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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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And how exactly do they think they're going to limit paying customers ability to install and reinstall their games? Always online DRM? Force the game dev to include some library so installs can be tracked? And they are going to filter that REST endpoint by unique customer ID? They are somehow going to keep that rest point from being slammed with fake traffic or being trolled by DDOS?

Is their installer going to fail secure and deny you the ability to install the game unless it can call the mothership? This is a complete shitshow even theoretically.

Force the game dev to include some library so installs can be tracked?

The engine already has analytics built in that do most of what's needed to track this.

Sure, but what's the engine gonna do when it fails to contact the analytics servers? (Maybe its launched in a firewalled container or some other DNS shenanigans.). Refuse to run? Nag the players? What a dumpsterfire

I think you might have misunderstood. The one that has to pay is the developer.

End users aren't being charged, so there's no reason for them to mess with firewalls or DNS settings. Maybe a tiny handful might try to support the devs by blocking Unity's tracking beacon, but 99%+ will just hit the Install button as usual.

"You pay us when your product gets pirated", basically. No wonder it's such a popular idea.

If a developer modifies the engine to remove the analytics then they'll be looking at a fat lawsuit from Unity. If endusers or piracy cracking scenes or whatever do it then I don't think Unity will care since most users aren't going to bother.