Unity Technologies has stated that PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo will pay the company's new runtime fee on behalf of game developers.
A new FAQ has been shared by Unity Technologies, which answers questions regarding the company's recent change in pricing plan for its game development engine.
According to the FAQ, the Unity runtime fee will be charged to the entity that distributes
This sounds like it would mean charging Valve money for the privilege of using Valve’s own infrastructure every time a player installed a Unity game after a major PC upgrade/reinstall or after uninstalling that MMO they dumped every other game in their library try out.
Steam could probably bake a ban on software that uses installation trackers into their developer/publisher ToS, or ban the collection or transmission of Steam user data related to installations, or something similar.
By the definition of “distributor” this would include Steam, GOG, Epic, etc. as well.
In before one of them starts stripping or firewalling the phone-home code. What’s Unity gonna do? Valve hasn’t signed any contracts with them!
I don’t want another attack vector for some hacker on my computer. That phone home code will be the second coming of the Sony rootkit.
This sounds like it would mean charging Valve money for the privilege of using Valve’s own infrastructure every time a player installed a Unity game after a major PC upgrade/reinstall or after uninstalling that MMO they dumped every other game in their library try out.
Steam could probably bake a ban on software that uses installation trackers into their developer/publisher ToS, or ban the collection or transmission of Steam user data related to installations, or something similar.