Asking here since Unity Support has been ignoring my emails. Mainly looking for input from other Unity 4 Pro licensees, but obviously any constructive suggestions or input is welcome.
Is there, or was there, some kind of upgrade path - even a reduction of the $125/mo. Unity 5 Pro subscription path - for existing Unity 4.x Pro licensees?
Unity 2.x > 3.x > 4.x was always a 50% discount to upgrade. And this made sense considering 3rd-party code packages get updated with new versions of the engine, and thus become incompatible with previous versions of Unity.
Essentially, my Unity 4.x Pro license is now useless, since I invested a lot in code/scripting assets that have since been updated to Unity 5.
All I’m seeing now is a 3-month trial offer for Unity 5 Pro which expires in a few days (March 31, 2017), but you can’t publish games with the trial. I’d have to fork out another $1500 to do so. Moreover, to own Unity 5 Pro you have to pay for 2 years of subscriptions, at at total of $3000.
The sad part is all I want is to remove the Unity splash screen, and use the Dark Skin theme again. Maybe they should offer a Personal+ sub model for that.
Anyway, have a sinking feeling I already know the answer, but hopefully someone out there in the same shoes was able to work something out with Unity.
Hopefully someone out there was in a similar situation, as I’d love to hear your experience. And thank you for reading. I still love Unity, been feeling burned.
Was planning to email them next week. I totally forgot about the middle option “Plus,” but it’s the principal of being a Pro owner. If there’s a discounted upgrade path for being a 4.x Pro licensee, I’d prefer to go that route. Thanks for the reply, @AcidArrow .
Also, if a moderator can, please delete this thread. I was frustrated, and just need to persist in reaching sales to see what options are available. Sorry for the useless thread.
The only problem I’m still having with this, is that they provide no way to deactivate and reactivate your license. I hope they fix this soon… People who have had HDD crashes, or upgrades or anything that caused them to have to have a re-activation have been hosed. The only way to do it is to email support and wait days for a response (in some cases people have had to send more than one email).
It’s a fine concept and I uses subscriptions for other things (Allegorithmic, Resharper, etc), but right now it’s a very poorly managed system and the responsiveness of the only viable support channel (email) isn’t very good.
Additionally, when you start your subscription, evidently they remove your previous perpetual license key for a period of 3 months for some bizarre reason, so you can’t even go back to it if you can’t activate. For that very reason I’ll be sticking with my current 5.x perpetual and not subscribing for 2017 until they come up with a better support / reactivation system.
Yep had this issue myself when putting a new boot HD in my workstation. Manually emailing the company asking for them to manually deactivate and reactivate my license. A bit odd today, considering Unity is no longer a scrappy little company. They are a huge company at this point. Same as my gripe about them still hand processing asset store payments and being inconsistent on the deposit dates.
Ha ha. Yeah they helped me pretty quickly. Luckily in my own situation I don’t do this HD replacement often (thank god), so it’s not a huge issue for me. I can see how it could be for people running small studios with lots of machines.
The licenses (at least, perpetuals) can be deactivated on all stations via your Unity Profile. It’s instant, so if you disabled them all you can immediately plug in the serial on the new station and it works fine.
I’ve done this a lot, as I change hardware frequently, and don’t really have any problems with it. The old way of doing it was maxing out the installations and then having to email support. License issues were prioritized, but it was still super annoying and a breaking issue back when pro-only features were a thing.
That no longer works for subscription licenses. You have to email support and they have to deactivate for you.
That’s not the only route though. I install my license on both my desktop and laptop. Every so often, Windows 10 does a big update and for some reason I then have to re-activate Unity as it thinks it’s no longer activated, and upon reactivating it tells me all of my activations have been used so I have to go to the portal and return them. As this is no longer an option for subscription licenses, I won’t move to subscription.
Just today I received an email from info@unity telling me that my Pro services will be reduced as of March 31st. I replied to support@unity and told them that I cannot and will not upgrade to the subscription for the very reasons above until they make it possible to return the activations from the online portal because the only support channel of emailing support is too inefficient and slow. If you have to wait even 24 hours, it’s too long imho.
I had the Unity 4 Pro license, I got a reduced cost Unity 5 Pro license when it came out, which I still have, but I got a Unity Plus subscription because it covers all platforms (buying android/ios separately was a bit ridiculous).
You should not be buying a Unity 5 forever license today (I don’t even think they are selling these anymore). If you were going to, you should have done it a couple years ago, as Unity 5’s last major release 5.6 is any day now. I’m sure they will only offer subscription licensing for Unity 2017.
March 31st is the date that was in their last email to me, though f1 is available to download.
Yep but some are already on 5.x subscription and that doesn’t solve any of the above mentioned issues, which is why I wouldn’t recommend subscribing to 2017 if you think you’ll be in a situation where you won’t be able to wait 2 to 5 days for support to respond and reactivate your license.
I just didn’t want to name drop and draw attention to any individuals.