Game engine company Unity is threatening to pull the licenses for RocketWerkz, the studio founded by DayZ developer Deal Hall, for reasons Hall told me are unfounded.
Hall first posted about this situation to the Reddit game development community r/gamedev on Friday, where he said “Unity is currently sending emails threatening longtime developers with disabling their access completely over bogus data about private versus public licenses.”
According to the initial email from Unity, which was provided to me by Hall, Unity claimed that RocketWerkz is “mixing” Unity license types and demanded that the studio “take immediate action” to fix this or Unity reserves the right to revoke the developer’s access to existing licenses on May 16. Essentially, Unity is accusing RocketWerkz of using free “Personal” licenses to work on commercial products that Unity says require paid “Pro” licenses. Hall says this is not true. If the company’s licenses are revoked, RocketWerkz will not be able to keep updating and maintain Stationers, a game it released in 2017, and continue development on its upcoming project Torpedia.
Hall told me that one of his concerns is not just that Unity is threatening to pull its licenses, but that it’s not clear how it collected and used the data to make that decision.
“How is Unity gathering data to decide whether a company ‘has enough’ pro licenses?” he told me in an email. “It appears to me, they are scraping a lot of personal data and drawing disturbing conclusions from this data. Is this data scraping meeting GDPR requirements?”
Unity has a variety of plans developers can use, ranging from a free “Personal” version and an up to $4,950 a year “Industry” version. The more expensive plans come with more features and support. More importantly, games with revenue or funding greater than $200,000 in a 12-month period have to at least pay for a Unity Pro license, which costs $2,200 a year per license. Unity infamously outraged the games industry when it tried to add additional fees to this pricing scheme in 2023, a strategy that was so disastrous for the company it reversed course and dumped its CEO.
According to Hall’s Reddit post, RocketWerkz pays for multiple licenses which it has spent about $300,000 on since the company was founded in 2014. He also shared an invoice with me showing the company paid $36,420 for 18 Unity Pro Licenses in December of 2024, which are good until December of 2025. Game developers need to buy a license for each of their employees, or one license per “seat” or person who will be using it. Paying for monthly or annual access to software, instead of buying, owning, and using software however you like, is increasingly common. Even very popular consumer software like Adobe and Microsoft Office have shifted to this model in recent years.
According to an email Unity sent to RocketWerkz after it asked for clarification, which I have viewed, Unity claims that there are five people at the studio who are using Personal licenses who should be using Pro licenses. Unity lists their emails, which show two @Rocketwerkz.com emails and three emails with domain names obscured by Unity.
Hall says that of those people, one is a RocketWerkz employee who has a Personal Unity account but does not work on a Unity project at the studio and one is a RocketWerkz employee who the company currently pays for a Pro license for. Another email belongs to a contractor who did some work for RocketWerkz in 2024, and who the company paid for their Pro license at the time, and the other two belong to two employees at different companies, which like RocketWerkz are also based in New Zealand. These two employees never worked at RocketWerkz. One works at Weta workshop, the visual effects company that worked on Lord of the Rings. Hall also shared an image of the Unity dashboard showing it’s currently paying for Pro licenses for the employees Unity says are using Personal licenses.
“There is a lot of unknowns here, and I don't have much to go on yet—but I do wonder if there are serious data violations going on with Unity—and they appear to be threatening to use this data to close down developer accounts,” Hall told me. “How will this affect users who don't have the clout I do?”
Essentially, it’s not clear how Unity, which can see what RocketWerkz is paying it, what for, and who is using those licenses, is determining that the studio doesn’t have enough licenses. Especially since Unity claims RocketWerkz should be paying for licenses for people who never worked at the studio and are seemingly not connected to it other than being located in the same country.
Unity did not respond to a request for comment.
On Reddit, Hall said that on one hand he feels “vindicated” that Unity’s recent strategies, which have been hostile to game developers, lead to bad business outcomes, but that many small developers rely on it and that will be bad for them also.
“They will take with them so many small studios. They are the ones that will pay the price. So many small developers, amazing teams, creating games just because they love making games,” Hall said. “One day, after some private equity picks up Unity's rotting carcass, these developers will to login to the Unity launcher but won't be able to without going through some crazy hoops or paying a lot more.”
