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Comment by danboy4 | Hacker News Reader

They clarified it will only be initial installs. Depending on how they’re uniquely identifying that, I guess it could still be gamed though.

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> They clarified

They backtracked.

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma...

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

This is an important distiction.

There's absolutely zero chance that Unity can track such a thing precisely. To say nothing of their handwavey "proprietary data model" that uses nothing more than vibes to determine how much a developer is on the hook for. It's all corpo-speak nonsense from a clueless CEO who has no idea what he's doing.

"We'll bill you how much we feel like and offer no way to reliably measure or control it yourself."

You can script a VM that looks different enough each time (e.g. change a Mac address) and install the software. Over and over.

I'm sure an enterprising hacker will figure out the http endpoint that gets hit at the end of the install, so you can just rub a script instead of actually installing the game multiple times.

Wouldn't be surprised to see people DDOS that endpoint.

And gamers are fucked enough in the head to actually do stuff like this.

That's still potentially disastrous for free-to-play games, or games that get pirated a lot.

Unity has no incentive to solve this. They’ll push it onto developers to provide a deduplication in a clumsy process after they’ve already been billed for the month

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