I think Unity needs a licensing change.

News & General Discussion
1

I hope this is not just shouting into a dark hole. I like to think that people at Unity still read this stuff.

I’m not asking for a price drop or anything to be made free, this thread is in no way about anything like that at all.

Rather I think the licensing scheme needs to work differently. The licensing scheme of Unity really needs to be tailored to the highly cross-platform mobilized freelancer, much in the same way that Luxology Modo’s licensing scheme is and Pixologic’s Zbrush licensing scheme is. Both Luxology and Pixologic know their proffesional users are going to be jumping around to different workstations and different studios alot and have thus made their licensing very permitting of this. You can install a single Modo license on as many workstations and as many operating systems as you want, just it can only be open in one place at a time. This is allows you to easily work in different studios, different workstations, on different operating systems, with a single license, without any struggle. I think Unity developers are susceptible to needing this same flexibility, but the current Unity licensing scheme makes it a serious struggle to have this work style.

Let me describe my situation here. I am a full-time Unity developer at a company, I also do freelance unity development on my own, and my company also sends me out to other companies from time to time to help them with their projects when they need a programmer.

What this ends me up with is, I have three computers, I have a mac pro workstation at my company office, I then have my personal mac pro workstation at home, I then have my own own personal macbook pro that I take with me.

I know Unity lets you install your license twice, and I currently have it on my office mac pro, and my personal macbook pro. This has been sufficient for a while. BUT there a few things that have developed that have made this restriction very frustrating.

I am increasingly needing to develop native plugins for OSX and Windows. I am needing to now use Directx 11 for a few projects, but most of my work is still for iOS. So I need Unity on OSX as well as Windows. It would also be nice to be able to develop on my home mac pro when I am at home, and not be forced to use my macbook pro because I’ve run out of installs.

Basically it’s turning out than I need Unity installed 6 times. As I have 3 computers I work on, office mac pro, home mac pro, personal macbook pro. But I am also now needing to do both Windows and OSX development back and forth, meaning ideally I need my unity licenses installed on the OSX partition of each computer, and ALSO the windows bootcamp partition of each computer.

So right now I am looking at having to install my unity license on the OSX and Windows bootcamp partition of my macbook pro, and not even be able to use my much faster Mac Pro’s for Unity development. Or spend another $4500 to have a second set of Unity licenses.

This is seeming really frustrating to me at this point. When comparatively Luxology lets me install Modo on all three of my work computers, on all three of their OS’s (I have triple boot set up on my machines), and then it just grabs the licenses from the internet whenever I need it, allowing Modo to be open on only one computer. So I literally have my single Modo license installed in 9 different places, and the license permits that as long as it is only open in 1 place at once. For my work style this is really ideal, and I presume alot of people doing unity development are probably in the same boat as me. Unity developers aren’t ones that seem to get absorbed into major companies and sit at one workstation the whole time. I imagine alot of your are probably like me of having to go around to lots of different places, and having to use different computers, and you also need to to do develop under different operating systems. The current Unity licensing scheme is really restrictive to allowing this. I really wish it would change.

Even a licensing scheme like Vray or Propellerheads reason where your license is on a USB dongle would be more preferable to me, as then I could jump around to all my different computers and operating systems.

Sorry I don’t like to complain very much about this stuff but. Really I am facing the decision right now to spend another $4500 on unity licenses just for myself, or move both my installs to my macbook pro’s windows and OSX partitions, and stop using my much faster Mac Pro for unity development altogether. It seems to me like for a package that caters to highly mobile freelancers, and cross platform development, it should seem obvious your probably going to need to install your licenses on more than just two separate operating systems.

Please change it?

2

Yeah I’m in the same position. I have both copies installed at work, one on a PC, the other a MAC, and end up using Unity free at home, even when working on work projects (yes I have to mix licenses on my projects, but I own pro…), and even though I do have a pro license.

I’ve been thinking of getting a laptop, but unless I get a mac I can’t really take it off the mac at work, even though it sits for weeks without use. Or I have to juggle licenses and it’s just a pain, I either get to work and forgot to release the version at home or vice versa, so now I just keep them separate completely and mix pro and free in all my projects which sucks.

