anonymousab

> harmless and 99% anonymized ad tracking

Let's be serious now, not even the biggest ad industry proponents really believe that line.

> Studios don’t want to replace writers

They will do it the very first second they think that they can get away with it without major consequences (such as profit loss from bad AI writing).

> listen to feedback, and implement.

The whole X debacle has proven once again that Elon will never give up on a bad idea that he has tied his ego to or that was shut down by people he dislikes.

These are exactly the kind of idea that he will jump at once the opportunity arises and the pesky naysayers aren't in the room; "why should we have to bother with any of this privacy or informed consent stuff" is where he's coming from.

That is his style of CEOing, for better or worse.

An interesting bit of history is that autopilot was one of the first common terms for cruise control, and was in use until at least the mid 60s.

That is far enough back to not have any relevance to Tesla's current customer demographic though.

Participate politically, seek employment, and of course the examples you gave.

When pubic safety and goodwill comes in to focus, that's where the role of automation is scrutinized and minimized more heavily. Copyright itself is an invention and area of balancing individual rights and greater public good.

Machines are not human and they are not sentiment and sapient at a level where we can view them differently. Perhaps they will change one day, but as it is today these systems are not entitled to do the same things humans get to do. They are tools performing a task, so the laws apply to them as they apply to, well, machines; copying and reproducing whole code blocks or novel chapters without attribution or licenses is something we allow a human to do in their head and not what we allow a machine to do in a prompt, regardless of the non-human mechanisms in between.

People can do a lot of things that we don't legally allow machines or automation to do.

A couple of years ago the CEO called game developers "big fucking idiots" effectively for not extracting the most possible revenue out of the industry. There was the classic "well I actually meant [more innocuous but still dirtbag thing]" walkbacks, but we all knew what he meant.

It now makes a lot more sense when you view it from the perspective of Unity wanting to rip much more revenue out of devs and games using their engine.

> Epic pays for temporary exclusivity

In several cases, they sought out games that were already coming out on Steam and even had preorders (or kickstarter backers) there, and then paid those developers to rip it out.

There is a seemingly minor but important distinction with what Epic does: they do not pay for exclusivity nor do most of their actions involve paying for a game to be made that otherwise would not have been. Either of those things are fine, even if begrudgingly.

What Epic actually does is pay to harm Steam specifically; the stipulation is always "don't put it on Steam", not "only put it on our platform". It is purposely targeted and antagonistic towards steam and steam users; "we have deprived you of a thing, now you have to come here if you want to get it" is how that comes across, when they should have aimed for "we are getting this new thing made for our platform, come over here to check it out!"

While they were doing this, their store was in a miserable state compared to its competitors, in terms of features and reliability (especially for the desktop app). So they were seen as prioritizing depriving another platform instead of prioritizing having a good platform and customer experience.

When all of the above is put together, it comes across as petty and malicious, rather than them trying to throw their fortnite dollars at bootstrapping their platform, and at making and having a quality platform for consumers.

If they had simply paid for a bunch of new exclusive games and IP to be made for their platform rather than seeking out existing, already advertised and in-development suitor games, it would have come across way differently. Or if so much more of the effort and money would have gone to making the store better and beyond feature parity with its main competitors (not that it necessarily reached even that), it would have been received quite differently.

Install count and hardware based DRM in games is notoriously bad. Reports of "I changed a graphics card and now the game is locking me out" are as old as time.

It is a solution that can be done more, or less, correctly or fairly. But the problem is that it is easy to get it wrong, it is easy to implement this incorrectly.

Given how slipshod and slapdash these announcements and responses and walkbacks have been, you can't really have any faith that they will fall into the "right" side of things.

They initially said the exact opposite. They changed their mind after being shouted at about all of the above concerns.

They're clearly flying by the seat of their pants with this. There is no reason to give them any rope, any benefit of the doubt. There is no reason to believe that they will be able to do this right.

> I don't understand why this is a worry

It's a massive new change and requirement coming into force in only a few months, with basically every single report coming out of Unity internal engineering being that they don't have any systems in place to figure this out and have no idea how they will actually make it work while also still being GDPR compliant.

"Just trust us bro" and "you can file a support ticket if we get the numbers wrong" are not acceptable and are each reasons enough to worry about the potential for (or rather, guaranteed) abuse of this system.

One must assume the worst about any implementation with a system like this, in the same way that once must assume the worst about any implementation of telemetry or of DRM. You'll be right far more often than wrong.

That is trivial to spoof for a malicious user, as are the Android ones.

> if you pair it with some kind of online login system

Unity does not have that and there is no way in hell that they will be able to force all players of all games made in unity to sign up for one.

Initially, this applied to every single update, every single reinstall, and anything that changed your IP. Every load of a unity web game.

All of those counted as a new install, and this was stated to be intentional by unity to all the journalists who reached out and by their internal developers on the support forum.

