Resolved Redeeming a Pay to Own perpetual Pro license in 2022 (SOLVED) (Unity delivered!)

So, back in 2016, Unity offered a Pay to Own subscription to the Pro tier.

I subscribed to this an specifically asked if I would be able to get a perpetual pro license if I wanted it.

They said YES, but I had to subscribe for more than 2 years and specifically ask for it when its due. So I subscribed.



It's been more than 5 years and it has come the time for me to ask for my perpetual Pro license, as promised by Unity.

At first, support said there was no such "pay to own" license and that I should just keep paying.

Nice.

After some back and forth, the support team finally agreed that there was indeed a Pay-to-Own tier and that I was entitled to a perpetual Pro license if I so wished, but that I would lose all the benefits of paying each month.

I said alright, I still want my perpetual Pro license.

And now support is ghosting me, acting like my emails don't reach them, just letting the time pass and acting as if I wasn't even speaking to them.

This is how you treat your PRO users Unity?

I have been a loyal Pro user since Unity 3 and I have been paying monthly for more than 5 years now without fail.

I'm still a PRO user. Where is the PRO support Unity?

Can Unity even be trusted ?

 

There is nothing anybody on the forums can do for you, this is a community forum and any replies from unity staff is at their own discretion. While I understand your frustration, This is between you and support as they are the only ones that can help you on this matter.

 

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that subscribed to the pay-to-own offer Unity made back then, but even so, it's definitively in the interest of the community to know how Unity Tech handles their promises in the long run.
This is not between "me" and support, this is about Unity broken promises.

 

Update:
So, contact has been reestablished with support and my request has been now "escalated to the team in charge", which sounds super corporate and all but I still don't have my perpetual license.

 

They will probably stretch as much as they can legally can, so you can change your mind within that dark pattern.

 

I don't know, it seems the support person I got sent to couldn't read my emails or something.
I didn't want to make a big fuss about this but I got really frustrated after 3 weeks of back and forth and maybe overreacted.

We'll find out soon anyway. I'll keep this thread updated for the sake of transparency and for other Pro users who subscribed while the Pay-to-Own offer was proposed and are still subscribed.

It's quite disturbing that ANY reference to the Pay-to-Own perpetual license offering has completely vanished from Unity's website and that I got to use the wayback machine to unearth it and show it to the customer support for them to even acknowledge its existence.

I mean, to be eligible for the Pay-to-Own offer, you had to have subscribed for a MINIMUM of 2 years, but any reference to the Pay-to-Own offer vanished less than a year after its announcement.
All of this was at the time when John Riccitiello joined Unity and was switching the company from a perpetual license model to a subscription / renting scheme.

I guess they changed their mind midway and erased all mentions of the Pay-to-Own offer, but that doesn't change the fact that they did offer it and they must honor it now, at least for those who subscribed in that time frame and are still subscribed.

This is a very big deal for me and I'm not letting it go, but anyway, I might have jumped the gun a little here.

 

It's still referenced here: https://blog.unity.com/community/subscription-why

But as I remember it was sneakily removed even from that blog post 1-2 years later, then restored after backlash.

EDIT: Related https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/89xvxd/unofficial_pay_to_own_no_longer_supported/

 

thanks for the links!

 

Man, that seems super shady. If you're going to end a program like that, ANNOUNCE it.

 

Hm, so on one hand. It's super shady.

On the other hand, its possible that their actual infrastructure no longer supports perpetual license for anything after unity 5. So it might simply not be technically possible to honor the agreement, in which case I have no idea what you can do.

If they technically can't honor the perpetual license, the best you can hope for would be recouping your costs for 5 years of subscription. I did a couple quick searches about filing a lawsuit in small claims court, and it might be possible if you live where they're registered (I think california, but maybe its legally registered in denmark(?)).

My guess is that without legal action, you're probably gonna be out of luck. But maybe there's a shot of getting a refund if you can just raise hell on socials.

 

If that's the case, they have monumentally failed as a license provider.

 

Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess the backend/hub has no support for a version locked perpetual license anymore.

So they'd probably need to build in support for this, which isn't gonna happen for one guy.

 

I know for a fact that other Pro users got to redeem their Pay-to-Own perpetual licenses at least for Unity 2017, so the support is there.

 

I hope you're right, but in the 5 years since 2017 a lot of UT infrastructure has changed.

Either way, they could probably just give you a non version locked perpetual license (just set your renewal date for like 3027).

It'll be interesting to see if you get UT responses in this thread.

 

Boom!

 

I have changed the title of the thread to reflect the current state of events.

 

Also, for future references, here is the post made by Joachim Ante about Pay-to-Own:
Link to the post: https://blog.unity.com/community/subscription-why
(this page was silently removed some years ago but then re-enabled after backlash. It is up as of 5/18/2022)

 

Great news!

After a month of back and forth, support finally delivered and sent me a perpetual Pro license of Unity LTS as per the pay-to-own contract!

I shouldn't be that happy for something that's my right after all, but I was seriously losing hope of this to be solved peacefully.

Let this thread be of help to anyone who wants to redeem a pay-to-own license in the future. Although given that this clause seems to be more and more forgotten, I wouldn't wait much more to redeem it.

 

Wow, that's honestly awesome.

Congrats!

 

By the way, just to clarify how it works: you get a serial number, you activate it using the Unity Hub and then it shows up in your account here: https://id.unity.com/en/serials along with other older Unity 4 or 5 serials.
Then you disable the auto-renewal of your current subscription and let it die.
I have removed all the assigned seats of the subscription just for the peace of mind, but that shouldn't be necessary.

Now I'll have to wait until next month to be completely SURE everything is fine, when the subscription ends.
I'll keep this thread updated.

 

hello atomicjoe, and thanks for these informations.
You said you had to wait one month to be 100% sure it works. So did it work ?
best regards

 

yes, absolutely. I now have a perpetual Unity Pro license.

 

What unity version LTS did u get ? 2017 ?