I don't really understand the unity license

I remember reading somewhere something about 100k limit but I don't even plan to sell my games.

What are the limitations of the Unity Personal version?

All my games are free and my company does not produce video games, I just make them because I think it's fun, they get a fair amount of downloads but they are free games. Have I surpassed some kind of limit? Is there a limit on how many downloads you can have, or just sales? I have never made money on my games before, but other people who I am not affiliated with have made money via my games by filming videos of themselves playing my games and putting ads on their youtube videos.

Are there any other limitations besides that one? How does Unity even confirm how much money a game makes? Do they stalk you? I don't get it.

tl;dr - I just want to make free games because it's fun but I am using Unity Personal edition I think (whatever the free one is called), is Unity going to prevent me from doing this or stop me for some reason, under any circumstances?

I've only made one unity game but it got a lot of downloads (although it was free - so it made 0 dollars) so I just want to get this squared away before I make a second unity game. Thanks.

 

Is Unity registered under your company?

 

If you do not promote your games through your company, you should be fine. If you do for example advertise them on the company website, it could be quite a valid claim that you did develop the game in the name of your company because one could assume the company profits from the game's existence.
If you were the youtuber yourself (and with a revenue > 100k) that would make quite an interesting case. One could still claim you made the game for it and you'd have a hard time proving the opposite.

Occasionally Unity has been proactive, but we only hear of that when it goes wrong, like one case I remember where they revoked the private license of a user because the domain of their mail address of the license was very similar to the name of an actual dev studio.
In the end the issue got resolved without a court etc.

They likely have a person or two who scrams the internet to check on devs. A game that made one reach 100k most likely got quite some public attention. Without the pro license you cannot hide the Unity loading screen after all, so it's never a secret whether such a game is made with Unity. And in fact that kinda shows that the game is indeed made without a pro license, because most larger studios do replace it with something that fits the games theme with the Unity logo in the corner, if at all.
Of course they do not "stalk" all users in particular.

 

https://store.unity.com/products/unity-personal

Btw. Unity can evaluate software distribution by collecting analytics.

 

Thanks for all the replies.

My job has nothing to do with video games at all, and I don't associate my video games with my job in any way, and I don't make any money from my video games, nor do I or anybody else make any money from anything that I associate with my video games.

The only people who would in theory make money from it are YouTubers or Twitch Streamers if it gets popular. And I have no control over that though. Or in theory maybe some people might even try to scam people and resell the executable themselves as if they made the game, if it becomes popular lol, but I can't control that either.

I'll consider all this and look for the license again to review it. Making video games is just a hobby to me and it already takes effort to make the games, so if I had to put additional resources into it beyond what I already do, then I feel like it wouldn't be worth it so hopefully Unity company is fine with people making games as a hobby.

 

What Youtubers? If PewDiePie randomly plays your game on live-stream and makes $100,000+, that has nothing to do with you and has no bearing on your licensing terms

If you're only using Unity at home for your own personal use and your income is less than $100,000 then there's no question that you could use the free version.

 

It's simple:
- if you're an individual using Unity (you don't bring your Unity to work and all), then you need to have at least $100k income in the past 12 months from work using Unity(!) in order to have to buy a Plus license. If you reach $200k, this changes to Pro license.
- if a company is the beneficiary of your work, it changes that if you have $100k income into the company from any sources, even if it has nothing to do with Unity, then you need to buy Plus license. If the company has more than $200k income from any sources, you need to buy a Pro license.
Other people making money on your product doesn't matter.

 

Your income from a regular job etc. luckily has nothing to do with this. Otherwise many well paid software devs in other industries couldn't use Unity for a hobby.

 

They send you threatening e-mails then see how you reply.

Unity gathers a bunch of data when you use Unity (and depending on how you set up the game, also a bunch of data from the users playing your games) and they often draw wrong conclusions from that.

Not sure how it escalates past e-mail. Typically in the terms it is stated they can ask for an audit, but skimming the current ones I don't see anything related.