Does Unreal Engine allow NSFW games? Unity, Unreal and the licence terms

Unreal Engine allows adult games. Its licence has no rule against sexual content, and it says in plain terms that as long as you stay within the agreement and the law, you can use the engine however you want to make products. Unity is the more complicated case. Its terms briefly banned “sexually explicit images” in the use of its services, then dropped the words. Neither engine’s licence is now the real obstacle for an adult game. The services and stores attached to them are.

This page sets out what each licence says, what changed in Unity’s terms between December 2024 and August 2025, which Unity services do ban sexual content, how the Epic Games Store differs from the Unreal licence, and what that means in practice. It describes the terms as they stood on 18 October 2026. It is not legal advice.

Key points

• Unreal’s licence has no content rule. You must comply with the agreement and the law.
• Unreal’s royalty is 5%. It applies above the first $1,000,000 of lifetime gross revenue per product.
• Unity’s December 2024 terms named sexually explicit images. The ban covered use of Unity’s offerings.
• Unity’s terms dropped the phrase in 2025. The version dated 13 August 2025 does not contain it.
• Unity’s ads and payments services ban sexual content. That is a separate policy.
• The Epic Games Store does not take explicit games. That is a store rule, not an engine rule.
• Trademark use needs care. Both companies protect their marks.

What the Unreal Engine licence says

The Unreal Engine End User License Agreement is written in unusually plain language. Section 2, on how you can use the engine, grants a licence to use, reproduce, display, perform and modify it, and then explains what that means:

“as long as you are not violating this Agreement (such as by exceeding the Seat limitation stated in Section 6(a)) or applicable law, you can privately use the Licensed Technology however you want, including to develop Products.”

The rest of the agreement deals with payment, distribution, open source licences, trademarks and the like. We read the restrictions in Section 6 and found none about the content of what you make. The limits that matter for an adult game come from elsewhere: the law where it is sold, and the rules of the store that sells it.

What you pay

For games, the EULA works on royalties. Section 3 sets the standard rate: “The Royalty Rate is equal to 5% of all Royalty Revenue”. The first $1,000,000 in lifetime gross revenue for each product is excluded, so most small studios never pay anything. Developers making less than $1,000,000 a year are also exempt from Epic’s seat subscriptions.

Trademarks

The one clause adult developers should read closely is on trademarks. The EULA grants no licence to use Epic’s marks beyond the attribution it requires, and says: “You agree not to engage in any activity that could tarnish, dilute, or affect the validity or enforceability of the Epic Trademarks”. An Unreal logo on the splash screen of an explicit game is the kind of use that could be argued to fall under it. Many adult developers leave engine logos off altogether.

What Unity’s terms say now

Unity’s Terms of Service were last updated on 30 June 2026. Section 17.2 lists things users must not do, and begins: “Except as expressly authorized by these Terms (including any Commercial Terms or Additional Terms), Policies, Documentation” or as Unity permits in writing.

Item (w) is the content restriction. It says users must not “Access, store, distribute, introduce, or transmit any material during the course of its use of the Offerings” which is, among other things, “harmful”, “obscene” or “otherwise illegal”.

Two words decide how far that reaches.

“Offerings.” The terms define Offerings as “Software, Online Services and Entitlements provided by or for Unity”. That covers the editor and runtime, but also Unity’s cloud services, hosting, asset store and the like. The restriction applies “during the course of its use of the Offerings”.

“Obscene.” In law, obscene is a narrower category than sexually explicit. Most adult games sold on Steam or DLsite are lawful in most countries and are not obscene in the legal sense. On the current text, the general restriction is aimed at unlawful material, not at adult content as such.

What changed in Unity’s terms

The question “does Unity allow adult games” became common in 2025 because the wording was briefly different.

We compared archived copies of Unity’s terms. The version dated 4 December 2024, still in force in July 2025, gave the same list in item (w), with one extra entry. Between “facilitates illegal activity” and “promotes unlawful violence”, it said the material must not be something that “depicts sexually explicit images”.

