this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Still an enormous nope. Both for the developers and the users. How do you check if a game has already been installed once? What data are you gonna steal to check if it has been installed already?
They'd have to get steam to tell them each time a game was downloaded to a different device so they could invoice. And apple.. and google... and random websites..
Or they make the client phone home each time it's run, which is going to cause its own mess of issues (firewalls, that kind of thing.. some of the corporate firewalls we run our app behind would raise lots of alarm bells at something like that).
The announcement says they'll still charge per device, so I'd guess they either hash your hardware and send it over or leave some garbage data in your registry on uninstall.
Either way, not a solution to the problem at all. In that even with a single per-user fee this is still bad.
That still wouldn't prevent malicious driving up of the install count. You wouldn't even need to actually install it, you could just figure out how they communicate a new install and then either block it if you want to say "fuck unity" or send fake ones to say "fuck this dev using unity".
And how will it work for devs that think they can handle it but then change their minds and drop unity but some older versions of their installers are still out there?
All the debate about the hypothetical hostile uses of the scheme are... more valid than I'd like, given that it's clear they hadn't thought about any of them, but it's missing the forest for the trees.
The forest is that even if this worked as intended it'd be a dealbreaker. That's the forest.
But they also confirmed that every new/reinstall on the same device counts as a different install, aka another 20ct
I think that's the bit they just rolled back, according to the OP's link.
They would have to have a home grown solution since Valve is unlikely to help them and other platforms like gamepass exist.
I can’t wait to write a script to install Windows and install shitty publisher’s Unity game repeatedly in VMs, old hardware, etc.