Can they even track pirated installs ?

B3_CHAD@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 383 points –
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It would mean every Unity game was not-so-secretly shipped with code that phones home to the Unity company upon install.

Either they've been egregiously spying on gamers for years (and by extension, game developers using Unity have just been fine with that), or they're lying through their teeth.

Unity includes telemetry for some time
I believe you can't actually disable the telemetry (or Unity intro logo) in the "free" version

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.

Probably the opposite actually. The devs who utilize the feature probably enjoy having some numbers to look at and analyze. They're trying to make a game that people enjoy after all; the more info they have on how you're playing the game, the better. The devs who don't use it probably aren't even aware that it exists. Additionally, I'm not sure if it requires a subscription to view the telemetry (the page suggests you have to sign up for it in some capacity), but if it does then it makes sense that devs might believe that it's something that's disabled until you manually enable it.

Personally, I know if I was a dev I'd be checking that shit every day. I like watching the funny numbers go up and down.