Can they even track pirated installs ?
Can they even track pirated installs ?
73 comments
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We have come full circle. Hurray?
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Does EA use unity...
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Doesn't matter. Regardless of what Unity said their "Enterprise" plan was, it doesn't matter.
B2B deals just work differently since both companies have more at stake. If a company like EA used Unity, there is no way Unity would want to lose that contract and EA couldn't afford to drop Unity. Large companies will likely go through a few short renegotiation meetings, if that.
Plus, lawyers. If Unity even tries to force this on its larger customers, they are going to be hauled into court and most likely lose. When they lose, Unity will likely be liable for court costs as well.
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It would mean every Unity game was not-so-secretly shipped with code that phones home to the Unity company upon install.
Either they've been egregiously spying on gamers for years (and by extension, game developers using Unity have just been fine with that), or they're lying through their teeth.
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Unity includes telemetry for some time
I believe you can't actually disable the telemetry (or Unity intro logo) in the "free" version
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I love their response to (paraphrasing) "Are you going to do another Darth Vader and alter the deal on us in the future?" - "Oh yes, potentially every year."
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Is it just me, or does "we have a proprietary data model that calculates..." sound an awful lot like "we have no actual method of tracking that"?
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To me it sounds a lot like "We don't really want to answer that question, so here's a bit of technobabble to ease your mind."
I mean, writing your own linked list in C and then summing its values could be considered as having "a proprietary data model that calculates", but it has basically nothing to do with the question on how they track such things, just hints that they're not using an existing - and proven - tracking method.
To clarify; they took the question "How are you tracking installs" to mean "With your tracking data, how are you counting installs", and then basically answered "We add the numbers together"
This is a complete non-answer, and it seems to suggest that their actual tracking method is likely unreliable. -
It sounds like bluffing.
In other words, it could very well be complete and utter bullshit.
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Why couldn't someone set up a script to install, uninstall, and reinstall Unity games on a loop? That would fuck with their numbers hardcore.
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If they could tell an install is pirated then they would lock it down
They either count all installs as legitimate or pirated copies are not picked up by their telemetry
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Why would you ever let a pirated copy online anyway
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On the contrary, I think the incentive would be for Unity to let the pirated install keep existing because that would mean more money they can extort from developers/publishers.
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All points made in that post are LMAO.
They estimate the installs. Or least thats what remains between they wont track installs and they have a proprietary data model to calculate them.
Enshittification takes its course.
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rofl seriously? Not only will they charge for the installs, but they won’t even use the actual number of installs - they’ll guess? This is the most hilariously stupid business model I’ve ever heard of
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All this makes a lot more sense with the lens of mobile gaming. Effort required is little, and margins are huge. If players don't partake in microtransactions, you just bombard them with ads.
This is the future of Unity. They are counting on devs not even bothering with the whole monetization model and instead expect them to turn on IronSource ads.
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No, they can not. This is just a standard PR response.
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When crackers don't patch out the phone line, they can.
Edit: Only in some cases, though. They can detect popular ways to crack games, like Steam DRM stubs. If the game has zero identifiable information about the buyer and no or an unsupported DRM, they're SOL.
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The thing is that most Unity games don't even have DRM in the first place. At most most will have the Steam DRM which is trivial to bypass. And Unity Games released on GOG will be especially at risk.
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Idc about anything right now I'm hungry af and the only thing I was able to read was crackers fml
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and how exactly is unity going to know whether it was gotten legitimately or not? the only way the developers wouldn't get charged is if crackers patched it out
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Can I pirate just the Unity bits, so they don't telemetrize?
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Firewall your pirated games
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That was my thought as well, since they count installs and not use count of bought copies directly from a platform.
What if people create cracks for legit purchased games, e.g. on Steam, which only removes the Unity tracking part?
A simple Firewall rule which "fixes it" for all games installed on a machine might work as well?
I believe it might be similar or the same procedure for every game using Unity. We might see this popping up at some point.
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Oh it's our fault for being confused is it, ok.
What a jackass.
Oh and look at that they are 100% going to increase the price on you down the line.
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Which company will become insolvent 1st, Twitter or Unity?
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I would place my bets on unity. It has tougher competition imo
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So those who aren't victims of piracy will be "fairly hurt"?
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Unity jumped the shark.
Engine was trash anyway. Unreal for lyfe.
