Will probably be enforced via licensing. Maybe even self reported. Probably has a clause giving them permission to perform audits of your sales.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I doubt they will spend that much time. Just state you owe us x. If you appeal, you have to proove sales from your different channels.
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.
They have telemetry. They probably know when a game is downloaded. They probably don't know if it's legitimate. They just auto bill based on telemetry and leave devs to dispute or suck the big one. Only effort needs to go into disputes. Big clients will obviously get quicker resolution.
No company would trust devs to be honest about downloads and it would be too expensive to verify.
They don't need to audit much, just need a steam, epic, and itch total downloads figures.
They'd have to do best effort against charging devs for pirated copies.
Telemetry is also easily blocked. As a business, I'd trust that a lot less. It's why many enterprise licenses are simply self reported. The punishment isn't worth lying enough to make a difference.
Most companies would trust devs as the devs are not big enough to survive a legal fight they'd certainly lose with prejudice, meaning they'd pay court costs as well.
Not really, they just go by if the game isn't selling well, or rather isn't selling well enough for them, obviously they have to be careful not to do it too aggressively otherwise otherwise they'll come off as being greedy or whiny about poor sales, which isn't a good look on any dev (especially if it's not actually related to piracy, then it hurts their argument).
They've just been careful enough to only whip out the crybaby arguments when it'll work in their favor and seem enough like piracy, as opposed to doing it too much or at the wrong time and seeming salty about low sales (to be fair that's exactly what's happening, but people think they know more about who buys vs who pirates, rather than who buys vs who doesn't).
They can obviously track pirated installs.
They use computational predictions and quantum mathematical calculations through a software called trust me bro.