I keep seeing reviews titles "Unity Analytics Beware", "The game devs likely dont know, but Unity installs telemetry that cannot be removed, I believe still that I must warn people about this as they may be wary of telemetry and other forms of spyware."

It's all over the review pages at the moment, and I've got many of these "Unity" engined games, on GOG and Steam, so what is the *real* beef with this or is it just scaremongering?

As far as I know, Unity was planning to charge the dev/pubs money for each installation. This was the last thing I've heard about Unity.

I have no idea what happened to those plans but it could have a big impact to the world of gaming.

Unity engine games phone home when you launch them. Could be collecting information about the hardware configurations of people running their games, or other usage data about how people play the game/how often they play the game. Unity doesn't actually tell you what is being sent, it happens entirely in the background.

As for whether this should concern you or not, it depends on how big a deal your privacy is to you I suppose. Complete anonymity isn't generally practical on the Internet, but each individual needs to decide how much information they are comfortable giving away, to who, and for what reasons.

It's not just a privacy issue though, right?. It's also a legitimate DRM concern as well, even if you care nothing about some developer or corporation gaining access to your system info. I don't much care if Unity, GOG, Steam, or anyone else is privy to my system info, heck I've willingly posted it many times. But having a game require a phone home at launch is DRM.

Can you play the game offline? That matters.

On GOG, yes. Unity games work fine offline, and you can block the executable files in your firewall and the game will still run.

This is exactly what I care about as well. I don't mind sending some specs of my PC to the web, but the games HAVE to work offline.
But the latest plans I was talking about could put this in danger. At least I don't know how GoG will handle this.

They never had a way to do that via analytics and never will. What they have is a "proprietary data model," i.e. mostly just making stuff up based on sales figures. Currently, what they have in place is that after you make $1M you either self-report your installations (which I guess you also just make up) and pay a fee based on that, OR pay 2.5% royalties on sales, whichever is lower. If Unity thinks you're lying then they use their own numbers. It's still nonsense but has no effect on Unity games as such; you can always play them offline and that won't change.

You can disable telemetry by editing a config file.

https://www.gog.com/forum/iron_harvest/how_to_disable_unity_analytics

The linked example is for Iron Harvest, but it works for other games, just amend the path accordingly.

IIRC the newer engine analytics couldn't be turned off like that. But it's been a long while since I read about it, so I can't be any more specific than that.

Except, that those analytics should be disabled by default!!!

If those game developers (usually the case with Indies) are able to put together a game, there's really no excuse for not taking that little extra step and disabling those damn Unity analytics! But NO let's drop crap on the end users instead!

Can't just shove blame on the devs way things are. Thats ignorant.

I made a post about a tool to "bypass" the telemetry a few years ago.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/unity_engine_telemetry_killer

I am not knowlegde about it but from the little I know, the telemetry is enabled by default on all Unity built products above 2017 version.
I can't stress this enough, even if the said telemetry is benign.

Undisclosed telemetry is not limited to Unity built games, you can assume pretty much any sort of modern software has telemetry enabled.
I recall talk about game (possibly Slay the Spire?) telemetry and the way it changed the game, because only listening to player feedback was not enough and even possibly misdirecting to what most players actually wanted.

But then again GaMeRs don't care and to be honest, the way Windows handles telemetry is way, WAY nastier than Unity.


Edit: the video mentioned above was: Slay the Spire: Metrics Driven Design and Balance

It depends on whether the "home" is required to answer to that "call", as only then would the server have any means to affect our ability to continue to play our games.

Yes we can, and we should.

They knowingly chose an engine that includes telemetry by default. They decided not to provide an option to disable it (a couple devs do it, so all devs could do it). Most do not even bother showing a disclaimer about the inclusion of user tracking.

The blame is deserved.