I still refuse to believe that's the right interpretation. That can't be real. Are you really going to owe more to Unity every time a user uninstall/reinstalls your game? If they want to play in their main PC and their Steamdeck?
Completely abolishes the incentive of pushing free updates too. You don't want to make new great features that would push people to re-download your game.
> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download.
> An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.
> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform.
> An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.
> Each time a game is downloaded, Unity’s runtime code is also installed. The Unity Runtime Fee goes towards the continued investment in that code to support the billions of devices served every month.
So if BuyerX installs the game, I get charged, he then re-formats his hard drive, and re-install, I get charged again, if he goes to another of his machines and install, I get charged again? Crazy.
And a weirdo who hates a developer could keep auto-reinstalling (or just re-triggering the "new install" signal to unity servers) 1000 times per day, every day.
They will most likely use hardware ID to track installs. So if you reinstall the game on the same machine it won't count, if you install it on a different one it will. Unless they let you bind it to some internal ID and track it that way.
Unless you get crafty, machine identifiers aren't stable on Windows and will change with updates. So if you update windows and reinstall an app, a lot of naive software will detect that as a fresh install on a fresh machine.
That would really suck for a small Unity dev to get screwed by a Windows update that forces reinstall of their users' game libraries - which isn't that uncommon.
On PC the only upgrade that would generate a new hardware ID would be a complete mobo replacement and that's somewhat rare. Upgrading your CPU/GPU/RAM does not regenerate the hardware ID.
On the recent Intel platforms upgrading your CPU required upgrading your mobo too, and there are many people who upgrade almost every generation, i.e. 1-2 years. Burdening game developers with this is unjust. The engine fee should be tied to the game's purchase, or game related purchases(DLC, other paid content).
AMD also promised (iirc) that the AM5 will only be good for 2 generations.
I'm aware. Yet I am prepared to wager that the number of people who upgrade their own mobo(instead of buying a whole new pc/laptop) is absolutely insignificant on the scale of the market.
> They will most likely use hardware ID to track installs. So if you reinstall the game on the same machine it won't count
Pretty trivial for a malicious user to spoof, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's something that calculates a new hardware id for trivial changes as we see so often with "don't install this on more than 1 computer" DRM implementations.
Completely abolishes the incentive of pushing free updates too. You don't want to make new great features that would push people to re-download your game.