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Nah, unity is/was a good engine. The reason why it has a bad reputation is for the same reason that Game maker used to have a bad reputation. Almost everyone who's learning how to make games uses Unity because it's easy to use, is extremely well documented, and has a massive store full of add-on scripts, programs, model sets, etc. As such, all the poorly optimized games and 0-effort asset flips end up being made in unity (though I've seen some unreal games that make even the most poorly optimized Unity game look good). The result? Even though there are a number of high-quality, highly-regarded games that use unity, it has a reputation for being a shitty engine.
Don't believe me? Keep an eye on Godot or Unreal. If unity sticks to their new license, then it's highly likely that one of those engines will become the new "newbie engine" and gain a reputation for being shitty.
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I disagree. I've been/am working on several pretty large projects in Unity (some of them sold hundreds of thousands copies), and especially once you start porting to consoles, the experience goes to shit. Their support is vague, documentation is plainly wrong in some places - I've once spent few days figuring out how to use a documented and explained feature, only to find out later that there's a closed few years old bug on their issue tracker that it's actually not supported, and the documentation only does not explains it very well. (The feature was multiple hits per single Raycast in jobs, here are the docs. According to the bug resolution, only one hit per ray is supported, and the docs only don't explain it very well. The docs are still the same.)
You also inevitably run into issues that you simply don't have in other engines - it's closed source. You have no idea how is something implemented, or whether something isn't working because you are doing it wrong, or if it's Unity bug/fault. In Unreal, if something doesn't work, you can always just check the engine code, and either fix it yourself, or better understand why it's not working. If you need to slightly modify some engine behavior, you're out of luck with Unity - you have to resort to ugly hacks that sometimes work, but usually at a cost. In Unreal, you just modify the engine code and be done with it.
Trusting Unity with any feature is also a gamble. Have you started developing a multiplayer game on Unet? Tough, we don't want to support that anymore. But, we will create a better multiplayer system, just wait for it! Then they removed Unet, and the new networking relacement is widely regarded as pretty much unusable - or at lest it was last time I checked. Thankfully, there are a few amazing open source networking addons.
In general, while Unity is an ok-ish game engine for smaller hobby projects (but for that, Godot is better), it's really an awful and frustrating experience once your project size grows and you need to build bigger games, or if you start porting your games to consoles.
And it's also really apparent from the way they communicate and threat you company that they don't give a fuck and only want your money.
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I'm sure they can track the installation. Not sure if they can tell it was pirated.
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I guess that would depend on the cracker..
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Will probably be enforced via licensing. Maybe even self reported. Probably has a clause giving them permission to perform audits of your sales.
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I doubt they will spend that much time. Just state you owe us x. If you appeal, you have to proove sales from your different channels.
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There is no way they'll just make up a bunch of invoices for small developers. That would be too time consuming, plus they'd need to show reasonable effort in determining the invoice. It's best to just let the devs do all the work with the fear that an audit can cost them so much more money than they'd save if they lied.
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Not really, they just go by if the game isn't selling well, or rather isn't selling well enough for them, obviously they have to be careful not to do it too aggressively otherwise otherwise they'll come off as being greedy or whiny about poor sales, which isn't a good look on any dev (especially if it's not actually related to piracy, then it hurts their argument).
They've just been careful enough to only whip out the crybaby arguments when it'll work in their favor and seem enough like piracy, as opposed to doing it too much or at the wrong time and seeming salty about low sales (to be fair that's exactly what's happening, but people think they know more about who buys vs who pirates, rather than who buys vs who doesn't).
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They can obviously track pirated installs.
They use computational predictions and quantum mathematical calculations through a software called trust me bro.
73 comments
According to what Unity reps said elsewhere, they have no way of knowing what's a bought install, what's a demo, what's a charity bundle, what's a pirated install, and what is someone loading a webpage with a WebGL program integrated (every page view = 1 install).
Instead, they want to estimate how much people owe them. Using secret methods with no accountability.
"according to our extensive research, when we multiplied how much we like you by fuckall, you owe us 20000"
This is my kind of maths, add on p&p, handling, admin and VAT let's it call it a nice round milly. No, no questions at this time sorry.
Exactly. To me, this explanation sounds like they'll just magically estimate the numbers without really being able to prove it. And that sucks.
However, we can be sure that developers will have their own analytics, that are probably way more accurate and they know exactly how many people have played or installed their game. And I'm betting that this number will be a lot smaller than the Unity "estimation", and people will get even more angry.