Comment on Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds

Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)

  • If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that’s 2 installs, 2 charges
  • Same if they install on 2 devices
  • Charity games/bundles exempted from fees

  Regarding this being abused by bad actors:

  Unity says it will use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team

  - @stephentotilo

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  • nature_man@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.

    The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other “users” won’t have to pay to install the game!

    There’s literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed

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    • Hildegarde@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The fraud detection is especially bad because they have a financial incentive to ignore, or under-report installation fraud.

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      • nature_man@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Exactly! I’d put money on a group abusing it, admitting to abusing it, and the game devs still being charged in the near future.

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  • BURN@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.

    This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.

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    • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s time to chuck unity in the bin. If not Godot, go for unreal… though I would check their requirements beforehand first.

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      • teruma@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Hard to chuck unity in the bin when you don’t use unity.

        We’re lucky there are enough other engines on the market at the moment, but eventually someone will need to spearhead a FOSS engine with blackjack and hookers.

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  • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it

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• Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Also, what counts as an install? Ive seen many unity based games that don’t have an installer and just run standalone? Would a standalone game count as already installed? Is it a first run thing in that case? Honestly this, and the additional clarification raises more questions than it answers?

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