Rival developer? Please, I'm pretty sure the call is coming from within the house here - this is exactly the sort of thing 4chan would do because a game asked them pronouns or gave them a wetsuit skin instead of a bikini one
Execs of a company that makes bajilions dollars a year want to buy a new yacht, so they make the most corrupt, greedy, and stupid decision imaginable. There is a mass exodus of consumers who pay these shitty execs in the first place, resulting in losses.
Being an exec is a job even the stupidest motherfucker can do and it shows
"Our telemetry software, which we developed, operate, and have complete control over with no accountability, says you owe us one hundred million dollars. Slaughterhouse time."
Unity seems to imply that it only counts 1 install per user, but depending on how the phone-home works I'm sure this can be tricked somehow to get a similar result.
If you need an alternative for retro pixel-art games, then you can use my engine. Has its own weird quirks, but can be made work, also I still need time to hardware accelerate the sprite rendering.
breaking news: if you spend thousands of hours building a house of cards on top of a rug controlled by a company whose best interests do not align with yours, don't be surprised when they hold your work for ransom and threaten to pull it out from under you
btw i predicted the whole thing a month ago
i fucking had the whole system in mind and it matches my thoughts exactly. (i was trying to come up with the most developer-unfriendly monetization strategy for unity... while in shower... for some reason)
Yeah I can't see this policy staying legal for long. Even if it wasn't blatant Highway robbery, Don't these tech companies have lobbyists that can push to ban this kind of shit? Because this screws over the company and not the fan base. I mean Publishers are going to have a hard time finding Talent if they want a game based in unity, but the developers are worried about being bankrupted simply because too many people are trying to get the game working by uninstalling and reinstalling it.
And what if the company is already defunct, but their game is still on Steam because the publisher owns the ip? Who exactly is going to Pony up?
I mentioned this in a thread on the news article posted somewhere around here and it was pointed out that they do claim to have preventative measures for this exact scenario. They didn't detail what that was, however. It could still be (and likely would be) inadequate and certainly not fool proof.