented from the start.