Hi,
While I appreciate that we no longer need to rely on Unity to determine installations, I was wondering if Unity has any plans to release that proprietary software they mentioned that is capable of identifying pirated and malicious installs. It would be a shame to just shelf such a system, if it exists at all.
I think all that discussion was just a smokescreen.
The official story now is that they will not count “initial engagements” (1) because they kicked the hornet’s nest suggesting it before, and (2) because they cannot if you don’t enable analytics phone-home features.
But when they were suggesting all this sophisticated detection/accounting, it sounded like they were going to leverage their ad impression analysis. IronDome IronCurtain IronThrone IronMountain IronSource has a proprietary scheme to detect fraudulent ad impressions. They use it to reject payouts to game authors unilaterally, just go visit the ad services forum area to get a sense of how open and transparent this process is. My impression is that they were planning to just wire this random number generator proprietary algorithm in reverse when counting “initial engagements” or “retroactive installs” or whatever they called it that day.
Yep, it definitely is. I guess my goal with this post is to remind developers that this isn’t the first time Unity made something up, and it is in fact a pattern - one more thing devs need to remember just in case they feel appeased by today’s announcement e.g. Gigaya wasn’t published because “oopsie the project is just really messy haha, but it totally exists we are using it internally”.
If Unity wants to make right, and they weren’t lying, then there is no reason not to make available this great fraud detection system especially when it can help developers pay their fees. Anyway, let’s mark this date September 22nd 2023 and let the next silent days/months/years speak for themselves.