• @Squids@sopuli.xyz
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    2149 months ago

    Rival developer? Please, I’m pretty sure the call is coming from within the house here - this is exactly the sort of thing 4chan would do because a game asked them pronouns or gave them a wetsuit skin instead of a bikini one

  • TheBlue22
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    1249 months ago

    I never get tired of this.

    Execs of a company that makes bajilions dollars a year want to buy a new yacht, so they make the most corrupt, greedy, and stupid decision imaginable. There is a mass exodus of consumers who pay these shitty execs in the first place, resulting in losses.

    Being an exec is a job even the stupidest motherfucker can do and it shows

    • Neato
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      879 months ago

      This isn’t even the part that’s supposed to make them money. This is investor bait. They announce this and idiot investors who have no idea how this will damage Unity’s userbase jump on their stocks thinking it’s about to earn a lot more money. The CEO of Unity just sold 2,000 shares. He fucked both his company, the industry and his investors for a quick buck.

    • @Ddhuud@lemmy.world
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      59 months ago

      The call-home code can probably be disassembled, extracted and put on a loop, no need to actually install anything. Ddos the server with “install” messages.

    • @Sekoia
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      509 months ago

      I believe that part is a joke

      • @Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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        339 months ago

        You never know. Some people ABSOLUTELY believe that using (insert thing they don’t like here) makes people deserving of any and all abuse.

  • @rtxn@lemmy.world
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    739 months ago

    “Our telemetry software, which we developed, operate, and have complete control over with no accountability, says you owe us one hundred million dollars. Slaughterhouse time.”

  • @x4740N@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    even running a few virtual machines on one host can take this further

    edit: now I’m wondering if someone will make a botnet virus to do exactly this to send companies bankrupt

    • @Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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      369 months ago

      Didn’t they literally clarify that an user reinstalling the game multiple times on the same machine would count every single install?

      • @Dasnap@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I believe they changed their mind.

        After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity’sWhitten 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.)

        So they’re trying to track it per device, which can also be exploited fairly easily.

        • JackbyDev
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          9 months ago

          Why aren’t they doing it per purchase? I guess GamePass and similar services?

          Edit: I guess live service games are a problem too. Just charge per initial download.

          • I Cast Fist
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            69 months ago

            There are a lot of games that are available as free downloads on the app stores and rake in lots of cash, partially with ads, but mostly with microtransactions (think games like Clash of Clans). Can’t charge per purchase if so many games are “free”.

            • JackbyDev
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              39 months ago

              I’m having trouble phrasing it, but like when you “add to account” for the first time with a free game.

              • I Cast Fist
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                9 months ago

                When you first obtain a copy would be how I’d phrase it, or when a copy is first attached to an account. I think that’d require Unity to actually talk to each shop their games are available at to know for sure when it happens, or maybe not.

                Also, that’d open a loophole for games that don’t require an account anywhere to download and play, or even games that you can play straight from the browser, Friday Night Funkin’ being a prime example of those situations. Also, you -can- download and install a bunch of games from the Google Play Store without having an account, so that’d be another way to skirt that account check.

          • @SSUPII@sopuli.xyz
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            59 months ago

            It is. I wonder how it is gonna detect different Steam Proton prefixes, because if they are all different PCs a bad actor can simply keep recreating the prefix. On powerful enough CPUs you can create a prefix in seconds.

    • @Nerorero
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      59 months ago

      Could I make a Text based game with this? And does it support android?

      • ZILtoid1991
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        79 months ago

        It has a text rendering subsystem for bitmap fonts, so as long as you either get the fonts for it (either by converting them from old bitmap fonts, or from new vector fonts), you can. It also has a GUI system, which might be good for either text-based games too.

        Android support is planned, but currently low-priority due to other things I need to take care of. Audio is likely taken care of for the most part through ALSA (hotplugging would probably crash the audio thread as of now), and until I don’t move things away from SDL to my own solution (iota), it wouldn’t be too hard to port (also I will add Android support to iota, either by directly interfacing with it, or using an x11 translation layer). If someone would join, I could speed up the process to it, maybe even add things like MacOS and iOS support (D code has been successfully ran on PS4/5 and Xbone/XBS, reportedly even on the Switch).

  • @Pyro@pawb.social
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    389 months ago

    Sounds like unity doesn’t want any new devs to go over to them and for the ones who did to start moving away to other engines.

    Ask for x per purchase would at least get less backlash but I guess they couldn’t track that as easily

  • @wolo
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    369 months ago

    breaking news: if you spend thousands of hours building a house of cards on top of a rug controlled by a company whose best interests do not align with yours, don’t be surprised when they hold your work for ransom and threaten to pull it out from under you

    • @Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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      429 months ago

      And watch games prices/microtransactions skyrocket as every studio making a 3D multiplatform game needs a huge team of in house developers to develop their engine…

      Engines have gotten way more complicated since the 2000’s. There’s a reason only a few AAA studios have their own robust in-house engine nowadays

    • @KyuubiNoKitsune
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      339 months ago

      I think it’s hard to make an engine that lives up to today’s gamers standards. I mean, engine building is hard either way. There is always Open 3D, but having some association with AWS probably sullies it’s name.

      • Farming Simulator 22 was the game that ran the worst on my PC. Performance was even worse on lower settings and the graphics weren’t any good. I had a Ryzen 7 5800X and RTX 3080. Luckily I just played it using Xbox Game Pass and didn’t buy it.

    • I Cast Fist
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      139 months ago

      I miss in-house engines.

      Eh, they’re not always a good solution. CDProjekt ditched their own, which led to a lot of bugs in Cyberpunk 2077, to move towards Unreal. Bethesda’s notorious for their very buggy mess of an engine. And people working under EA complained to hell and back about having to use the Frostbite engine for everything.

    • @OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org
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      119 months ago

      As a former indie game dev who made their own in-house engine for a reasonably popular game, this is generally a bad idea. Just use Godot imo.

  • @popemichael@lemmy.sdf.org
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    319 months ago

    I can see a lot of people switching away from unity due to this.

    It’s sad that I wasted my time learning the engine a few years ago.

      • I Cast Fist
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        119 months ago

        Any C# coding skill won’t be wasted, so there’s that silver lining, unlike navigating through the editor.

          • I Cast Fist
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            19 months ago

            Yup. There’s also Stride, which uses C# as its main language and is heavily focused on high performance 3D games.

  • voxel
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    9 months ago

    btw i predicted the whole thing a month ago
    i fucking had the whole system in mind and it matches my thoughts exactly. (i was trying to come up with the most developer-unfriendly monetization strategy for unity… while in shower… for some reason)

  • Queen HawlSera
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    269 months ago

    Yeah I can’t see this policy staying legal for long. Even if it wasn’t blatant Highway robbery, Don’t these tech companies have lobbyists that can push to ban this kind of shit? Because this screws over the company and not the fan base. I mean Publishers are going to have a hard time finding Talent if they want a game based in unity, but the developers are worried about being bankrupted simply because too many people are trying to get the game working by uninstalling and reinstalling it.

    And what if the company is already defunct, but their game is still on Steam because the publisher owns the ip? Who exactly is going to Pony up?