A New Gaming Feature - Spyware
Greg Hoglund took a closer look at the popular online roleplaying game World of Warfact analyzing the traffic that the game exchanged with Blizzard servers over the Internet. According to Greg a software know as the "warden client" is executed every 15 seconds on all World of Warcraft clients that are currently playing the game. Here is what Greg found out about it:
- The warden dumps all the DLL's using a ToolHelp API call. It reads information from every DLL loaded in the 'World of Warcraft' executable process space. No big deal.
- The warden then uses the GetWindowTextA function to read the window text in the titlebar of every window. These are windows that are not related to the WoW process, but any program running on your computer.
- The Warden program sniffs down the email addresses of people you are communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that you have open at the time, and the names of all running programs, including those that were minimized or in the toolbar. These strings can easily contain social security numbers or credit card numbers, for example, if you have Microsoft Excel or Quickbooks open with personal finance information at the time.Once these strings are obtained, they are passed through a hashing function and compared against a list of 'banning hashes'
- Next, warden opens every process running on your computer. When each program is opened, warden then calls ReadProcessMemory and reads a series of addresses - usually in the 0x0040xxxx or 0x0041xxxx range - this is the range that most executable programs on windows will place their code. Warden reads about 10-20 bytes for each test, and again hashes this and compares against a list of banning hashes.
Gregs conclusion is that the warden client can be declared to belong to the category of spyware. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) calls it a massive invasion of privacy.
According to the EFF Blizzard has come up with three responses:
- Warden doesn’t collect personal information, so what’s the problem?
The thing is, warden does at least scan personal information and process these findings. In other words, a privacy invasion takes place even though Blizzard claims that no data is saved.
- Everyone’s doing it. Blizzard points out that many companies use hack-scanning programs
That's no excuse, is it ?
- Read the EULA. Blizzard advises gamers of its intent to invade in its terms of service. “People should read contracts, says Blizzard rep John Lagrave.
Well, I don't know a lot of gamers who actually read the EULA of a game and Blizzard surely knows this.
Hoglund released a tool called The Governor that watches the activities of World of Warcraft, and clearly reports which data is being read from other processes. You can download it at Greg Hoglunds site.
Update: The site appears to no longer be available.
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What would Rockstar gain by doing this?
Probably, laziness. Why “crack” your own old game, if other people already did it?
If you read the actual twitter thread, this code was found in an unused “testapp.exe” file, not the actual game executable. They were probably testing out the crack back in the day to develop countermeasures. Somehow the testapp got left in the downloadable game files
People love making drama, and probably most people complaining about Unity, don’t use Unity or don’t even do anything productive with it, which means they will never hit the thresholds to apply these fees.
In fact, the fees are not too terrible, they are just different… I mean what is the difference of paying 5% of royalty for 1million.
or well, give 30% to Apple etc…
It is just a similar stuff, and only seeing in action can really tell if this is better or not.
Also it is obvious they are trying to sell Pro and Enterprise licenses, which most of these Developers should have anyway, not the personal one which would be the most expensive one for these ‘per install’ fee, and being honest, nobody serious would use Personal license and then expect them to hit the threshold and be a 200K+ game and stay personal.
Just another day of drama in this world.
For example, these changes were expected since they have been acquiring a lot of stuff lately, and they want to give people the power to compete against Unreal, but obviously they need to provide servers and a lot of services that cost money.
Well, they are even providing with cloud storage and all.
And they want to give AI and don’t require developers to have a server to utilize it, which means more money in servers and services.
So, it is an obvious change and unless people have substantial evidence than this will really affect anyone compared to other companies and their way to charge fees, then, this is just another drama by users who will never even release a serious game in their life, with Unity, Unreal, Godot and nothing, not even Game Maker, we have to be realistic about it.
To me, it is a weird system, but doesn’t mean it won’t work and it will be worst than %5 royalty by Unreal or anything like that.
Unity has always been in a weird place, because it has never been cheap, it has never been the best and Unity has mostly been done for mobile games, which doesn’t help the image of it. Some Desktop unity games are okay, but nothing incredible.
The only time you see Unity ‘shine’ is when you see their tech demos.
But Unity is easy to develop, and it works fine most of the time, but it was never cheap, not at all, in fact, it was always expensive.
And we are talking in the times when it was only the Engine and done, not about cloud and AI and servers and this and that.
So people making drama about how ‘expensive’ and ‘weird’ their new system is, are acting like if this game engine was the cheapest and now it is becoming the most expensive.
