99
Unity to introduce runtime fee based on installs
(blog.unity.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
99 points (96.3% liked)
Programming
17314 readers
29 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's retroactive and it's not based on sales, it's based on installs. So for example, I purchase a game on steam and I own a PC, a steam deck, and I have a kid with a PC. That's 3x the fees for one sale even though I can only play it on one device at a time. Maybe I get bored of the game and uninstall it. A year later I want to play it again, there's a new fee for the same sale and PC that unity gets.
From what I understand there is also a risk that pirated copies could count. It's hard to see how Unity can effectively defend against it.
It's clear that they haven't bothered to actually think any of this through.
Or they have but the potential profit outweighs potential negative PR.
Now imagine someone makes a program that repeatedly installs and uninstalls the game. They let this program run all day every day. They also give the program to their friends or post it online.
Unity says they have measures against this, but that then smells of spyware. How would they know how many times a game has been installed without that?
Unity may say they have a solution to that too, but no matter the implementation, bad actors will find a way to exploit it.