My Pro/ Industry/ Enterprise license shows duplicate activations on the same machine after command line activation

Symptoms:

• Running Unity with -serial <s> -username <u> -password <p> results in two activations on the same PC.

• Observing two activations in Unity Dashboard: one of type Serial and the other of type Entitlement.

• My Unity Hub displays two licenses activated.

Cause:

Unity’s Industry, Enterprise, and Pro plans now use a new licensing system called named-user licenses (NUL), which eliminates the need for serial keys. For more details, see our Knowledge base article: How do I activate or return my Unity Industry/ Enterprise/ Pro license?

As your plan supports NUL, the command triggers both the older serial activation and the new entitlement activation methods (NUL) simultaneously:

• The -username and -password arguments log you in, using the new Entitlement activation.
• The -serial argument uses the older Serial activation method.

Resolution:

Since your license is tied to your account, you no longer need to include the serial key in your command line. Here’s how:

1. Return all activations from your account to start fresh. See our article How do I return the activations on my Pro/ Plus/ Enterprise license?
2. Delete the Unity_lic.ulf on your machine to prevent the old license file from causing issues.
   Files are located at: Windows C:\ProgramData\Unity\ , or Mac: Library\Application Support\Unity

3. Simplify your command line to exclude the serial key argument:
   … -serial -username 'name@example.com' -password 'XXXXXXXXXXXXX'

More information:

For more detailed instructions, refer to Unity's documentation on managing your Unity license: Unity License Management Documentation.