Hello,

I have a controversial question about the Unity License.
I'm making a game with a couple of friends in Unity Free.
We we're planning to put it online, and sell it on steam and/ord XboxLive.
I've read that if you don't earn more than 100.000 dollars, it's ok to use Unity Free to make your game and then sell it.


But there's a feature that only Unity Pro offers that we'd like to use, but we don't have 1500 dollars laying around to pay for the license.
If we'd crack Unity Pro and sell the game, and NOT earn more than like 1000 dolars, would Unity notice that it's made with a cracked version?
would we be banned or something? or fined?

I know it's a controversial question, but we're not trying to earn lots of money or something, we just don't have the money to pay for the license.

There's always the possibility they won't find out. But if they do you won't be fined, you'll be sued. That means you have to pay fines as well as pay for court costs. Having something like that on your record could also make it hard to be hired by a software/game company.

Short answer, don't do it. It isn't worth it.

I'd advice you to implement as much as you can using the free version. If you get to a point where you can show your game off you can try getting some funding to finance your license.

Ok thanks a lot for your advice guys!
We don't want to do anything crazy, so thanks for showing us a bit of reality.

In that case I have a question:
Let's say I'm working with three friends on a Unity game, and we need a Pro account.
Would we need to pay the license once, or four times? one per person using unity?
And would starting an official company change that? (we live in The Netherlands, btw)
And let's say someday I start another group, with other people, would we need to repurchase a license, or could we use my license, that I used for this project?

Let's say I'm working with three friends on a Unity game, and we need a Pro account.
Would we need to pay the license once, or four times? one per person using unity?

You would only have to buy it once, but it would be very difficult to manage the project assets without having one license per seat (your time wasted working around not having full license for everybody on any project of appreciable size would probably be a greater loss than the cost of the licenses).

And let's say someday I start another group, with other people, would we need to repurchase a license, or could we use my license, that I used for this project?

You can use the same license(s). Just make sure it's not registered to the team members, but explicitly in your possession (or your company).




_sprite had something to say about it in the other thread which is relevant:

[quote name='_sprite']According to the EULA: (d) A company, educational institution, incorporated entity, or individual may not license both Unity Pro and Unity at the same time.

So I think you're ok as long as you're separate individuals, and only one individual actually uses the pro license (say to put everything together). If you become a company, you'll all need to have the pro license.[/quote]

If you don't want to buy multiple Pro licenses, it's easy to get around by not hiring your peers, but contracting them wherein they use their own respective versions of Unity, and you use Unity Pro.

However, as I mentioned earlier, this would be a serious pain because of the tools Unity Pro provides and Indie lacks, such as the asset server, which you would have to work around if using the indie version.