I think it would make more sense to take a cut of the revenue when a game is sold, as that is easier to calculate for the developers. I can understand why they chose installs though as that's easier to measure for them and they would need to trust developers with their revenue numbers as they don't own the distribution platform like e.g. Apple does, but honestly they could've just used the installation rate as a sanity check for the license numbers reported by developers.
As a game developer I would be very wary about signing such a contract as I'm sure these metrics can be easily gamed, so anyone with enough malicious intent could probably install-bomb my game and rack up large charges for me, and in the end I would be responsible for proving that those installs were malicious (which I imagine could be quite difficult).
Like, you better not make a good game that is installed more than once.
Pay-per-install seems like a really bad way to charge dev costumers by. E.g. a nice long lived game will be charged way more than shovelware, due to users reinstalling when they buy new machines.
I've installed Deus Ex probably 30+ times since I first played it at launch. Hell, sometimes I'll install it, decide not to play it, uninstall it, then reinstall it a week later. I've reinstalled it like three times this month because I can't decide whether I feel like replaying it or not. That would basically mean over 10% of the game's original full price going towards Unity with ongoing costs in perpetuity. That's without distribution (whether brick and mortar or Steam) and other costs, and without the developer further monetizing the game off of me.
Anybody who believes anything they say now is a fool. Every developer would have to go out of their way to track the same thing Unity is tracking to ensure that Unity isn't literally lying to them about how many installs and how much is owed. Again, in perpetuity. This is again additional cost and effort for every single developer on top of all other costs.
Quite simply, it's a completely unbounded cost for an indefinite amount of time.
> This is again additional cost and effort for every single developer on top of all other costs.
Presumably pretty much all developers already do that (F2P games are filled to the brim with analytics) and paid game developers can use the number of purchases as a proxy (and presumably also end up paying for every install of a pirated version..).
I still don't quite understand how is this legal in Europe for instance? Mandatory telemetry which neither the developer or end use can disable and which phones private user data to a third party (outside the EU presumably) which is not necessary for the product to function must surely be illegal?
If so Unity's management can't be that stupid to now know this?
It doesn't always phone home, that's the thing, a lot of people assume that's the case and that every games built using their engine since the beginning does it but that's not the case.
The way they calculate the installs is not base on that, well unless you enabled Unity Analytics of course, but that's not the case on every games and they are going for every games ever made by their engine.
My theory is that newer installers will troll the registry and try to phone home about anything you did.. That’s the only way you could roll this out without the capabilities for tracking in most present games.
As you can see, they have promised they would not take a cut of the revenue, as well as specified in their license that you would not have to accept the new license as long as you used an old version. Then changed the license and are now claiming that you can't do that.
As a game developer I would be very wary about signing such a contract as I'm sure these metrics can be easily gamed, so anyone with enough malicious intent could probably install-bomb my game and rack up large charges for me, and in the end I would be responsible for proving that those installs were malicious (which I imagine could be quite difficult).