this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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(DayZ creator) Dean Hall: Unity is threatening to revoke licenses with flawed data that appears to be scraped from personal data (www.reddit.com)
submitted 3 days ago by Jeffool@lemmy.world to c/gamedev@programming.dev
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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.

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[–] RedSnt@feddit.dk 20 points 3 days ago

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.