Gaming

Unity: ~~Everyone really seems to hate EA~~EA sure is making a lot of money

Also Unity: Let's hire the CEO of EA

🤦

Ftfy

If I buy a new computer, they shouldn't be charged again because I installed on the new machine.

his is ignoring the "we don't collect personal data" but "we will definitely know if you install it once or multiple times "we have ways""

MAC addresses are per network Interface, my computer has three technically and uses two of them on a regular basis.

A terrible tracking method.

MAC addresses are absolutely trivial to spoof, to the point that it's just a drop-down option on linux lmao, so yeah good luck with that one

Except iOS will randomize its mac adress at each boot / after a while to prevent users being tracked by rogue WiFi networks, which is actually a thing being used to track consumers in commercial spaces etc. So that wouldn't work.

There is still a lot of questions. How many components can I change and it still be the same computer and not a new computer? If I replace one component every two months after about a year I'll have a new computer I've kind of ship of Theseused may way to a new rig. At what point would I have to buy a new licence?

If I don't ever have to buy a new licence in that scenario why do I have to buy a new licence if I buy a new computer outright, it's functionally the same difference.

It also tells me that this is the first time their internal devs have heard about these plans. This is the C-level‘s wet dream, not something they have actually implemented yet.

But hey, it can’t be that hard, can it? The code monkeys should be able to get it to work in three months, right?

There’s a couple of ways to block it.

1. Via an application Firewall, which will run on your PC. Safing’s Portmaster works on both Linux and Windows. Objective-See’s LuLu is a good Mac option. Both of these tools are free and open source.

2. If you know Unity’s IPs, you could block it in your firewall. I’m guessing you do not. Though, with a little work, it can be done.

3. If you can’t do either, you could at the very least block it at the DNS level. This will stop the software getting those IPs. It doesn’t really work if the IPs are already baked into the software, but that is incredibly unlikely in games. A great configurable DNS provider is NextDNS. If you have the know how to self-host a Pi-Hole or Adguard Home are great options.

There’s also ways to analyse that traffic, which I won’t go into here.

Which is the opposite of what smart companies like Adobe do. You facilitate the small players in hope that they grow big and keep using your products at a larger scale.

That's probably pretty negligible numbers. In fact I'd suspect that the number of people who buy a single copy that they then install on multiple devices is lower than the number of people who buy a game and never play it.

It's also much simpler to implement and the numbers are verifiable. Unless... that's exactly what Unity wants; just "trust me bro this is the correct number" kind of deal.

It's also possible that they can't track new installs either.

FAQ:

How is Unity collecting the number of installs?

We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.

Which is some kind of weird nebulous BS.

They're not saying their engine phones home and/or collects data from end-user devices. With the associated data protection nightmares.

This is the perfect answer.