this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)

Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I gotta ask, considering the "per install" pricing, what exactly is an installation in the eyes of Unity?

A game download? In which case would a cancelled and restarted download result in two installations being logged?

Is it an API call during first start-up? What would keep malicious actors from simply modding their game to repeat this call a thousand times?

What about pirated copies? Do they count as being "installed"?

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unity's official response to those questions as of a few hours ago is akin to "we have ways... trust us."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yup let's trust Unity's crummy ways, keeping in mind that it's actually in their best interest to NOT detect false installs, since they get money when it doesn't...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I had to do something like that, I would make it every time the installer runs, every time it's installed by a launcher like Steam, and as a fallback every time the game executable runs for the first time unless an installer or launcher hands it a key to say "you've been paid for already." But I'm by no means a game dev so idk.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cool, find a game dev you hate and set up a script to install their game and run it once as many times as possible. Let that run on a machine you don’t use for a while, then drink their tears

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm not saying it's a good idea, that's just how I'd implement it - no matter how you do it it's evil, unsafe and evasive.