Unity is currently sending emails threatening longtime developers with disabling their access completely over bogus data about private versus public licenses. Their initial email (included below) contained no details at all, but a requirement to “comply” otherwise they reserved the right to revoke our access by May 16th.
When pressed for details, they replied with five emails. Two of which are the names of employees at another local company who have never worked for us, and the name of an employee who does not work on Unity at the studio.
I believe this is a chilling look into the future of Unity Technologies as a company and a product we develop on. Unity are threatening to revoke our access to continue development, and feel emboldened to do so casually and without evidence. Then when pressed for evidence, they have produced something that would be laughable - except that they somehow gathered various names that call into question how they gather and scrape data. This methodology is completely flawed, and then being applied dangerously - with short-timeframe threats to revoke all license access.
Our studio has already sunset Unity as a technology, but this situation heavily affects one unreleased game of ours (Torpedia) and a game we lose money on, but are very passionate about (Stationeers). I feel most for our team members on Torpedia, who have spent years on this game. Detailed Outline
I am Dean Hall, I created a game called DayZ which I sold to Bohemia Interactive, and used the money to found my own studio called RocketWerkz in 2014.
Development with Unity has made up a significant portion of our products since the company was founded, with a spend of probably over 300K though this period, currently averaging about 30K per year. This has primarily included our game Stationeers, but also an unreleased game called Torpedia. Both of these games are on PC. We also develop using Unreal, and recently our own internal technology called BRUTAL (a C# mapping of Vulkan).
On May 9th Unity sent us the following email:
Hi RocketWerkz team,
I am reaching out to inform you that the Unity Compliance Team has flagged your account for potential compliance violations with our terms of service. Click here to review our terms of service.
As a reminder - there can be no mixing of Unity license types and according to our data you currently have users using Unity Personal licenses when they should under the umbrella of your Unity Pro subscription.
We kindly request that you take immediate action to ensure your compliance with these terms. If you do not, we reserve the right to revoke your company's existing licenses on May, 16th 2025.
Please work to resolve this to prevent your access from being revoked. I have included your account manager, Kelly Frazier, to this thread.
We replied asking for detail and eventually received the following from Kelly Frazier at Unity:
Our systems show the following users have been logging in with Personal Edition licenses. In order to remain compliant with Unity's terms of service, the following users will need to be assigned a Pro license:
Then there are five listed items they supplies as evidence:
An @ rocketwerkz email, for a team member who has Unity Personal and does not work on a Unity project at the studio
The personal email address of a Rocketwerkz employee, whom we pay for a Unity Pro License for
An @ rocketwerkz email, for an external contractor who was provided one of our Unity Pro Licenses for a period in 2024 to do some work at the time
An obscured email domain, but the name of which is an employee at a company in Dunedin (New Zealand, where we are based) who has never worked for us
An obscured email domain, another employee at the same company above, but who never worked for us.
Most recently, our company paid Unity 43,294.87 on 21 Dec 2024, for our pro licenses.
Not a single one of those is a breach - but more concerningly the two employees who work at another studio - that studio is located where our studio was founded and where our accountants are based - and therefore where the registered address for our company is online if you use the government company website.
Beyond Unity threatening long-term customers with immediate revocation of licenses over shaky evidence - this raises some serious questions about how Unity is scraping this data and then processing it.
This should serve as a serious warning to all developers about the future we face with Unity development.
How much you want to bet someone at unity threw the company database at an LLM and asked it to find people who weren’t paying the right licenses and then just trusted what it spat out uncritically.
I saw Dean’s real-time frustration on discord when he told us about the email from Unity. I’m so glad his latest project doesn’t involve a single byte of Unity.
KSA could still be impacted by this. If they have a sudden large bill, or if the rug gets pulled out from underneath them on several unity-based projects, then that effects how many devs and dollars they put towards KSA.
Unity are doing an excellent job at digging their own grave. I’m glad I jumped ship to Godot.
Fucking same, oh my god.
How is Unity such an endless shitshow?
Like… I can understand ‘oh we messed up a few classes and how they bind to some things in the latest major update.’ type errors, that happens with basically all game engines, forever.
But… fucking Unity always finds a new way to up the meta to an entirely new dimension of fucking up.
Christ.
My guess this time around it’s a dumb sales director tasking their team to chase supposedly “easy money”. We’ll find out over the coming days if this is a global or regional thing.
Either way, wasting your customers’ time, treating them with disdain, and lacking evidence of license breach/abuse, is a really really poor look to an org most studios are looking to take their business elsewhere after their Unity-based projects are wrapped up.
The entire gaming industry is infested with these ‘seek maximum profit at all costs’ bastards, and it is ruining everything for everyone who isn’t either a top level exec, an investor, or an utterly dubious consumer with more money than sense.
I would say ‘this shit is gonna implode’, but given the astounding numbers of gaming fuckups and layoffs in the last 6 or 12 months, I’d say we are just right in the middle of it.
Just fucking sad to see Unity go so utterly corporate, succumb to it as well.
Forget the past 12 months, the industry has seen record-breaking layoffs worse than the 2008 recession for 4+ years now.
I think we’re in the early stages of an 80s style collapse of the industry.
I switched to Godot and I’m loving it. Now when a new version comes out i don’t have to be afraid of more enshittification, it actually improves every time.