That is a much wider category than obscenity. On 27 February 2025 a user opened a thread on Unity’s own forum, Unity does not allow adult/nsfw games?, quoting it. The discussion that followed reached no official answer; no Unity staff reply appears in it. Most commenters read the clause as applying to Unity’s online services, its forum and its asset store, not to games built in the editor and distributed elsewhere. One commenter found that the 2022 terms had no such wording.

The version dated 13 August 2025 no longer contains the phrase. Item (w) reads as it does today, with “obscene” and “otherwise illegal” but without “sexually explicit images”. We found no announcement from Unity explaining the change, and the current version, dated 30 June 2026, does not mention it.

So the honest summary is this:

The Unity services that do ban sexual content

The general terms are not the end of it. Unity’s Advertising and Monetization Services Content Policy, last updated on 30 June 2026, covers Unity’s ad network, its in-app purchase service and its webshop terms.

That policy is direct. Its prohibited content includes “Content which contains or depicts graphic sexual acts or sexually suggestive content intended to arouse”. Since the June 2026 update it also states that “synthetic, manipulated, or AI-generated sexual content is prohibited”.

In practice that means:

• Unity Ads: an adult game cannot use Unity’s ad network.
• Unity IAP and webshop: an adult game cannot sell through Unity’s monetisation services.
• The engine itself: not covered by this policy.

An adult game built in Unity therefore needs its own payment and distribution arrangements, through a store such as Steam, DLsite or itch.io.

The Epic Games Store is a separate question

Unreal and the Epic Games Store are both Epic products, and people often assume the store’s rules apply to the engine. They do not.

The store has its own content guidelines, updated on 12 September 2024. They rule out explicit adult material outright and treat non-explicit sexual content and nudity as mature material that can appear but is kept from general audiences. When Epic opened the store to self-publishing in 2023, its chief executive Tim Sweeney told Axios that the exclusion of explicit games was a choice about the store, not a judgment on lawful adult content.

In 2026, according to Gigazine, Epic removed the horror game HORSES from its store after assigning it an Adults Only rating through the IARC questionnaire, and said that AO-rated products cannot be distributed there. For what that rating means, see the AO rating explained.

So an explicit adult game made in Unreal is allowed by the engine licence and refused by Epic’s store. It can be sold elsewhere. For where, see where adult games can be sold in 2026 and does Steam allow NSFW games.

Godot, Ren’Py and other engines

The open source engines avoid the question entirely. Godot is released under the MIT licence and Ren’Py under a similarly permissive licence, and neither has any rule about content. With them, as with Unreal, the only constraints come from the law and the store.

That is one reason they are common in adult development, though not the only one. For a comparison of engines for story-led games, see Ren’Py vs Godot vs Unity vs RPG Maker vs Twine. For the wider process, see how to make an adult game.

What this means for adult game developers

1. Unreal is safe on licence grounds. Read the trademark clause and leave the logo off if in doubt.
2. Unity is safe on the current terms, as long as you stay within the law and keep explicit material off Unity’s online services.
3. Keep adult builds off Unity’s cloud and asset store. That is where the wording bites hardest.
4. Do not use Unity Ads or IAP. Their content policy rules out sexual content.
5. Plan the store first. The store’s rules decide more than the engine’s.
6. Re-read the terms when they change. Unity’s December 2024 wording shows how quickly a clause can appear and disappear.

What is still unknown

• Why Unity added and removed the clause. We found no explanation from Unity.
• How Unity reads “obscene”. The terms do not define it.
• Whether Epic would enforce the trademark clause against an adult game. We found no example.

How this page was put together

The Unreal Engine EULA was read on Epic’s site on 18 October 2026. Unity’s current Terms of Service and its Advertising and Monetization Services Content Policy were read the same day. The history of Unity’s terms comes from copies held by the Internet Archive, captured on 15 June 2025 and 13 September 2025, which we compared directly. The account of the February 2025 discussion comes from Unity’s own forum.

The studio has not taken legal advice on either licence for this page, and nothing here is legal advice. Where a source used wording this site does not print, it has been paraphrased and the source is linked.

This page was written on 18 October 2026 and will be updated when either licence changes. To report an error, see the corrections standard.