So the long tail of things like your customers buying a new phone == old apps get transferred == that counts as a new install and you get charged. Reinstall a game from steam or change the install drive or directory? Same thing.

Beyond devs and game types that are affected by legitimate usage, there is the clear problem of malicious installs (what a phrase) and abuse. Unity's answer to that was that proprietary secret internal models would solve abuse, but also that developers would have to reach out with proof of being falsely billed after it happened. And just kinda hope that unity would have the support and billing staff to ever actually deal with that problem.

Video game console gens last longer and have continued software support for longer than Android phones.

I'm not sure if this developer is drawing the same distinction, but Unity seems to count updates to the game on app stores as a new install for those users, as well as things like initiating the web version of a game. So if you have a few million downloads and you push out even a token update a week, I can see the numbers getting that high - at least as far as Unity is concerned.

Or rather, Unity's initial Q&A responses said that. They've half-backtracked and started muddying the waters so I think they actually just didn't think it through at all.

Unity silently changed the contract a little while back to remove the "we can't change this contract arbitrarily without you agreeing" clause. Which is to say, the terms that most of these devs would have agreed to when they started their current games _was_ one where Unity agreed not to force contract changes onto them.

Which is why it is not unreasonable for the devs to be both pissed off and feeling like they might have legal recourse as well.

It's not currently tracking anything, at least according to some unity devs on their support forums. So in the absence of some network request to capture, scripting the reinstall loop is the current option to be have a "day 1" script ready in advance.

> the same ip address

Unity confirmed that this is part of how they intend to do it. That's why the meme scripts so far make a point to cycle up addresses or use rotating proxies per install.

The other part of the methodology that unity confirmed is "proprietary internal models that can't be shared but are GDPR compliant". Somehow.

> But there has to be an alternative so that advertising can continue to hold up the internet and keep it freely accessible

This dichotomy is false. You can still advertise to users without having any tracking data about them other than the service or site they are using. Just as advertising has done in most other major industries, be it print media, television, or physical advertisements such as billboards.

It's not as crazy insanely lucrative !== it's not profitable enough to work.

Per install, not sale, which includes demos, pirated copies (yes, really) and, say, a web browser spinning up the browser version of a game. Or a cloud service running it in a VM (each executable startup in that case is an "install"). Or any download from a service like gamepass.

Above all, a single player/user redownloading the game on their device counts as a separate install. They've now said that they're using proprietary "fraud detection" and IP address uniqueness to prevent fraud, and seemingly requiring devs to reach out if they think they've been overcharged.

> They will most likely use hardware ID to track installs. So if you reinstall the game on the same machine it won't count

Pretty trivial for a malicious user to spoof, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's something that calculates a new hardware id for trivial changes as we see so often with "don't install this on more than 1 computer" DRM implementations.

On mobile, theoretically each new APK - every new update to the game - could count as a new install.

I don't think they're that crazy, but I wouldn't be surprised if JRR didn't even think that far.

> If you can't turn a profit after the fee structure, then don't choose Unity.

You've got the order wrong. This is about people who already chose Unity, and then they changed the fee structure. Changing engines is beyond nontrivial for a project in flight.

Freemium games with millions of installs but maybe only a couple hundred k of revenue. The model of "having a bunch of users but only a couple of them pay money" or ad-supported so the ARPU is really low is not uncommon, and certainly more of a likely sweetspot for a smaller game or studio to find themselves in.

The number of downloads or installs is not equal to the number of purchases, and can be quite a lot larger, particularly for a game with a free demo, steam refund "trial" shenanigans, pirated copies, etc.

I didn't say other superconductors were not useful. I was saying that one that can be used at higher, room temperature temps is at the very least a new, useful thing. That calling it "limited in usability" is odd when existing ceramic superconductors with considerably cooler temperature requirements are already useful?

~104k is a world of difference from ambient room temperature.

What room+ temperature ceramic superconductors are there? Why would this not still be immensely useful anywhere a ceramic superconductor is currently used?

> Why does this need a plugin to go this far when if you see it you can just block them yourself.

Under any post with a moderate amount of attention, the blue posts that always seem to get filtered to the top are hypebeasts, hustlebros, cryptobros and blatant sycophants. Pages and pages of them.

The majority of blue posters are probably not a problem, but whatever algorithms twitter has for sorting them are the opposite of what they need to be. So auto blocking, auto-muting or even just auto-hiding the div is kind of a necessity to see any useful responses.

The constitution - or rather, judicial interpretation of the constitution - is constantly in flux. The kinda things that were seen as constitutionally valid by SCOTUS less than a century ago are completely off the wall compared to today. And today's views will likely be very different from a future court's interpretation.

> protest at the UI/UX/managers

Remember, so many of them don't even use Windows itself. They're so unabashedly removed from the actual user experience that I doubt anyone working with them can change their minds.