It wasn’t the most expensive but never the cheapest either, so they are trying to find a way to change the way things are charged, which in the end would need a threshold, which most developers will never hit anyway.
For some, it’s just another drama in their bored student life, but for indie developers, that cuts off all possibilities of free to play games. And they can fear that unity change their mind again. They must feel like Lando when Darth Vader told him he altered the deal. I bet they’d pray unity ceo won’t alter it any further.
And it looks like the threshold is easily reached. So, I don’t think the Indie developers are not really bring overreacting. They’re more very cautious about potential abuses from a man who is known to messes up everything he touches for the sake of money.
So basically instead of understanding how toxic and anti consumer this is all you did is defend bad practices … mighty clap for you my guy. You have no literal consideration on how this new monetization will affect, devs and consumer, keep up with that white knigthing.
Do you even develop games? probably not “Anon”, if you are going to talk so much nonsense.
First it says BOTH thresholds have to met, so show me Data backing up how this new fee is terrible for game developers using Unity. Like I said, Unity was never cheap, so they had to spend big bucks already to use Unity, plus other software.
Of course, most people complaining, like you, probably have never touched a game engine in your life to know the process of making one, don’t know about pipelines and everything involved on a game, therefore you and most people will never hit the ‘thresholds’ to know if it is cheaper or more expensive for you or not.
So don’t throw the “consideration” talk at me, when you are not sure if this will affect anyone or not, because I doubt most people have done mathematics to know it.
Also, it depends on the game and the studio, so I doubt you have any statistics to back up your claim, and how you are more considerate only because you are not knowledgeable about the subject, and you are just parroting what others say, without research first.
I am not claiming it will be better or worst, I am questioning why people make so much drama, about it, and how is this different than Unreal Engine which is tagged as free, but you have to pay %5 royalty after 1 million dollars revenue, without trying to find data first and make a real study how this game will affect Unity games, you know, taking already made games and applying the new fee to know how much the cost will change or not.
So compare old Unity prices with New Unity prices and then you can compare them to other game engines like Unreal which has it at 5% after 1 million, or Cryengine which has it also at %5 but starts at a lower revenue “If your publisher receives total gross receipts of USD 100,000.00 for a given year for a given game, and you only get forwarded 70%, you still have to pay USD 4,750.00 as royalty.”
So my point is simple since it seems you missed it. if you are hitting 200K for a probably mobile game (which is what Unity is used mostly for), well, that’s a lot of money, that means you are not stopping at 200K but you will probably go higher.
if you are developing a game to make money, like most reasonable people, that means developers will get the PRO license and not the Personal one, which means this fee will have a higher threshold and be cheaper.
Because that means you are making tons of money so you can license the produce to benefit you more.
You make it seem like Game Engine is everything, and while it is the most important art, studios already need tons of other software to make videogames, which cost money, and they are not cheap, and sometimes they are not even ‘cheap’ for indies because there is not ‘indie’ licenses, or their team is bigger than the license allows, also, studios might want to acquire the Perpetual or Permanent license which is more expensive, than the subscription one, but that means you are not ‘subscribing’ to a software and you won’t get forced updates in many cases that might break your pipeline.
But this is why many studios stay in old versions of any 3D software, because they developed tools for their pipeline and all that, and they don’t need newer versions.
I mean, not everyone is using the ‘free’ Blender to make games… which is mediocre at everything it does, even if it can do a lot, in fact, I quoted free, because vanilla Blender is bad, you need to buy or get for free many plugins to make it do what other software have, making it just as ‘paid’ as any other 3D software, but worst since you don’t get the same support as you would by being a paid costumer.
So, there is a lot of expenses about making a videogame, so this fee might not add much difference when having to pay other software, in fact, sometimes many studios don’t fall in the ‘indie’ license for the size of the team, which means you have to pay 4 or 10 times more for the software.
Compare Maya indie to full Maya, or Houdini indie to Houdini FX or something…. also Substance software, which I don’t think it has a perpetual license and you have to rent it, a lot of money each month, per license or seat.
For example, just Zbrush acquisition by Maxon, and therefore price changes and now you having to pay, per major version, means if you want to have perpetual license you need to pay 970 dollars to Maxon to get updated Zbrush for every new version.
Just 3D Software and the Adobe and Maxon acquisitions of Substance and Zbrush respectively, made pipelines a lot more expensive, especially Zbrush since it was 1 time fee before.
You need real software to do games, not free tools only ignorant people would recommend, you need th best tools for a pipeline and the best tools for X and Y job, you can’t relay on a single package and hundreds of plugins, especially when Blender can’t even handle many polygons as other software do.
