Daily Pac-Man @DailyPacMan
Unity has announced it will charge a "Runtime fee" to developers whenever their game is installed by a customer, potentially starting as high as $0.20 USD per install
9:44 PM 9/12/23 from Earth 12K Views
Lars Doucet @larsiusprime19h
It occurs to me that Unity's new pricing model incentivizes developers to get people to buy their games but then never install them. Steam players, you know what to do. You've been preparing all your lives for this moment. Remember your training.
Unity already sort of addressed this, I believe it's max one install per device (uninstalls and reinstalls don't count as a charge). No idea at all how they'd keep track of this, but I think the solution is simple: Virtual devices.
They also say that 'They do not want to track users across devices, so each device will count individually'. They say you can appeal large charges, but only if you can prove that it's a botnet or bad-faith actors. If it looks like random data, the developers are stuck with the bill.
I wonder if one could script spinning up a bunch of cloud instances, installing the game, then destroying the instances.Only issue is how to mask your personal identification from the installer (if its even possible), because anyone competent would track that alongside install requests.