House Party, Beat Saber, Death's Door, Pokemon Go, Pillars of Eternity, Rust, Guns of Icarus, Slender, Superhot, Kerbal Space Program, Dead Trigger, Ghost of a Tale, Return Of The Obra Dinn, Fe, Dusk, Escape from Tarkov
Unity is also used very often for low performance devices like Android.

If there will be much change in the market, it will affect a lot more 2D games than it affects 3D games. The number of 2D games made with Unity is by far higher.

I'd expect Gabe's response to be "Steam has accurate numbers, so for games bought via Steam someone will audit Unity's numbers against Steam's". He might sort out the issues with retroactively applying the new ToS to old games, but don't expect his answer to help new games on DRM-free stores.

Valve has no authority to tell Unity what to do or to audit their data. And really there's no reason Valve would care in the 1st place. It's not their issue.

Those are two publicly-listed companies, and data that (aggregated over many games) results in numbers that appear on their balance sheets. There are several authorities that could lead the audit; if developers report that the numbers don't match up, someone is going to audit it.

Since the number of installs cannot be tracked for GOG's backup offline installers - wouldn't this alone make them a whole lot more attractive and the better alternative to the Galaxy client?

Maybe. It's not going to have to do with Gabe though. And it's only 1 store. So if their data is aggregated you can't prove based on what they are saying what #s come from Steam, EGS, GOG, Console, Mobile, what was pirated, what was malicious users, what was gamepass, etc.

I would think the opposite. Because you can't distinguish between 1 person installing multiple times or several distinct people doing it. So the whole install metric is just really problematic.

I think it would all boil down to some inbuilt metrics. For example the game gets the machines MAC address and sends it to a server, this will then see if this MAC address has been used before for that game, or if it is a new one.. Thid does not depend on any client, or wether it is an offline installer or not.

It does depend on the computer having a network device, however.

And Android too. I've tried it on my phone.
Performance wise, it ran well enough to be perfectly usable. But even with a mouse and keyboard, it still had enough quirky behaviour that I wouldn't want to use it for real.

(Some/All?) Unity games send telemetry back whenever you run the game anyway.
So air-gapping or blocking the game ín the firewall should be the choice of the truly paranoid already. :-)

If a developer doesn't like Unity's license they don't have to use the product. If you don't like a DRM product you don't have to use it. No one needs to abolish it as if it's against some objective cosmic law.

Unity should be free to make up whatever dumb terms they want and people should be free to say no thanks.

I've said it before and I'll say it again :
Sooner or later even steam will try to pull a "server tax"
Meaning that everyone will have to pay like 5$ a month to keep access to their library.
Then they'll use a lame excuse, such as "server costs", "economic crisis", "carbon footprint", whatever.

Sure there'll be a huge outrage. But considering that since 2004 people have been accumulating thousands of games in their libraries I don't see most customers abandoning their investments. And from my own experience, gamers aren't really one of the most resilient coherent types.

In fact I'd guess the only reason why Valve hasn't pulled this stunt is because of GOG and epic. The moment they realize there's no true risk of competition steam users will be literally renting all their already purchased games.

I don't know. I think there's always risk of competition. Every company dies eventually. Maybe not in your lifetime but it always happens. And Valve makes so much on new sales I don't see the incentive to encourage people to find alternatives, which is what would happen.

It maybe true that user must give consent to phone home, however, when was the last time you recall giving consent to your Operating System or even Graphics Driver?
I mean, the consent must be there but I know, you know and "they" know that no one read the terms and conditions, specially if it's a wall of text. People just click next, Remember a decade ago how most installers, including Microsoft, had a "add a search engine" box?

I recall a Unity game wich changed the TOS and there was a big outcry on the comunity, due the telemetry. The outcry was so big they put a start screen stating that you must agree or coulldn't launch the game. I believe it was Kerbal Space Program.

Many, many games use telemetry outside of Unity built games, I recall some talk by the devs of Slay the Spire stating that the game only took off after they start collecting data via telemetry, because the most vocal community members, while helpfull, were clearly not how most people played the game. Probably only benign data was/is collected but was anyone bothered with some TOS clausule? People just launched the game as ever, "oh, there's a update, nice".

The issue is with the Unity putting a back door into their Engine. This back door could be or already is illicitly gathering data about installs. It could be in violation of EU privacy laws and could cause any European based distribution company to have to delist any games that have this code.