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.
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.
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.
Red flags are always free. Upfront anyway. You pay for them at an unexpected time in unpleasant ways later. So feel free to have as many as Unity is providing. 😊
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).