If I released a game in 2015 and forgot all about it and some popular streamer in 2025 plays it and it gets millions of installs all of a sudden, I’m now liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a game I may not even have the code and assets for anymore?
This part I think has a hard answer: no. Unity’s terms of service are a kind of contract, and you can’t go back and retroactively change a contract on somebody without them agreeing to the changes (and even then, what can be changed and under what circumstances is limited by law). At most Unity can say “these are the terms for Unity engine version x.y.z and onward”, while leaving the old terms intact for older versions of the engine, since updating to the newer engine could be argued to be a form of agreeing to a new contract (though that’s probably a grey area too).
Right, I get that that’s what Unity wants to do, but they’ve also said that they’re exempting small projects and going after bigger ones, which means that if they actually try to enforce this against an actual studio they’ll get a legal challenge that will be pretty black and white against them.
and you’ve agreed to all future permutations of it the second you release something using Unity
WOTC tried to do basically this exact thing by updating the OGL despite everyone already having been using it for years, and they ended up backing down and saying that their terrible update would only apply to new products.
The old contract applied to the unity engine, the new one applies to the unity runtime, it’ll apply to older projects too because they think they’ve found a loophole.
This part I think has a hard answer: no. Unity’s terms of service are a kind of contract, and you can’t go back and retroactively change a contract on somebody without them agreeing to the changes (and even then, what can be changed and under what circumstances is limited by law). At most Unity can say “these are the terms for Unity engine version x.y.z and onward”, while leaving the old terms intact for older versions of the engine, since updating to the newer engine could be argued to be a form of agreeing to a new contract (though that’s probably a grey area too).
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Right, I get that that’s what Unity wants to do, but they’ve also said that they’re exempting small projects and going after bigger ones, which means that if they actually try to enforce this against an actual studio they’ll get a legal challenge that will be pretty black and white against them.
WOTC tried to do basically this exact thing by updating the OGL despite everyone already having been using it for years, and they ended up backing down and saying that their terrible update would only apply to new products.
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The old contract applied to the unity engine, the new one applies to the unity runtime, it’ll apply to older projects too because they think they’ve found a loophole.