I suspect the potential for abuse is the reason they’ve walked back. The problem is that data will be private and the gatekeepers are the ones who stand to profit. So you’ll have another situation like those ad companies who underplay bot impressions

Unity merged with a "your flash player is out of date" adware company, I'm sure device identification is nothing new to them

Nothing changes until January 1, 2024.

Would not surprise me if it was a heavy handed management decision dumped on engineers laps last minute, and is barely implemented at this point.

Which is literally _next quarter_ and retroactively applies to all current games. That's _really soon_, and is going to cause headaches for any publisher/developer looking to release soon.

Eh, yeah. Once had a service provider promise their new API would “easily” (I still remember the tone the sales rep used every time he said easily; must have practiced it came out sounding the same every time).

3 months of integration dev later, we start load testing, the external API fails spectacularly. They tell us to redesign to use their old batch API 35 days before our deadline. We tried, failed, ate shit with our customers. Provider was too big to pick a fight with. Startup failed.

Welcome to software engineering.

The obvious way is hardware ID, which can work okay for 80% of cases.