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.
“according to our extensive research, when we multiplied how much we like you by fuckall, you owe us 20000”
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.
Now I can finally download a game 100000x to bankrupt a game company, just like they always said we could.
Well you would just have to download it once. But install it 1000000 times. Sounds like a lot of work.
Not if you automate it with a good script and run it on a few machines at a time.
Virtualization is the key. Multiple VMs, installing, uninstalling, reinstalling.
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.
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.
Unity includes telemetry for some time
I believe you can’t actually disable the telemetry (or Unity intro logo) in the “free” version
So then this falls under “devs didn’t care” because it was useful information for them and they didn’t see how it could be used negatively.
Probably the opposite actually. The devs who utilize the feature probably enjoy having some numbers to look at and analyze. They’re trying to make a game that people enjoy after all; the more info they have on how you’re playing the game, the better. The devs who don’t use it probably aren’t even aware that it exists. Additionally, I’m not sure if it requires a subscription to view the telemetry (the page suggests you have to sign up for it in some capacity), but if it does then it makes sense that devs might believe that it’s something that’s disabled until you manually enable it.
Personally, I know if I was a dev I’d be checking that shit every day. I like watching the funny numbers go up and down.
RED FLAGS!! red flaaags. RED FLAAAGS, get your red flags heeeeere folks 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
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. 😊
This needs to be adapted into a three part movie (think Creepshow) where a seemingly innocuous vendor selling flags rather than balloons is the “host” and the people who buy red ones get them free…but “You pay for them at an unexpected time in unpleasant ways later.” And all the parts are just FULL of red flags the characters don’t see but the audience does (as per usual in most horror films).
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.”
Is it just me, or does “we have a proprietary data model that calculates…” sound an awful lot like “we have no actual method of tracking that”?
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.
