Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Hey boss Unreal is eating some of our market shares, what should we do?

Boss: Isn't obvious, we drive the company off the cliff. Duh

God executives are the dumbest mother fuckers

Godot is looking much better to me today than it did yesterday.

Godot is great.

I’m not involved in piracy/DRM/gamedev but I really doubt they’ll track cracked installs and if they do, actually get indie devs to pay.

Because what’s stopping one person from “cracking” a game, then “installing” it 1,000,000 times? Whatever metric they use to track installs has to prevent abuse like this, or you’re giving random devs (of games that aren’t even popular) stupidly high bills.

When devs see more installs than purchases, they’ll dispute and claim Unity’s numbers are artificially inflated. Which is a big challenge for Unity’s massive legal team, because in the above scenario they really are. Even if Unity successfully defends the extra installs in court, it would be terrible publicity to say “well, if someone manages to install your game 1,000 times without buying it 1,000 times you’re still responsible”. Whatever negative publicity Unity already has for merely charging for installs pales in comparison, and this would actually get most devs to stop using Unity, because nobody will risk going into debt or unexpectedly losing a huge chunk of revenue for a game engine.

So, the only reasonable metric Unity has to track installs is whatever metric is used to track purchases, because if someone purchases the game 1,000,000 times and installs it, no issue, good for the dev. I just don’t see any other way which prevents easy abuse; even if it’s tied to the DRM, if there’s a way to crack the DRM but not remove the install counter, some troll is going to do it and fake absurd amounts of extra installs.

Maybe that will give Godot a serious chance for second place I guess, Unity ocupied that for far too long anyway!

Cracking often includes blocking all networking features of a game to kill any phone-home license checking, so it's likely that Unity will not know cracked games are getting installed. But it is not guaranteed.

More likely every game dev save for a few big developers (who we don't give a shit about) is going to drop this radioactive business model like a hot plutonium potato and it will become a non-issue.

Unity is the worst.

I hope game developers can shift to different game engines! Can't imagine how difficult that could be since I don't even know more than some basic python.

Yeah... Enshittification of game engines, they're trying really hard to show they can do it too.

This was a good summary to read from a Unity game devs perspective, just keeps getting worse.

Yeah that's what tends to happen when you go into complete dependence to a single product of a private company. They will greedily fuck you over at some point and you look like a total dumbass.

I just run all games behind a firewall. Hopefully that blocks unity from learning about steam installs too.

The most hilarious thing about this is that, assuming crackers prevent Unity games from phoning home, the best way to support game developers would be to buy their game and then only play the cracked version, never installing the version you purchased.

Make sure to firewall every single Unity game going forward folks!

(... which is something you should already be doing for any pirated software in general)

I haven't pirated a game for a very long time. Indie games are very very cheap; and AAA games don't interest me anyway.

So I'm not really looking at this change from a piracy point of view. For me, the big message here is (once again) don't trust big corps. People who put their trust in Unity are now getting stabbed in the back. They're now have to either pay up big, or do a huge amount of additional work to write their stuff using a different engine. And this could easily happen again, and again, and with other engines... ... So its best not to rely on big corps.

Am I the only one thinking we need to convince EA or Origin to make a Unity game if this is an option?!

Unity is janky as fuck so I hope this turns more developers away so that they'll use Unreal or anything else for that matter.

Does this mean you can't make free games with Unity anymore?

Unity is going pay to win.

Crackers make their own installers, repackers even more so. So piracy wont count.