Subscription Licensing using Paypal for Unity3D applications

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1

Anybody interested in having people pay for their Unity3D-based games and tools may find this useful:

http://www.forwardthinking.org.nz/paypal.html

This is in Beta at the moment, and it would be good to test this in semi-real situations. We are already using it with the Virtual Lathe training tool.

The basic functionality is that it allows a user to purchase a period of time of usage for the simulation. We can also allow organisations to bulk-buy licenses in advance and issue tokens so that they can give out licenses to, say, students doing online virtual training, who then can renew them themselves later if they need to. Likewise, special BuyNow buttons can be made for Channel Partners so that any purchase made through their website is tagged with their code and hence they can get part of the revenue generated.

This can easily be added to pretty much any Unity3D code.

2

I ran into a GUI formatting glitch when I switched to a different tab in FireFox, the GUI grew and shifted to the upper left.

I’ve been thinking about how I would set up a Unity webplayer in a subscription based website. What made you decide to do everything within Unity? Are you going to be licensing the subscription code, and if so, how much?

3

I’ll look into that glitch, thanks.

I did it in Unity because I could and it seemed to make sense, however, the same functionality will also soon come to webpages on the license server (using a combination of javascript and PHP), and additional ones too aimed at channel partners so they can see how many licenses they have sold, number of tokens left etc. Also, buy now buttons can be made for channel partners so they can bulk-buy licenses and get a new token sent to them. I’m also looking into using the shopping cart facilities of PayPal.

In terms of licensing, there are two options I am considering:

  1. Do all the licensing on my server and clip the ticket of each that is sold. The advantage of this is that anybody can quickly integrate this into their Unity3D program and they don’t need a license server of their own.
  2. License the PHP code and SQL database structure for others to install on their servers and fit out with their own PayPal accounts. I’m thinking a price in the order of $1500 USD.

In both cases, it will need some more features before I am confident it is ready for general release, but I can already see a development path ahead with new features coming in for later versions.

4

Interesting, I’m sure people will invent many ways of using this in a creative manner.

Regards, Robert

5

Looks interesting, I’ve yet to see something similar.

6

Very interesting, nice work.

7

link is not working M8.

8

That might be because the thread was started in 2010, so 3 years ago.

9

Kind of moving seeing ideas come and die in one thread.