The Unity pricing debacle has taken an unfortunate, dangerous turn. In a new report from Bloomberg, the company has reportedly canceled a town hall meeting due to what the publication called credible death threats. According to Bloomberg, Unity CEO John Riccitiello was set to address employees Thursday morning, but the companywide meeting was canceled and two of Unity’s offices were closed because of the alleged threats.
Only scenario I could imagine where a developer may want you to both buy and pirate their game.
Unfortunately, Unity has no way to tell legitimate installs from pirated installs, as far as I have read. This means someone with a massively pirated game who has just broken the $200,000 revenue barrier could potentially be on the hook to pay Unity more money per install than they’ve even made.
The average pirated install is blocked by the pirate from network access so there’s no way for it to dial home to be approved or denied, or for them to know it was installed to begin with.
edit: The main exception would be GOG pirated installs since they’re usually the original installer with no DRM to be bypassed, but they can still be blocked from contacting home if you don’t care about cloud saves or online features.
There’s always a way to screw over company plans like this.
edit2: actually GOG cloud saves aren’t even possible with offline GOG installs, legal or not, you have to install them through the GOG store and launcher for it to be an option.
Where do they get install stats on pirated games? Some call home?
Sounds like something that could easily be blocked or gamed if it’s not mandatory and if it doesn’t require a unique login.