So how can this fee be so much terrible that will make everything worst? Probably not, and if it does, then show the statistics and real data.
And don’t start with ‘you are not considerate’ at me, I think Game Engine developers are the most important ones for games anyway, so, they deserve to change whatever they want to change and if people want to pay for it they will pay for it.
Unity was never a cheap game engine, and it was mostly used for Mobile for how easier it made things and being C# and all that.
So yes, I have consideration with Game Engine developers, people like John Carmack, in the 90s with ID Tech, making amazing technology for people to get new features and stuff in Video Games. They are the reasons why Games can look as realistic as they can today, the revolution of game engines was really good at one time.
I wish Game Engines didn’t make it so easy for anyone to make videogames, especially people who complain about this but barely can make a cube move with WASD.
In today’s game engines, they are not even making assets, they are buying kitbashes and template and all, even downloading them illegally and then just change the assets and name it whatever, most people have no morals or passion or anything, they only want to push a button and release a game.
In fact, people could do what John Carmack did, their own game engine and be better, but nah, they would rather rent this game engines and complain about their prices and fees.
This was obvious that Unity would look for ways to make money faster because their acquisitions, Ziva Dynamics, WETA FX and PiXYZ and dozen others in the last few years.
And again, with the AI and servers cost and all that, well, it was just obvious they would modify something.
In fact, if you read, hey also mention “Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games. ” So for example the cost could be less when you are using their acquisitions related to ad business.
So again, show me real data, stop parroting what you don’t know, show me X and Y studio where this fee will be so bad for them, show me all their operation cost, all the licenses they already pay, all the software they should be using in order to make a game that will met the thresholds.
Game engines are already making it easy for people to publish their games unlike before 30 or 20 years ago, so at least people can stop complaining, especially when they don’t have real data to back up the whole drama.
thats arrogant b/s tbh and totally missing the point since its not about a rising cost for studios per se.
this thread sums it up perfectly what the points really is:
https://twitter.com/tha_rami/status/1701864575031775516
“this is just another drama by users who will never even release a serious game in their life, with Unity, Unreal, Godot and nothing, not even Game Maker, we have to be realistic about it.”
You say on an article that repeatedly quotes indie devs who have released popular games on the Unity engine. You kinda undermined your entire argument with just that but there’s other issues too. Such as the fact that even with their clarifications, this new pricing model is pretty nasty for plenty of dev studios. Ie: Any dev studio that releases a free game, for example, would now be charged for doing so. This is idiotic to the extreme since those dev studios are already paying for Unity anyways. And before you claim that this situation wouldn’t happen, one of the links being shared around fairly early on was from a dev that works at a studio producing educational mobile games. One of which has over 100,000,000 installs and in which the the base game is completely free. Then there’s also, as the article points out, the clear privacy concerns over their methods to track installs. It’s almost like you didn’t actually read the article and instead just jumped to post contrarily to what most people think of the subject.
“The big question here is, how does Unity detect game installs? It has to be using some sort of analytics tool for telemetry to track the installations. DRM-free games could be impacted by this issue as well. I’m not quite sure if this is an ethical thing to do, or does it seem like spyware?”
Today people are being burnt alive by Google drones for calling far worse things spyware, than just detecting an install. But you’re right nevertheless, it’s minor spyware behavior. But it’s obviously not the actual reasons why all those companies who spy much more on their users, typically counting how much time they play the games and rating all their in-game actions without an option to opt out, cry about this. Even Unity if I remember well already spies on users much more than by counting installs.
I understand that Unity may want money from developers who profit from Unity’s work, but the violation of trust may come from announcing fees after developers already started using it before. However the article does not make it very clear what the initial Unity revenue model was.
You could have gone to the website and check the current plans.
Currently Unity Pro which doesn’t even include Source Code is at $2,040/yr PER SEAT… yes, that’s how much Unity has costed for many years. Enterprise version which has Source Code doesn’t have a price since it is meant for big teams, but Unity Industry says $4,950/yr per seat.
In fact, this means that the only ones who can complain about this free, are the Pro or Enterprise or Industry plans users, who have to still pay a fee, even if they are already paying big bucks for Unity per seat.
And it seems most people complaining about Unity are people not even using it or using the personal license and not people who are working to make big bucks with Unity.
Like for example, if you use personal license, which is free with lack of tons of features, but you can develop some games with it… well, they are still adding Unity services at no cost, like Unity Sentis, which is the AI ran in Unity servers, which means, you will save money in those server computing AI training cost for your game.
