It was such an insane pricing policy, too. Charging per download opens the door to some extremely hostile manipulation opportunities for bigger companies.
Imagine you’re an indie dev. You made a really great game and it’s doing well. But uh oh, I’m a wealthy AAA publishing company and I don’t like you cutting into my market share. I can just buy 100 copies of your game and setup 100 virtual machines to constantly download, uninstall, and redownload your game until you’re bankrupt. If that’s not causing enough damage I can get 1000 copies. Hell, I can probably get some of my employees to convince you to give me steam keys so I don’t even have to pay you upfront.
And the fact that they hand wove that away, “we totally have solved the problem of counting installs on remote computers no problem, just trust us when we tell you how much you owe us”. Like, how out of touch from your userbase can you get?
![Open Source Tools vs Corporate Greed [Rule]](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/ed349361-3e89-4e68-91ce-848d3adebffb.webp){kind=link}
It was pretty cathartic when Unity tried to price-gouge game devs and a bunch of them just went, “Oh, okay… I guess we’re learning Godot, now.”
It was such an insane pricing policy, too. Charging per download opens the door to some extremely hostile manipulation opportunities for bigger companies.
Imagine you’re an indie dev. You made a really great game and it’s doing well. But uh oh, I’m a wealthy AAA publishing company and I don’t like you cutting into my market share. I can just buy 100 copies of your game and setup 100 virtual machines to constantly download, uninstall, and redownload your game until you’re bankrupt. If that’s not causing enough damage I can get 1000 copies. Hell, I can probably get some of my employees to convince you to give me steam keys so I don’t even have to pay you upfront.
And the fact that they hand wove that away, “we totally have solved the problem of counting installs on remote computers no problem, just trust us when we tell you how much you owe us”. Like, how out of touch from your userbase can you get?