Games

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[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks [B] 10 points 3 years ago (81 children)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

I've seen this somewhere before

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

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[–] ItsDedo@lemmy.world 33 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Bot woke up and said "I'll show you how deep the thread goes"

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[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world 3 points 3 years ago

I opened up this thread thinking there was a lot of engagement here.

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[–] can@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Yo wtf is happening lol

Edit: There's a github issue opened for this

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[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 10 points 3 years ago (1 child)

Oh no.

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[–] Damage@feddit.it 3 points 3 years ago

YouTube's black ops team hit the bot

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[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 23 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I hope all the devs with weight followsuit. My little project moving won't really disturb anyone but me. Sweeping and sudden policy changes like this are bullshit.

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 6 points 3 years ago

What I'm hoping is that gamers take some of the big pocket publishers that use Unity and abuse the absolute fuck out of them so they send their lawyers after Unity for the obviously unenforceable terms.

Unfortunately Unity will probably just settle with them for nothing to avoid them setting precedents.

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[–] nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works 21 points 3 years ago

It's like crawling back to an abusive partner thinking things wont get worse.

[–] iso@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 3 years ago (16 children)

What happened?

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[–] simple@lemm.ee [S] 58 points 3 years ago (13 children)

TL;DR of the situation is that Unity released a statement 2 days ago saying they want successful developers to pay up to 20 cents every time a user installs a Unity game starting from Jan 1 2024, even if your game was already released. This caused a huge ruckus in the game dev community and many developers want to switch away from Unity.

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[–] falkerie71@sh.itjust.works 61 points 3 years ago (9 children)

Note that it's "per install" (they clarified that reinstalling on the same device only counts as one install), not per unit sold. And Unity will also track pirated copies, so the devs would still have to pay the fee even if they didn't sell it to you.

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[–] Wilker@lemmy.blahaj.zone 32 points 3 years ago (4 children)

the tracking of pirated copies is even more fucked up. is that their way of imposing that "piracy = stealing"?

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[–] Cqrd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

It’s because they literally don’t know how to differentiate a download from legit and illegitimate. They’re going to track every time their bundler is downloaded and bill the developer for it, that would include pirated copies and legit copies alike.

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

The swashbuckler's solution is then to make your own bundler installer!

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[–] jayandp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 years ago

That's assuming pirates would go through the trouble of removing said functionality. Pirates hate trackers, so they might do it, but not necessarily, as often the priority is just to get the game working.

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[–] can@sh.itjust.works 10 points 3 years ago

Because a cracker could remove the DRM but not whatever is tracking installs

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/

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[–] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 23 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

That's a recent change. According to the faq on the official forum, initially the idea was to charge every reinstallation. Then they realized it was crazy. Now it's every first installations:

If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs. (Updated, Sep 13)

Note the "updated" yesterday. Initially every install in "different devices" counted. Even on the same device after reinstallation of the os

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[–] InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 25 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I fail to see how they can guarantee it's the first install.
I game inside a VM with GPU passthrough and I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to install-bomb any game to rack up install numbers and costs.
Moreover, would anyone even trust any number of times Unity tells you your game was installed?
They could a magical 10% that would be hard to prove/disprove.
Anyone with a half-competent legal team would stay the fuck away from any of this nonsense going forward.

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[–] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 10 points 3 years ago*

It's a "proprietary system" (quote). It must be clearly always correct. It's not one of those open source stuff... /s

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[–] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 4 points 3 years ago

Where did they add the same device reinstall clarification? Last I saw, same device reinstall is still a new install and thus chargeable

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[–] betz24@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

Retroactively charging developers, that's stupid.

However, I'm not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn't $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that's only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I've used Unity before and it's still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I'm missing something.

Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.

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[–] jayandp@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 years ago

It's the complete unpredictability that devs and businesses hate. 2% of every purchase they can plan for, but with install fees they could get randomly billed for copies that were already sold, and that is unacceptable. This isn't a one time fee, whenever somebody installs the game on a new device, the dev gets charged. Not to mention the fact that some people might have multiple devices, but randomly in 3 years they could get a new PC and suddenly the dev gets charged again, all the while the dev didn't make anymore money from that copy. Who the heck would agree to a system like that?

Not to mention that if a game gets added to a service like GamePass, then the service gets the bill. No way Microsoft would say yes to that, which means the Dev misses out on deals that could've made them a bunch of money.

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[–] McScience@discuss.online 2 points 3 years ago

A competitor could literally buy one copy, make a script that spins up 1000 vms a minute and downloads your game over and over on "new devices" and put you out of business

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[–] oxideseven@lemmy.ca 22 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

This.

Basically changed their pricing model to fleece Indy devs. Some devs would have owed more money than they ever even made on their games.

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 years ago*

Fleece every Unity dev pretty much, even if big studios can afford it.

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[–] Tom_bishop@sh.itjust.works 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

They copy from Spez book LOL. Dev definitely gonna pass the price to us users. We're fcukd