I’m a hobbyist, and together with two other hobbyists, I would like to participate in game jams with Unity.
The problem, however, is that I have bought a plus-license a while back, and neither of my partners are interested in dropping the $300 required to get a license themselves.
I’ve tried to return my license while the jam is ongoing (and activate a Personal license in its plan), but when I activate a Personal license, it automatically activates the Plus license instead.
Can I just go ahead with my Plus-license, as it’s not a commercial product we’re developing? What if the game turns out to be an incredible proof-of-concept, and we want to build on it further and sell it? We’d still all be qualified for a Personal license. What are my options?
You should consider buying license, if you start making earning money threshold. That is the main purpose. Plus some few perks. There is no issue, to work with Unity pro on hobby project. As long you don’t earn threshold using Unity.
I don’t think any game jams require Unity-Pro. That would be missing its point.
Just consider your working colleague as contractor, so license won’t be an issue for either party. As long above applies to each party.
Contact support. In theory you supposed to return the license and work your project with Personal if everyone else uses that. Do not touch your project with the Plus license, because that is actually a violation of the license (working with mixed licenses). When I returned my license to test something in Personal it worked after a reboot. Apparently the Hub does some things which does not go away properly. Or something. But definitely should work.
@Antypodish I think this time you missed every point of this thread, none of what you wrote is relevant.
As per Unity - Manual: License troubleshooting there’s a location where the license file lives. If you created a second Unity account for a Personal license, and backed up your existing .luf file, it should be possible to swap between two authorisations, by swapping the license files around.
If you’ve got paid Assets, you’d probably also need to swap between two versions of the Asset Store folder in %AppData%\Unity or ~/Library/Unity (see Unity - Manual: Unity's Asset Store equivalent) to be sure about licensing.
While testing our (Education) licenses for a class setup I was able to swap easily between my own (Personal) license with a bunch of downloaded assets and a work (Pro) license with only UT assets by swapping some files and junctions from a batch script.
So this thread makes me wonder. If I download a project from say GitHub (for example a plug-in, they sometimes come in project form), and the uploader used a different Unity license, am I automatically in violation of the EULA?
Also, if Unity wants us to change licenses appropriately for each project, they should provide an easier way to switch licenses and maybe a warning should pop up if you try to open a project that uses a difference license.
If you own a Plus/Pro license, it’s really annoying to have to switch to Personal for… personal stuff and Jams and other things. There should be an easier way.
Also, even after all these years, I’m unsure what happens with freelancers. Unity has given both answers in the past. If I want to send my project to a freelancer to do something and then he can send it back to me, do we have to do the whole song and dance about matching licenses first? I believe the answer is currently yes, but that makes zero sense and makes working with others much harder than it should (and definitely does not democratize development). If I want to hire someone to do some audio design directly in the project, I should buy them a Pro license as well? Even though they don’t need it?
This is not a theoretical by the way, I was talking to an audio guy, who was willing to place the audio in Unity scenes himself (so he can fine tune how everything sounds together), but was unwilling to pay 1500$ for a Pro license he would only have a use for like a month.
So any freelancer I want to use that might need to use Unity for a few days, I have to pay a 1500$ Unity Tax.
And I guess the mess and vagueness makes it easier to cold call people telling them they violated the EULA and should get more licenses (yes, I’m still bitter about that, it helps that I never got an apology).
Also it’s very often store assets contain personal license instead of the special store license. My project must be flagged all the time as suspicion over at unity
I should just create a new company and move the license to that company and use personal, I don’t care about splash screen, though support is better on plus.
Thanks for your responses. The best way to go right now definitely seems to be a separate personal account.
Although after a restart of my PC, Unity Hub does seem to recognize I’m using a personal plan now. Which is strange, as it still shows up as Plus in the hub, but the Plus features are disabled right now (most regrettably, the dark skin ).
Downgrading licenses is allowed if your team qualifies for the lower lisence. Just send an email to Unity
The real issue is you must upgrade the entire team once you cross over the income threshold. If the team is required to use plus or pro, you can’t have any team members (including remote freelancers) using a lower grade of license.
That’s my issue. If I want to get a freelancer to do a simple thing for me, either I have to do the implementation (wasting my time), or either one of us has to pay a Unity tax.
Yup. As an occasional casual freelancer myself, this does suck. The amount of time I spend on freelancing doesn’t justify the cost of a pro license. Which means in order to comply with the license terms, I need to reject jobs from companies required to use a pro license.
A sort of work around is if you can make the freelancer’s work self contained, so they don’t need to work within the same project but instead are basically creating you an asset. Then they don’t need to be on the same license tier.
Yeah, but that sucks. I’d like to have the audio guy wire up the audio himself, I don’t want to be doing extra work because Unity has a horrible license.
).