By Nelson Schneider - 10/25/25 at 05:27 PM CT
Back in 2023, we watched the company behind the Unity Engine – one of the two most popular canned solutions for creating games without having to re-write a bunch of low-level code, alongside Epic Games’ Unreal Engine – attempt to commit non-ritual suicide by changing its licensing paradigm to something so greedy that it was completely at odds with the type of Indie and first-timer games that typically use Unity as a jumping-off point. Unity backpedaled and reneged faster than we’ve seen most other corporations do when they try to implement a stupid idea and receive huge amounts of backlash instead of praise, and it seemed like everything was going to go back to “normal,” whatever that means in the modern Industrial Gaming ecosystem.
Of course, nothing can ever just be “normal” or “nice” or “not on fire” anymore, and it recently came to light that the Unity Engine is at the center of a security nightmare, as a vulnerability was introduced in the 2017 version of Unity, and has been there ever since.
Some developers of active, popular games have already rolled out patches for the issue. However, Steam is cluttered with hundreds, or even thousands, of mostly-abandoned Indie projects that are probably not going to be patched by their wayward creators, and can’t be patched by Unity. Some of these games are being forcibly de-listed from storefronts, while the storefronts themselves have implemented scans for this Unity vulnerability that warns users if a given Unity game is affected. Still other Unity games are Live Service slugde and can’t actually implement the fix for this vulnerability without re-doing a significant amount of their codebase, since these games are not only infected with an arbitrary local code hack, but terrible kernel-level DRM that will stop the game from working if the binary files don’t look exactly like the snapshot the DRM is set to enforce.
In sum, Unity and their engine have become commercial-grade malware that has the potential to destroy an entire generation of Indie games and abandonware, making preservation of and access to compromised games a dubious proposition. With online storefronts overreacting and de-listing these games, the problem will only grow worse as people who want these de-listed games will now have to search around for unauthorized copies that will almost certainly be compromised. Let’s hope that Unity can come up with a better solution – perhaps one involving a sandboxing wrapper for ALL Unity games to run in, regardless of version – than just “take it all down!”
