this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I don’t understand how unity has any legal standing to retroactively charge new fees to developers who have already made their games. You’re only required to abide by terms agreed to in a deal as it was written at the time of agreement. Isn’t that literally how EVERYTHING works?
Even in their old TOS they said if you didn't agree with any future TOS updates they could stay on their current version and the old TOS applies.
But obviously they deleted that part in April, which makes this much worse and most likely illegal.
Unity doesn’t give out perpetual licenses any more, it’s a subscription model. If you don’t like it, you can leave at any point in time, but then you also don’t have a license to distribute their engine along with your game.
The problematic part (for Unity) is that they used to have a clause in the contract that said that you could keep using the old license terms as long as you didn’t update the engine. They removed that last year, but developers who are using an older version than that should be able to have a chance at the court. The problem is just that small indie devs don’t have the money for this multi-year legal battle.