People used to pay less-than-reputable businesses for services that would spam ad clicks on competitor's search ads, draining their advertising budgets. So I could definitely see the same "services" for installs.

Anyone who knows what’s going on in the Minecraft server scene knows it won’t even need competitors for that..

There is so much wrong here:

- “Trust us we figured our install measurements” is insane. We all worked on this for decades, it’s a dilemma with multiple axes, one being piracy.

- Everyone in games for a decade or so has been in a company that’s been screwed by publishers or partners on sales. Developers embraced unique activation keys and master servers to stop publisher fraud at least as much as as an anti consumer piracy measure.

- The only tradeoff to install transparency is surveillance and tracking which trades off against piracy. Most developers are not interested in pushing boundaries there.

Trust us with a company that now has broken every single promise they have made… I don’t think so

Not even competitors. When you talk about games, even jilted fans are a liability.

They clarified it will only be initial installs. Depending on how they’re uniquely identifying that, I guess it could still be gamed though.

> They clarified

They backtracked.

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma...

> After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)

This is an important distiction.

There's absolutely zero chance that Unity can track such a thing precisely. To say nothing of their handwavey "proprietary data model" that uses nothing more than vibes to determine how much a developer is on the hook for. It's all corpo-speak nonsense from a clueless CEO who has no idea what he's doing.

"We'll bill you how much we feel like and offer no way to reliably measure or control it yourself."

You can script a VM that looks different enough each time (e.g. change a Mac address) and install the software. Over and over.

I'm sure an enterprising hacker will figure out the http endpoint that gets hit at the end of the install, so you can just rub a script instead of actually installing the game multiple times.

Wouldn't be surprised to see people DDOS that endpoint.

And gamers are fucked enough in the head to actually do stuff like this.

That's still potentially disastrous for free-to-play games, or games that get pirated a lot.

Unity has no incentive to solve this. They’ll push it onto developers to provide a deduplication in a clumsy process after they’ve already been billed for the month

This is immediately what I thought of when I heard it.

Worse, apparently reinstalling a game also charges the developer.

I'm not sure that "is this in Unity's interest" is still a reasonable way to judge whether Unity will do something.

This is a bit naive. Lots of customers of unity have gone bankrupt. Did they retroactively waive the $2000/seat yearly pro subscription (5k for enterprise) or any other fees for those companies? Of course not.

That doesn’t seem to bother all the other businesses out there who are also the moderators of abuse within their own domain. Such as ad networks who include bots with their page impression statistics.