3

Ask your employer for a kick-butt work l laptop as a replacement for your desktops? My employer switched to nearly entirely laptops for the whole company. Then you’ll be able to take the work laptop home (sigh…) and be like the rest of us slaves.

4

I wouldn’t mind spending a premium on an “extended license” where I could get Unity Pro (or individual addons) for two major revisions. Obviously less than CURRENT_PRICE*2, but still.

5

I twisted his arm hard for a laptop on our last project where he instead bought a micro form factor desktop instead, 9"x8"x3.5" for $1500, which is sitting on my desk. lol not sure why he’s so against a laptop.

6

Laptops are risky, is probably why. They lose any physical security advantages your office has, they’re far more prone to physical damage, and they’re easier to steal, and if lost or stolen someone else potentially has your data.

You’re spot on that cross platform development means you need access to more platforms. A license update to make this stuff nicer would be cool. (As an aside, I haven’t tried myself but apparently you can now build Unity Xcode projects for iOS from Windows. Not ideal, but possibly a small help for some people.)

As a stop gap, have you had a chat to the activations team to see if you can get one or two more? I wouldn’t be surprised if they were at least open to giving you extra installs for multiple OS’s on a single machine. Considering that you could have “solved” your problem with some dodgy copies of the software instead of taking to them I’d be surprised if they didn’t at least listen.

7

I agree with this. Having to wait 24-48 hours for a manual activation, even when upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 or installing a new PC is a pain in the butt. As you mention a better model is to allow the user to activate the license as they open the program, then perhaps close it on all other devices.

Lots of software packages use this model, I’m not sure why UT can’t. And of course if the activations get out of hand UT can of course start asking questions.

8

Its only an issue if you delete your stuff isn’t it? I think I upgraded from windows 7 to windows 8 without needing anything.

9

@techmage: just thought I’d let you know that installing unity on a bootcamp partition doesn’t take up a license, or is not considered to be a new install assuming you have it installed on the mac side already.

10

How does this work? Does it check for a license on the Mac drive or…?

11

You would need the above system to still allow two computers with it running at the same time due to the amount of batch processing etc. With Modo you have no real requirement to have it open in 2 places.

12

Nope! For some reason when I upgraded to 8.1, when I ran Unity (the same install pre-upgrade) I had to activate the license. The PC name is the same, so no idea.

13

Yes it does; it’s essentially a different machine.

–Eric

14

I agree with this, I’ve had similar worries before as I have more than one computer that I want to be able to run my license on.

I don’t mind if it shuts down on one computer if I run it on another, if anything this makes more sense, as you can now technically just install it on two computers and have two people use one license while with this solution, the license would only work for one person at a time!

15

What’d be nice is if we could de-activate our installs from the application rather than by contacting a human being. I have nothing against contacting a human being, but that’d make it a 1 hour turnaround instead of 1 day. They could easily set up notifications for themselves so that they could get in contact with us if our usage looked dodgy.

Plus, if we wanted to be dodgy we wouldn’t really need to keep them in the loop in the first place. There’s plenty of other places on the Internet who make that pretty easy for us.

16

You can currently return a license by going to Help > Manage License > Return License… unless you mean deactivating a different license from another computer, which would be really nice to do without contacting support.

17

Nope, I just totally didn’t realise you could do that. Sweet.

Whenever we’ve moved computers or whatever we’ve just uninstalled, and since that never asked if we wanted to return the license token I just assumed you needed to do that via support.

18

Well then why am I able to have one Unity license installed on one mac, and that same license installed twice on a different mac (via bootcamp)? That’s 3 installs.

I had assumed that unity perhaps used the MAC address, or something like that, which would be persistent on bootcamp and os x.

19

I think they might be a bit flexible on it. At one point I had Unity Pro on my MacBook, iMac, and Windows laptop and it was working fine (i.e. no problem when activating the third time). I’m now just on two Macs and got them to “reset me” before activating these machines.

20

Drop the support team an email, let them know the serial number and they’ll explain what’s going on.