And also, Cloud storage and Unity DevOps which is the collaboration, which will increase if you pay for Pro or Enterprise.
So it is not only ‘charge a fee’ and move on, also you can get discounted fees by using a higher tier license or using Unity services, and will benefit more than Personal users, even if Personal Unity is kind of mediocre, because they want you to get the Pro, but most serious studious want Source Code which means 5k! unless you are enterprise and buy big volume licenses, which means, Personal or Pro will never make sense.
For example, you have to pay extra money for services that Enterprise and Industry have, like Technical Support, and bug fixing and backporting and LTS backporting!
So yeah… Unity was never cheap… I don’t get why people are making drama, they are probably the people who only download templates, change assets and publish games without changing anything else, and they hope to make money without paying anything to Unity, even if Unity is giving them easy access to game engines and publishing and all that.
Also, there are many Game Engine alternatives, but Unity fits mobile C# development. so… yeah. People making drama is like so cringe, especially the ones that have never touched game engines in their life. Unity is mostly on mobiles, so that’s another thing, most Mobile games are ad supported, which is already an awful terrible business, but yeah.
When people show me how these fees will make any real difference with the whole cost of making videogames, I will believe the drama is justified. For now, I believe people who will get affected Pro+, will not really care as much since it says it has to meet Both Thresholds and we know game industry is saturated with crap already, anyone can easily publish games without doing any real work, sometimes people just download templates don’t even change a single line of code and uploading to Google or Apple stores! that’s how awful the game industry is in 2023.
But these game engine companies caused it, like Unity has the assets store, and they allow all these templates to be downloaded easily.
Some people don’t even pay for the assets and download them illegally, so they are not paying for Unity, templates, or anything.
Honestly maybe this will help personal free licenses to have a little more cost, but I hate how the fee applies to Pro+ users.
Also, about how they can detect installations, each store has analytics, you can’t just upload stuff in 2023 when you sell something and don’t have any idea how much you are selling. They all have it, the question would be about non-store drm free games.
Which might be just tied to your account, because you need an account to use Unity engine and I guess from there they can easily have access to the data of the analytics.
I mean, it’s ridiculous to say “But SpYwAre” when even Github knows what IP is downloading free open source assets from their server, and any legal person, you know, the ones who are not using Unity illegally and using assets illegally and all that will respect the fee and all that.
it’s not like there are many non store DRM free games out there, it’s even hard to find software that is DRM free because of all piracy and how people abuse the good things about developers.
So you are thinking about the rare cases, and if you are not going to develop a drm store free game, then I guess you shouldn’t worry about it.
Analytics for things like installs are on probably every game, every website and anything installable. You don’t need to declare it as long as you’re not tracking individuals.
It’s truly awful what many of these IT businesses have been doing lately in order to line the pockets of their ineffective CEOs.
fee is a fee, but not many games will met both thresholds to really find this ‘awful’.
The problem with the article is that it is using Personal license to make the ‘fee’ look worst but who cares about personal license used? a company shouldn’t reward free users, and in fact, any serious person making a game shouldn’t even have Personal license, maybe Pro, but Pro doesn’t even have source code or anything. Honestly personal unity users are probably using templates they downloaded illegally and publishing the games that way and making with having carbon copy games in the stores.
The people who truly wants to make a game, will have to pay big bugs for Unity per year, per seat.
So the article should focus in Pro+ users, which means, it will be hard to hit BOTH thresholds, one being a ‘lifetime’ which is the installs of 1 million, and the other being the revenue one.
In Unreal for example, once you hit the 1million in revenue you will get a threshold of $10K per quarter, where you have to pay 5% of it.
If you already hit a million, which means from ads, microtransactions and the cost of the game and other small ways, you are for sure paying tons to Unreal per quarter.
Also, Unreal is technically free, but you can pay for it to get training and special support and all that. Same with Unity Pro vs Enterprise/Industry plans.
So, how many Unity games have hit a million installs and constant revenue of 1million per year?, not many, in fact, really few and if they are getting so much money, using Personal pirate licenses would be weird, but humans are greedy and want to use stuff without paying.
But for example, starfield had a success launch with having 6 million players playing it, I mean for such a short time it is a lot of users, but still not many as you would think for all the hype, but that means, with all the marketing and all, and the hype it only got 6 months, that means that for games on stores that nobody knows from indie developers, just 1 million installs, from a mobile store it is hard.
I believe this treats unfairly Pro and Enterprise Unity users, plus the whole BS ’emerging market’ is just BS. But doesn’t sound terrible, if people use the brain and think how it could affect users in the future.
