cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29456639
Hall made a post on reddit’s r/gamedev yesterday giving an outline of how he believes they came down to the amount they wanted to charge him, which includes:
Then there are five listed items they supplies as evidence:
An @ rocketwerkz email, for a team member who has Unity Personal and does not work on a Unity project at the studio
The personal email address of a Rocketwerkz employee, whom we pay for a Unity Pro License for
An @ rocketwerkz email, for an external contractor who was provided one of our Unity Pro Licenses for a period in 2024 to do some work at the time
An obscured email domain, but the name of which is an employee at a company in Dunedin (New Zealand, where we are based) who has never worked for us
An obscured email domain, another employee at the same company above, but who never worked for us.
thank
godfoss devs for godotHeh, this will trigger another migration to Godot, and more funding as well. Keep it up Unity, you are paving the way.
I believe this is a chilling look into the future of Unity Technologies as a company and a product we develop on. Unity are threatening to revoke our access to continue development, and feel emboldened to do so casually and without evidence. Then when pressed for evidence, they have produced something that would be laughable - except that they somehow gathered various names that call into question how they gather and scrape data. This methodology is completely flawed, and then being applied dangerously - with short-timeframe threats to revoke all license access.
I do feel bad for game devs if they were taught how to use unity or were stuck in development around September 12, 2023, too far into development to simply pivot to godot when they had that licensing “restructure”. But the amount of enshittification that would follow seemed quite obvious.
I’m not a game Dev but our platforms I work with have corporate and learning editions. I have my work email registered with our enterprise install and my personal email for the learning. They could potentially cross reference and find me using both.
In this instance though a smaller game Dev would do a lot of BYOD and I think this comes down to business processes to make sure staff do not register using work emails unless it is directly for work purposes.
Unity also should be flagging it to them and terminating the personal accounts imho. But that being said how does Unity expect developers to upskill in their tooling in their personal time if they won’t let them practice. You can’t expect a company to pay for a pro license for someone not employed to work on that stack.
They only have 7 days to fix the licensing or their licenses are revoked? Is Unity that hard up for cash?
The first 3 examples seem like a mistake that an employee at this guy’s company may have made while working on a project, such as opening a pro licensed project with a personal account or vice versa. For example, he says Unity provided the personal email of an employee he pays a Pro License Fee for, but he does not say whether the employee opened the project with his company account or his personal account. The license isnt connected to the person, it is attached to the email, so using the wrong email address by mistake (or on purpose) would cause this.
The last 2 examples seem like a mistake with how the company set up their Unity account (apparently this company used to be located at the same building/address that the unrelated company is now located at) and should be easily fixable.
I get that people love to hate on Unity, especially on Lemmy, but I am pretty skeptical on this.
Agreed in the first one.
But the second one has nothing to to with their company
It’s completely on unity to go “the billing addresses match, must be the same company”. That’s not how you identify if an account belongs to a company