I do freelance work for other companies–and for the most part, my games are given away (promotional games or educational tools), not sold. But even if they are sold, it’s not by me directly.
So I want to make sure I understand and obey the licensing terms for Unity:
If I make a game for a much larger company’s use (for sale, giveaway, internal training, whatever it may be), they don’t need to have a Unity license, do they? They don’t have Unity, they just have the resulting game I made for them. So I’m the only one who needs the license, right? (Unless they, in future, wish to get Unity to make changes on their own.)
A similar question would come up if I got a shareware game published. I have a license, so the publisher doesn’t need one, right?
The right to publish to Unity’s format is why people buy
the lisence - what they do with the resultant file/program
must surely fall only within the end user’s ownership rights.
ie. a product produced by a legitimate commercial lisence
holder is the sole property of the author.
I’ve not read the Euler in full - (guess I should) - but surely
OTEE does not intend to keep some form of ownership
and sanction over what can, and what cannot be done
with a product created with Unity ?
I doubt it’s an issue, I just want to remove all doubt
It’s not so much about OTEE retaining control over my game, it’s just that if I need to make my client (or publisher) buy their own license in addition to mine, it would be good to plan for that from the beginning.
I assume not–they are “using” the engine in some sense, but they don’t have Unity itself. They don’t have the editing tools, just a product made with them.
The reason it caught my eye is that Virtools require the author to submit
their product to Virtools for vetting before release. I know someone who
was trying to buy the VR pack for Haptics recently and it ended their
relationship with the software as Virtools wanted explicit details of what
they were going to do with the VR module before they’d sell it to them… !!!
I’d have thought it would be a positive for OTEE to sell Unity without
the confusion of longterm enduser lisencing caveats re. created content ?
I’m sure they do but I was little suprised by the “Hmmmm” in aNTeNNa’s post.
Of course there’s no problem. You license Unity, you can do whatever you want with the results. Including selling it to a publisher, or some other customer.
Unity costs $X for indies and $Y for pros or companies with >$100k revenues.
Suppose I am a typical small American or Australian company (I pick these cases because Anglophone nations tend to have the most employee-hostile labor laws of all developed countries). All my employees might be “independent contractors” even though my annual revenues might be in the millions (I’ve worked in/with/around plenty of shops like this).
At best such an outfit might buy indie licenses for its contractors (or have them buy indie licenses) and have one pro license (at most).
I’m just giving an example, and I would imagine that in your case there’s no issue, but OTEE might want to design its contracts accordingly. (I want OTEE to succeed, obviously.)
We’d rather just have people happy and excited, then such cheapskates can go … ehm, create
That said, currently the limit is not the user, but who buys the license. If a company wants to force its contractors to buy Unity Indie licenses, nothing we can do to stop them currently.
Its not something you should worry about any way. You will do better with your open system, because people will come to love you as a company and you will sell more.
I personaly hate the heck out of Ubisoft, beenox and a number of other companies because of the way they lock me in. I pay for a product and they treat me like trash, so now I think a few times before buying anything with there name on it. On the other hand products from companies I love I’m willing to buy withought thinking twice, some times even though I won’t use the software much just because I want the company to survive.
I mean just take a look at the music industry. The more they add copy protection and the more they complain about piracy the harder they make it on the people who pay. The pirates always get what they want just as easily any way.
Its like gun control. If you put in gun control in the hopes of lowering crime all your realy doing is stoping the people who would legaly and legitimatly have guns. The criminals can still get guns just as easy, since when have they cared about things being ileagal, and now its even less likely they will get shot when they try to break in somewhere. Meaning they will be more likely to break in somewhere.
So thanks for the way you guys are so open with your license. Jeff
Also, Unity is far more likely to be used on a family member than on a criminal–I have seen this first hand! Two family members have already played my game (one was an accident) but zero criminals have.
I wish you every success, agree with your sentiments and those expressed in your support, and I agree there’s no way to win against sufficiently devious people but … for example … a lot of high end 3D tools (e.g. Maya and Max) will not allow a “pro” license to open files imported from an “educational” license.
j/k