Let’s find a game made in Unity hitting 1 million installs and constant 1 million revenue, and then let’s compare it to the others not doing it and less see more or less how much % it will affect.
Subscribers, take note!
About this article (How to play Roblox on Oculus Quest 2- Guide: Jul 29, 2023 by Onur Demirkol),
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most comments after September 14, 2023 are posts to other articles (Unity engine’s new pricing model has made game developers furious: Sep 14, 2023 by Ashwin).
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Viewers of articles and Comments should be aware of these “link is wrong”.
Article Title: How to play Roblox on Oculus Quest 2: Guide
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@owl, indeed. I’ve sent an e-mail hours ago to [[email protected]] to inform them of the issue as well as an e-mail to @Martin Brinkmann to let him now I had just contacted Softonic about the issue. Wait and see.
I like to imagine that one day, people in general will figure out that whenever someone else across the planet has leverage over them, they will tighten the screws. Always, always, always. Remember the Malware-box One introduction a decade ago, and the initial design which was going to require gamers to connect their consone to the net at least daily, or else all their games would get disabled!
That was my cue to run like hell away from that particular brand, to keep running, and to never come back. Sort of analogous to going on a first date with someone and they start acting like a total creep, in that, your reputation is toast, and you will never be trusted again. No amount of saying “I’m sorry” will do a damn bit of good. Game over!
The only thing that doesn’t make sense about this fee is charging people who are already paying big bucks for Unity yearly. Pro costs 2k a year per seat and you pay extra for other services, and since Pro doesn’t include source code that means people would have to buy Enterprise or Industry, Industry costs 5k, so enterprise has to cost similarly but get a discount depending on the many licenses you buy, so let’s say 5 licenses at 15-20K. So charging a fee on top, well, it was the only thing that didn’t make sense.
But for free and personal, should be actually a higher free, in the past I remember after you hit 100K you had to upgrade to Pro, so, Unity has always been looking for money.
But in my opinion this should have been a free for personal license only. It would been better and more effective to bump the prices of Licenses Pro, Enterprise and Industry by a tiny bit and make fees stronger for personal users free users.
It’s not like companies aren’t raising their prices, Adobe announced higher prices for their plans, and just like that, Autodesk and Maxon and others are always going up as well.
Of course new fees are always seen bad, so it affects negatively to anyone, but it’s not like the grass is geener on the other side, because the “free” engines have royalties and they are not too great.
Some studio claimed 100K per 1.5 million downloads a month, they would be a lot of money for Unity per month 15k, but also, 15K each quarter to Epic games if it was made in Unreal.
But let’s be honest, it shows you how bad they do business if they only make 100K on so many downloads.
So let’s bump the example: less downloads but generates more money like 500K downloads make 200K a month, that means 30K per quarter to Epic games and 15 to Unity… so how is Unreal royalties better? well they are not.
Also, let’s be honest, many of these studios are probably paying a service to make multiple downloads, Twitch viewerbots type of thing, because being on Top with 5 stars is better to bring the real players.
So I am sure that’s why some studios are so against the fee, because they know they little cheating will be over.
Of course I would be afraid of mass downloading just to make the game expensive, like when people want to cancel a developer and start giving 1 start even if they never played a game. That’s also the problem with installations fees, it has to be done properly to be effective.
So there are many problems with this, but it wasn’t as bad as people say, especially the people just joining the next bandwagon of hate to look cool in the internet like Reddit because they are X or Y company, even if they even know how to create a cube in a 3D software but believe game engine companies don’t deserve to get more money for their work.
You should really just disable the comments section… it is terrible!
I just wanted to say how people because of ‘commodity’ they would give all their power to their ‘mobile devices’, which is really bad, I mean, if you lose your phone or someone steals it, what will happen with this super ‘passwordless methods’?
It’s like when pages that force you to have 2FA and then it’s obvious that you will not get it back if something happens to the authenticator.
I mean, when airports are forcing you to unlock your phone to go through and they even clone your phone… it is terrible to imagine what will happen.
For example, US citizens can deny unlocking their phones because technically the gov can’t stop them from getting in USA, but what about other people? you don’t unlock your phone, you don’t get in.
So I don’t know, sounds really dumb to give so much power to phones, but then, we are in 2023, where people talk about “Privacy” yet, they can’t stop going online and getting radiated with their phones everyday.
They can’t even get up and walk to get food, they have to order it.
They can’t get up and turn lights off, they have to use ‘smart’ stuff.
Humans become worse but it is an agenda, and this powerless one simply bad and necessary.