this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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I pose you this, I open a book store. I say my terms of service is say, all non racist books are allowed to sit on the shelves. I then later say, "I now own the copywrite and that physical copy of any book placed on my shelves. The new ones, the existing ones, and the future ones." You'd be scrambling to get my books back before I pretend a contract you never agreed to is on effect and illegally steal them.
It's a book store you wouldn't own the copyright that makes no sense. Plus wtf is on with the non racist part at the beginning what has that to do with anything in the rest of the text.
And in any case yeah that would illegal because you don't own the copyright neither those books. You own the book store and the shelves you could decide one day to charge them another fee if they want their book in your store and use your shelves, that would be an equivalent. And yeah any existing ones, and future ones would require the fee, of course, it is your fucking book store, maybe people won't like it and look for s different store to put their books but that's it.
A different thing is if you have a contract with the book store saying x year you will never have a fee. Or similar. Yeah that would be breach of contract and you could do something about it but this is not the case.
Their terms clearly indicate that they can be changed. If people didn't try to or couldn't get another terms/contract that specified otherwise is unfortunate but it is what it is.
Maybe I misunderstood it but I never got the idea this was case , they will not charge for the previous years. Just that to continue to use it you need to pay, and that applied to already released games. It's not exactly the same as you mention
In any case as other comments said the previous terms covered that case so yeah legally they cannot charge them for those already released games if they still use the old unity version, as the terms allowed for somebody that doesn't like the new terms to stay on the older version and the older terms.
But as I pointed out in another comments that generally don't works because sometimes the devs need to update the games for fixes on the engine to support new hardware or stuff like that or simply fix bugs on the engine itself.
It emulates the stuff they put into a TOS.
My original comment was trying to say the recource legally allowed is to be kicked out, however that isnt possable with how unity qants fees and by its nature intertwines with the copywrited work, witch is hard to impossable to un-publish.