Indie devs actually selling their game should be fine right? If it's just the devs of F2P / adware crap that will be sunk, then maybe Unity's new pricing policies will be the unexpected savior of gaming. Imagine a world in which we're not racing to the bottom with ad-ridden shovel-ware but instead people try to make the best possible product and sell it for what it's worth... radical. Or maybe I've misunderstood something and this will hurt developers who sell their games too.
A semi-forgotten but viable and healthy business model (with roots in the Shareware tradition) for mobile games is the free-with-unlock. Not F2P where the IAPs are different quantities of “gems” or “coins,” but a single “unlock” IAP that gets you the rest of the game if you enjoyed the free content.
The per-install fee instantly makes this model unviable.
Unity should've talked to people before announcing the changes.
This is an unforced error on Unity's part and while historical performance does not promise future performance; you really can expect Unity to make large blast-radius changes in the future without consulting you.
Unity, for all its "clarifications," keeps promising it won't be a problem and then refusing to be transparent about any of the ways it could possibly be less of a problem.
Either they backtrack on this whole lifetime install count scheme or this blows up even more spectacularly when January rolls around.
I don't understand why this is a worry - they will do it the same way Valve/Microsoft/Epic/Blizzard identify how many machines you have their product installed on - with a unique hardware ID that will make sure you aren't charged twice for installing the game on the same machine. It's not rocket science, it's been used in the industry for ages.
Are you sure? As far as I'm aware, I'm able to install a game I own on multiple machines for all of these platforms. I figured that the game is tied to my account, not some hardware ID. Why would they need to make sure I'm not charged twice based on installing the game to a machine rather than just seeing if my account owns it? I have never been charged more than once for a game I own that I have installed on both my desktop and my laptop, even after replacing those machines.
Microsoft will stop you from downloading the game if it's installed on too many devices - it will tell you to deauthorize it on another device or sign it out entirely.
>> I figured that the game is tied to my account, not some hardware ID
Because it is. These platforms still use hardware ID matching for account bans and other functionality.
They're repurposing an existing telemetry system that already counts installs and cannot distinguish between a new install and a reinstall. They've been using it for at least five years.
I only know this because they specifically pointed it out when announcing the new pricing plan.
They initially said the exact opposite. They changed their mind after being shouted at about all of the above concerns.
They're clearly flying by the seat of their pants with this. There is no reason to give them any rope, any benefit of the doubt. There is no reason to believe that they will be able to do this right.
This is vastly more difficult than you think. For example, if you try to use the standard method, which is hard drive serial numbers, it's incredibly easy to spoof AND all prebuilt computers from Walmart share the same serials. Non-starter.
I have no idea why you think it's difficult at all. On windows Microsoft provides you directly with functionality to query the device ID, that's good enough but in reality if you pair it with some kind of online login system it's pretty much all you need.
> I have no idea why you think it's difficult at all.
Because I help develop a game engine / platform that deals with this problem and therefore done extensive research?
All of those Microsoft device ID variants are trivial to spoof or collide. If you're talking about GetSystemIdForPublisher() and friends like 'Product ID', you get the Walmart collision problems.
Furthermore, if you rely on an easy-to-spoof hardware ID system, if someone gets ahold of someone else's HWID (see: database breach, phishing), you can trivially mess with the data.
Valve/Microsoft/Epic get around this by spending tons of developer time on this problem and using techniques like fingerprinting and behavior analysis.
Can you provide examples where this has been used in then industry?
With the examples you listed doesn't it require an account to authenticate first before achieving this?
Furthermore, is this not easy enough to spoof? Without account based authentication (which as far as I know Unity does not use/require?) what stops me from spinning up VMs or emulators repeatedly to attempt to install bomb?
Install count and hardware based DRM in games is notoriously bad. Reports of "I changed a graphics card and now the game is locking me out" are as old as time.
It is a solution that can be done more, or less, correctly or fairly. But the problem is that it is easy to get it wrong, it is easy to implement this incorrectly.
Given how slipshod and slapdash these announcements and responses and walkbacks have been, you can't really have any faith that they will fall into the "right" side of things.
It's a massive new change and requirement coming into force in only a few months, with basically every single report coming out of Unity internal engineering being that they don't have any systems in place to figure this out and have no idea how they will actually make it work while also still being GDPR compliant.
"Just trust us bro" and "you can file a support ticket if we get the numbers wrong" are not acceptable and are each reasons enough to worry about the potential for (or rather, guaranteed) abuse of this system.
One must assume the worst about any implementation with a system like this, in the same way that once must assume the worst about any implementation of telemetry or of DRM. You'll be right far more often than wrong.
I'm not sure that really fits well with GDPR... Or it has to be quite far removed from any actual identifier. I certainly believe that tracking number of game installs to bill someone else isn't legitimate reason to store any identifying data about my systems...
