great news, are you a marginalized game dev? awesome. now 4chan can organize a mass uninstall/reinstall hate campaign and bankrupt you in minutes. unity claims they have fraud protection but i must stress that it's literally not possible for them to determine where an install came from, the intent of the install, what storefront the install came from, or even if the install was from a pirated copy or not.

if a dev gets targeted by revenue bombing it's now on the developer to file a dispute

From what I've seen people saying this sounds like pirated games would also count against the devs unless they also intruded some specific anti-piracy measures to determine if a copy is legit or not before counting it. (And I'm sure people would find ways to cheat that, anyway)

It also would count if somebody installed a game on multiple devices, or if they had to uninstall and reinstall for some reason. Potentially also if you upgraded some of your PC parts because it wouldn't be able to yell the difference between that and being installed on a different device.

This is hopefully going to be contested and forced to be walked back, but... it's pretty bad. Even if they walk this back, they've pretty much ruined any trust many people had in them because if this was considered chill to announce who knows what BS will get pulled in the future even if this change falls through??

The CEO sold A HUGE amount of stock just a few days before this piece of garbage news came out.

I think that counts as insider trading.

Also just to jump in here, Unity has no means of producing any actual metrics on installs. No means exists to do that reliably from a developer or publisher stand point, let alone Unity's position as someone who licenses a dev tool. Like yeah you can kinda track installs based on number of sales and info from DRM or other network related things that phone home, but those numbers aren't accurate. You can't know how many times a program has been INSTALLED. you can see purchases sure, but thats only for legal copies. And that's point of sale data, not point of install.

Point of install is a genuinely insane concept to try and tie a monetary fee to. It's unenforceable and unknowable. When pushed by basically everyone in the industry Unity said they would "leverage a proprietary data model" to find out this info which boils down basically to "trust us bro." Like there no way their numbers will be reliable. At worst they'll be like what people have already pointed out, charging for pirated copies or even creating an attack vector where someone could intentionally install a game to try and ruin a developer financially. At best their numbers will be wildly inaccurate in a way that doesn't cost that much. But we have no details on how these numbers are actually collected. They won't tell us what methods they use, if some kind of always online system will be implemented into Unity games by default. They also want this to apply retroactively to every Unity game period. It's insanity.

But as is pointed out this seems to be a genuine, outright scam. The CEO, a Grade A shitbag who is also behind a lot of EA's shit baggery from when he was an executive there, has moved a bunch of stocks ahead of this announcment, seemingly trying to short his own stocks. Thats textbook insider trading and pretty goddamn illegal.

What I think he's trying to do is some good old fashion vulture capitalism. He took over Unity with the goal of driving it into the ground and making money off its corpse. This latest policy is an out of touch, genuinely insane attempt at rent seeking that he probably thought would A) drive down stock prices and B) generate some real blood from a stone profits for him to hoover up before he finally let's the husk of the company collapse. However I think this guy is too stupid to realize he's overplayed his hand. Not only did he commit an obvious financial crime, he also instituted a retroactive policy that WILL get him and his company sued. They've said they intend to bill Microsoft for any unity games distributed on Game Pass. Microsoft isn't gonna take that shit. Especially when the pricing per install is absurd. 20 cents an install sounds like chump change but on a game with a few hundred thousand or even several millions installs that quickly becomes a huge sum. Consider how many devs make tiny free to plays with unity. Now they're gonna be in the hole by dent of their game existing. Even if they delist the games from store fronts pirated copies could still cost them. There no way this doesn't end in a legal fire storm and probably the death of unity as a popular dev tool, if not the death of the company and its tool outright.

My takeaway from this is capitalism remains completely at odds with human expression and art. So long as we let profit margins be a deciding factor in anything, it will always end up where we are with this, a greedy man ruining other people's lives and destroying valuable systems and tools, threatening entire forms of expression, to make himself a little bit richer. To generate money that doesn't even mean that much to him. It's absurd and it's disgusting and they can thrust this kind of hollowing out on us whenever they want because our society it built to empower the rich and no one else.