As far as I can tell, the document they are pointing you to isn’t the only one that applies, this one does too.
That one still says “Unity may add or change fees, rates and charges for any of the Offerings from time to time by notifying you of such changes and/or posting such changes to the Offering Identification, which may include changes posted to the Site.”
Until that’s gone, I don’t see what stops them from invoking that clause to change the rates (who want’s to pay 100% of gross?) or add novel new charges.
Ultimately, they need to get this down to a SINGLE license document that says exactly what you are agreeing to. Until they do, it’s going to be (by design) ambiguous.
I wouldn’t use Unity until the company remove the Always Online requirement with three-day grace and their proprietary tracking technology. I won’t make games that have a phone-home tech.
And how do we know the TOS won’t change in the future?
Is that a thing?
Half of this debate of the original anouncement came from people doubting Unity’s ability to track number of installs reliably because there is NO call home code in the games.
The doubt is there because we weren’t talking about “installs”, we were talking about “legitimate installs”. And Unity themselves said they don’t want tracker. But they have proprietary technology which tells it anyway.
But this disappeared at some point and it is unclear if a build phones home or not. You need to test it. Also the minute you enable any service with Unity, all bets are off and Unity will store analytic information about the game and player and hardware and whatnot. I’m fairly sure.
Unity said they use their proprietary data model to count the number of installs, so there must be phone-home tech in Unity games.
As for the grace period for the Always Online requirement, it would be better to remove it. Otherwise we won’t be able to open the projects if we can’t get connected to Unity server.
So what happened when Unity suddenly increase Pro license fee, or increase % revenue share? Do I need to pay more or still at the old fee if I keep using older version?
Is a risk for medium size projects, if this happens some day you can make a rollback to a older Unity version that is not difficult or migrate to other engine, with this crisis we discover many good alternatives to Unity, really we as users cant make much for the Unity decisions, as a private company (legally is a public company but in practice they work as a private company, a directive board take the decisions, not the stock holders) they only think in generate money without matters users, this complete mess can be resume in that Unity wants get money from free to play games and will be not change this road.
Exactly the opposite is the case. If they had a call-home system, there’d be no need for a data model. It would be just counting…
Also this is something people would see immediately thanks to Windows firewall.
Edit:
Right, I was also suspect of that number, having had 30 days in mind as well.
No… in order to model the data model you need one stream of representative data that can then be extrapolated (modelled) onto the whole.
So at least one of the platforms must permit Unity to gather some information about installations, and continue to do so, whilst at some other point in time they must have had some insights into the installs relative to that data stream from all other platforms.
What we can be reasonably sure of is that they’re not going to be getting that data stream from Apple’s stores and installs due to the rather more stringent terms and monitoring of and by Apple.
The issue is this: are they going to tell us where they’re getting their representative data from that they then extrapolate and/or model from?
Again, this is just theater. The TOS is there so Unity can bully you, it can’t really protect us and this isn’t any different from what they removed before and then tried to hide without a second thought.
Your license found at this link has a major flaw big as a house.
defines Unity Software as being a “Tool” which means under the copyright law that the ownership of the Output created with this tool belongs to the person or company that used the tool to create that Output.
So the copyright on a Game is owned by those that have created the game.
It is clear till this point?
Ok
then same license defines Unity Runtime as being part of Unity Software, so Unity Runtime is a Tool by your definition.
Because of this you can’t claim part of the revenue of the game because you don’t have any claim on the copyright of the game. You don’t own the game as a whole or in part.
So your runtime fee is not enforceable.
Which explains the
Self Reporting part.
You can’t legally claim money from a game developer but if they give you the money because they chose to do so, well, no one will say no to free money, I’m I right or I’m right?
Well, I would think that they would have to if you challenged the figures that their data shows.
If for instance unity provided me with data that shows install counts for a game and I say prove that data, will they supply proof and how they collected it?
Oh, so it was right there all along, thanks.
I’m not strong in Legalese, but I start to think more and more that they literally can’t provide us with an assurance that they will not change the terms again, stealthily, unless they use some popular enforcable license like MIT’s, which they will never use. So we just need to trust them, which became pretty difficult lately.
Wonder if Unreal Engine’s (I know how moderators love to see us talk about it or Godot) EULA could be refracted with such ease as well, should Epic Games consider to do so.
