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Unity is really trying desperately to kill their market share through executive greed and incompetence.

I'm an IT manager for a tech/engineering company, and I have to fight one of these flimsy "compliance violation" threats off about once every 18 months or so from any one of a dozen vendors of engineering design software. In one case, a CAD vendor tried to extort us for license fees for software we've never used and nobody internally even knew existed, but which one of our engineers college-age children had on their personal laptop - a laptop that had never connected to any of our company networks... which led to serious questions about how/what data they are collecting ... did they somehow get the home WAN info about our engineer from some third party source? (his home ISP's upstream gateway or something) then saw some other unrelated thing (the student's laptop) using educationally-licensed software with the same LAN settings, and just assumed with no further evidence that our engineer was using it?

Unfortunately, the experience you're having is VERY common out in the engineering/cad software space. I hope Unity clears it up for you quickly.

Surprise surprise, Unity is here to screw over long-time users again. Maybe it wasn't just the CEO that was the problem, but the entire leadership and board of directors.

A few people said after the last unity fiasco, that unity were fixed and that they were going to stop pulling anticonsumer business moves. There's clearly something tremendously wrong going on internally at unity

A lot of companies have developed a form of extreme short term brain rot, where they're absolutely selling out their futures in exchange for 1% more profits tomorrow. It smells a lot like unity has been taken over by folks that literally don't understand that their business model is to make and sell a product that people might use for decades, which requires trust. Its totally escaped them, and it'll destroy the company if they don't ditch the group of people who are making these kinds of stupid decisions

1. An @ rocketwerkz email, for a team member who has Unity Personal and does not work on a Unity project at the studio

2) The personal email address of a Rocketwerkz employee, whom we pay for a Unity Pro License for

3) 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

Okay, let me preface this by saying I DO NOT CONDONE HOW UNITY IS HANDLING THIS AND YOU MAY IN FACT ALREADY BE DOING WHAT I AM ABOUT TO SUGGEST because there are always some who like to paint what I'm about to do as victim blaming, but let me give you (and any unaware readers) some tips for the future because I have seen this type of issue before with licensing with plenty of other software companies:

1. You need to establish and make clear to your employees that work e-mails are not to be used for anything that is not directly work related. I've been in organizations who have had issues with this before, where an employee has purchased a personal license using a company provided e-mail (because they thought it gave them more clout, were hoping for a company related discount, preferred not having to use a personal e-mail, etc), and the software owner thinks the company is trying to circumvent enterprise pricing with personal licenses.

2. Other side of the same coin, employees are not to use personal e-mails for any work related matters. Again, issues with people buying things (licenses, goods, materials) under personal accounts for business use, especially with software which has online license verification ("Why is Bob1932@gmail.com using his license from a Lockheed Martin IP address?"). It's also just good practice because you want to be able to pull records of purchases in case the employee leaves, and you can't archive their personal e-mail.

3. This is why internal auditing and strong offboarding processes are very important. Hopefully you keep a good trail of when licenses are revoked/reclaimed for departed employees/contractors.

I have seen all 3 of these situations end up in a courtroom if the software owner is not readily convinced there is no wrongdoing occurring, and sometimes it turns out there actually was wrongdoing (again, not saying you are).

The other 2 claims of the non-related people, is potentially just Unity straight up smoking crack, but as others have pointed out may be highlighting a hole in your practices and policy where members of another firm were given access to software via your licenses. You may still be legally liable if this is the case even if you or your firm weren't aware of it, because monitoring and protecting the use of the license falling on the licensee is pretty par-for-the-course in most contracts/licenses.

My overall suggestion: Talk to a lawyer, especially one who works in contract/licensing law.

It is very admirable for unity themselves to push everyone towards other game engines and open source with actions like this.

This is wild. Hey Unity rep, I do investigations, not saying you'd hire some random off the Internet :( but you should know it is a skill set that requires training and specific experience, not just leaving it to some high ranking person or lawyer to think through. You need to hire someone (not a consultant - you couldn't think of someone who knew less about the topic if you tried).

Here's some free advice: in this case, you should have sent an email "there's been some unusual login activity on accounts associated with your business. [detail the strange logins] please let us know if any of these were your company by (one month time)."

You can also apologize about your limited resources and the requirement for them to cooperate. If terms they've signed already say whatever you want to say next, you don't have to say it - they signed it already.

Only ever show your cards when you're getting non cooperation. Suppose one of these accounts was actually not paid, so let's say they owed 50k last month instead of 43k (when you account for how many months they hadn't been paying), then you'd explain that and they'd almost certainly pay that extra amount. Even at this stage, you don't have to break out the legal nonsense. Let's say this argument is at best over 7k - if this post is true, with this post alone you just lost maybe $50k in marketing.

Consider if you aren't equipped to deal with this, that $7K is worth eating, and "hey our bad for not noticing, can you pay going forward" would win you brownie points if it ever got out.

Let's be real, that $7k or whatever you're chasing is peanuts to this company. There's a really good chance they grab extra unneeded licenses just to avoid this headache in future - it would help for interns or new hires for instance. They are way more likely to do that if you are kind and facilitating.

Every time you send a legal demand you risk a legal case that could cost in the tens of thousands just to run. If you're leaving this decision to lawyers, you're naive. Their favourite thing is job security. If this is a wide spread issue, instead of chasing up individual matters, why not offer a discount on spare accounts? call them flexi accounts, they cost half as much until used. This would appeal to large companies as having them ready would cost less than delays in setting up new employees. And accounts that are on the wrong tier or have a really messy tier setup (for example, hiring same contractor again and again with gaps in-between) will buy these to simplify their admin and headaches. Can't say if that's a good idea or not - my point is, even when there is non-compliance you can prove, it is often better to simply evolve your business away from the temptation that caused it.

Unity is going to be replaced in the game dev scene because of their nonsense. Hands down the worst game engine purely based on the overarching insanity packaged into a company that owns it.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

Stationeers is one of my favorite niche games and I love what your team has done with it. Seeing Unity bullying smaller studios like this is very disturbing. I and many others wish you the best of luck and greatly appreciate your dedication to making the best possible games that you can, regardless of what anyone else says.

Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars for a product only for them to try and shake you for even more money

Genuine scammer behaviour, if i saw an email stating i owe company money for no reason and or details, I'd chuck it into spam folder 

I'm going to take this as a sign and stop trying to learn Unity and switch to Godot. I already know almost all of the C languages so switching engines wont be too hard coding wise. I'm mostly just trying to make little games for me but I'd like to one day post a game to steam and if Unity is going to continue to be shitty...why sink my time into it? 

I know we all love the Unity hate, but one of your team members is using their company email for personal projects which does seem suspicious. If you don't see how that looks like a breach from Unity's perspective, then the rest of your post becomes iffy for me and there might be more going on here.

Your first three items could be actual, legit violations. I would try to get some more time from Unity to investigate instead of lighting up torches just yet. Call your rep

Hey Dean fellow Kiwi dev here 👋

I got a similar email from Unity, but it was more worded along the lines that my company may be using the incorrect licenses, as I recently switched from Pro back to free with Unity 6.

I sent them my tax financial statements to show proof I wasn't making more than $200k USD per year and they appreciated the transparency and mentioned they weren't sure what 'flagged' my company for this.