Recently, I found out we had Unity 4.0 beta licenses. I went to download the beta, which can be found here. I went ahead and installed it and I got a message when I booted up 4.0 beta: “This Pre-release version of unity 4.0 can only be run by 4.x license holders”. The option listed on the box was “Quit Unity”. I thought it was strange that it didn’t even ask me to activate at all. Everytime I booted up Unity 4 it gave me this same error. Well after about a day, the error went away and it asked me to activate. According to Unity’s technical support this is because of the way Unity’s servers synchronize for licensing. Apparently their servers update early every morning, which is why I couldn’t activate until the following day. Well I made a mistake when I activated because I accidentally chose to use a free license instead of using the license key I had for the beta. So my machine activated as a free version which caused Unity to continue giving me the above-mentioned error. I couldn’t figure out how to get passed this so I got in touch with Unity support and they showed me how to reset your licensing locally on your machine.

Here’s a solution for those of you out there who may be having Unity licensing issues and you want to re-activate your software:
1. Uninstall all versions of Unity (note that it’s probably a good idea to backup your important projects just in case)
2. Delete the directory (these are hidden folders):
* WinXP/Vista: C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Pace Anti-Piracy/License Files
* Win7: C:/ProgramData/PACE Anti-Piracy/License Files
3. Run the unity installer.
4. Wait for Unity’s servers to synchronize, this usually happens in the early hours of the morning (GMT).

This fix worked well for me. It asked me to activate right away when I opened Unity. After activating it kept giving me the error but when I booted up Unity the next day, it worked. So it’s simply a matter of deleting the above-mentioned files and then just waiting for a day while their server’s synchronize.

I hope this information is useful. I know I looked all around the internet for a way to reset the licensing on my machine to no avail. Feel free to share this post to those in need!

Author: Mark Philipp