Question regarding revenue restrictions for Commercial Entities vs Sole Proprietors

Hi Unity / everyone,

I noticed when reading the legal eula that the revenue restrictions differ slightly between Commercial Entities and Sole Proprietors - in particular, Commercial Entities are restricted by their overall revenue, whereas Sole Proprietors are restricted by the revenue specifically generated from the use of the Unity game engine.

Is this by design? I work for a large engineering consultancy which makes well in excess of the current restriction, however our actual Unity usage within the company is quite small and will easily fall into the new restrictions of the Plus license (200k).

Is there any plan to review this and possibly amend the Commercial Entity restrictions to fall in line with the Sole Proprietors? Companies these days can be quite diverse and it seems odd to place a revenue restriction on them for services that have absolutely nothing to do with Unity.

Thanks

 

Your private usage at home comes under the sole proprietorship license when it is for your sole proprietorship and not to the benefit of the large engineering consultancy or their clients and the Unity usage at the large engineering consultancy comes under the commercial entities restrictions no matter how few dollars that large engineering consultancy makes from Unity. Otherwise, a multi-billon dollar business like Boeing that just decided to start using Unity could say, 'Hey, we're not making any money from Unity. That's means we can use the Free or Plus versions.', and that is clearly violating the terms of the EULA.

 

Doubt it, since you are using it in a professional capacity. You should contact sales directly to get more details.

 

I expect so, otherwise it would be really easy for your large company to say "well, we don't directly make money from Unity, so we don't have to pay for it".

It doesn't seem odd to me at all. If they're using Unity then it's because it adds value to what they do, whether or not they charge for it directly.

I expect that the wording for personal use is there so that unfunded startups don't have to start paying Unity when their members get part time jobs to pay their bills and buy food while they're building their games. That concern doesn't apply to large, established companies.

 

Thanks for the replies everyone, and I should clarify that we already hold quite a few Pro licenses - just evaluating our options with the new pricing scheme. Staying on Pro it is!

 

This is by design.

Under the old 4.x license all income was counted towards the limit, regardless of its source. This meant that hobbyists with high incomes from day jobs were required to buy pro licenses, even if they barely touched the editor.

Including the individual clause in 5.x was basically to allow for hobbyists to use the personal version regardless of their day job.