Comment by wodenokoto
2 years ago
Well, it depends on how you think of the license. Is it like you buy a license for a specific release or do you subscribe to a license to the software across all releases?
I don’t know. I can see how it would be ridiculous if Amazon said “oh, by the way, starting next year you have to pay a cent every time you finish any of the books you bought on your kindle”
But if Netflix went “starting next year, there’s a surcharge of 1 cent per episode you watch” nobody would go “surely it can only count for episodes released from next year!
Which raises an interesting question to me: what if a developer wants out of the Unity contract? Does that mean they have to somehow break games consumers already purchased so as not to be liable to install fees?
Reminder that Amazon did something like that once: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/techn...
I think whether something can only run on the company's service is the differentiating factor. So if Unity games all required to be played on unity3d.com or if they all required online communication with unity3d servers to function at all then people would accept that the contract for finished games could change anytime.