The company has tweaked its policy to counter potential "install-bombing" and clarified how titles on Xbox Game Pass and similar services will be impacted.
They removed charging again for deleting and reinstalling but are still charging for installing on a different device. So they just realized that there's no way to enforce the former without people abusing it
They could still abuse the latter if they use a VM to tweak the device fingerprint, and you know that'll happen.
The other thing that was brought up, and is a good point, is that this will cause publishers to yank their games from anything like GamePass as the cost will be an unknown liability to them.
It'll probably much easier... In the end, Unity needs to call something to let them know there was an install, like http://telemetry.unity.com?game=DiabloImmortal&deviceId=acb-123
After installing a game locally or on a VM / Sandboxie, someone will figure out how it works... Then you just generate a lot of calls, either call it locally or through a proxylist / botnet - and you have millions of installs.
It's going to be to Unity's benefit to make tracking installs a token gesture and overcharge developers, with prohibitively expensive legal action required to claw any overcharges back. So guess what's going to happen ?
Threaten? I'm gone. Unity fit my workflow a lot better than Unreal, and I've never tried Godot because it previously wasn't ready for 3d. But Unity has made too many scary moves in the last few years, and I can't take that much risk.
I've never published a game with it, but I did a few game jams a while back, and I'm pretty confident that I could have. But now I'll be trying something else. I'm looking at Godot first, because UE made my head spin. I could handle Blueprints easily, but trying to make sense of their C++ stuff was very frustrating.
While not as intuitive, you could probably try to use one of the Quake 2 or 3 sourceports if you want to make a 3D game and Godot's performance isn't up to speed, or even OpenMW! Wicked might also be worth checking out
Ah, the classic "Beat a ho, then run her a bath" technique. You do something absolutely heinous, then you either walk part of it back or give some minor carrot that doesn't matter to make people feel better. People feel like they forced change or got a deal, so they accept the horrible thing you did.
There's free software equivalents to Unity? Video games are made by programmers, a FOSS alternative would advance quickly give thay its users are all programmers themselves, no?