This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Licenses and copyright laws. When you make a game with Unity, you're using proprietary code from Unity which has a license stating that the free version can only be used under certain circumstances. You'd be braking this license agreement if you distribute a game outside those conditions
How could they enforce such a thing? Just incorporate in another country and put the money there. Accept payment for micro transactions in Bitcoin. It's not like they could take a foreign company to court; you just have to pick the right country that doesn't honor such things.
The thing about unity is that it's not just a software you use to program the game. When you distribute the game, you also distribute the engine. Since the engine is licensed to you under a special license, distributing it in a way that's not permitted is copyright infringement. You agree to the license when you use unity, it's like signing a contract. And if you breach this contract, Unity has all the rights to take legal action against you for profiting off their proprietary engine without paying them.
It also just doesn't make sense to even try that. If you're at the point where you'd have to share your profits with unity, your game will be making enough sales that it's probably big enough for unity to notice it. And if you manage to keep your copyright infringement hidden from them, then your game is probably so small that you wouldn't be paying anyways.
So yeah, it's simply illegal, and unity will take legal action if they're losing out on enough money
From my experience that is not true. Unity has a very dedicated team of lawyers who are constantly looking out for possible licence infringiments. And they would rather inquire twice than to ignore someone for being "too small to notice".
How I made this experience: In univeristy I worked on a research project regarding immersion in gaming. We used Unity for creating virtual environments to conduct our experiments. For that we acquired a couple of education licenses which were strictly bound to non-profit usage. In return we got them for free. Some months later we received mail from Unitiy lawyers who suspected that we broke the terms of our license. The matter was cleared up after a while. But still, I was astonished by the dedication and energy they invested. It makes sense though. Their business depends on it.