Can they even track pirated installs ?

This is my kind of maths, add on p&p, handling, admin and VAT let's it call it a nice round milly. No, no questions at this time sorry.

Not if you automate it with a good script and run it on a few machines at a time.

Easy enough to do with PowerShell and just leaving the box running.

I could easily write some bash with ADB to do that over and over and over again on an old android phone

Doesn't matter. Regardless of what Unity said their "Enterprise" plan was, it doesn't matter.

B2B deals just work differently since both companies have more at stake. If a company like EA used Unity, there is no way Unity would want to lose that contract and EA couldn't afford to drop Unity. Large companies will likely go through a few short renegotiation meetings, if that.

Plus, lawyers. If Unity even tries to force this on its larger customers, they are going to be hauled into court and most likely lose. When they lose, Unity will likely be liable for court costs as well.

So then this falls under "devs didn't care" because it was useful information for them and they didn't see how it could be used negatively.

Red flags are always free. Upfront anyway. You pay for them at an unexpected time in unpleasant ways later. So feel free to have as many as Unity is providing. 😊

To me it sounds a lot like "We don't really want to answer that question, so here's a bit of technobabble to ease your mind."

I mean, writing your own linked list in C and then summing its values could be considered as having "a proprietary data model that calculates", but it has basically nothing to do with the question on how they track such things, just hints that they're not using an existing - and proven - tracking method.

To clarify; they took the question "How are you tracking installs" to mean "With your tracking data, how are you counting installs", and then basically answered "We add the numbers together"
This is a complete non-answer, and it seems to suggest that their actual tracking method is likely unreliable.

It sounds like bluffing.

In other words, it could very well be complete and utter bullshit.

Right but if it's something that's affecting every single creator then why would anyone continue to want to use Unity

The thing is that most Unity games don't even have DRM in the first place. At most most will have the Steam DRM which is trivial to bypass. And Unity Games released on GOG will be especially at risk.

Idc about anything right now I'm hungry af and the only thing I was able to read was crackers fml

and how exactly is unity going to know whether it was gotten legitimately or not? the only way the developers wouldn't get charged is if crackers patched it out

Unreal is open source, although it isn't free. I would certainly prefer it to unity though.

I disagree. I've been/am working on several pretty large projects in Unity (some of them sold hundreds of thousands copies), and especially once you start porting to consoles, the experience goes to shit. Their support is vague, documentation is plainly wrong in some places - I've once spent few days figuring out how to use a documented and explained feature, only to find out later that there's a closed few years old bug on their issue tracker that it's actually not supported, and the documentation only does not explains it very well. (The feature was multiple hits per single Raycast in jobs, here are the docs. According to the bug resolution, only one hit per ray is supported, and the docs only don't explain it very well. The docs are still the same.)

You also inevitably run into issues that you simply don't have in other engines - it's closed source. You have no idea how is something implemented, or whether something isn't working because you are doing it wrong, or if it's Unity bug/fault. In Unreal, if something doesn't work, you can always just check the engine code, and either fix it yourself, or better understand why it's not working. If you need to slightly modify some engine behavior, you're out of luck with Unity - you have to resort to ugly hacks that sometimes work, but usually at a cost. In Unreal, you just modify the engine code and be done with it.

Trusting Unity with any feature is also a gamble. Have you started developing a multiplayer game on Unet? Tough, we don't want to support that anymore. But, we will create a better multiplayer system, just wait for it! Then they removed Unet, and the new networking relacement is widely regarded as pretty much unusable - or at lest it was last time I checked. Thankfully, there are a few amazing open source networking addons.

In general, while Unity is an ok-ish game engine for smaller hobby projects (but for that, Godot is better), it's really an awful and frustrating experience once your project size grows and you need to build bigger games, or if you start porting your games to consoles.

And it's also really apparent from the way they communicate and threat you company that they don't give a fuck and only want your money.

There is no way they'll just make up a bunch of invoices for small developers. That would be too time consuming, plus they'd need to show reasonable effort in determining the invoice. It's best to just let the devs do all the work with the fear that an audit can cost them so much more money than they'd save if they lied.