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Is it legal (assuming US) if instead of paying for a proprietary software and accepting their terms and conditions for distribution, to require the user to own this proprietary software and use it as a dependency for your software? e.g. Instead of accepting Unity's TOS and paying for Unity, to distribute to the user (commercially) a set of source code that require Unity in order to be built and run with a simple installer executable that automates the build process.

Furthermore is it legal to distribute alongside those sources a script that guides the user through the download of Unity, such as automatically downloading it, then opening a browser to accept TOS, without hiding away any legal conditions the user need to accept?

Extra clarifications: 1) I don't actually intend to do this, it was just a thought experiment on whether this was legal. 2) I would assume the game is distributed on PC and 3) the fact that the source code is now revealed to the user is irrelevant since this question is a thought experiment.

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    This doesn’t directly answer the legal question, but there are some practical problems with it. Development environments for game consoles tend to be expensive and have limited access. And besides that, it might force you to reveal some of your source code to end users
    – SegNerd
    Sep 15 at 20:33
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    Just some clarifications: 1) I don't actually intend to do this, it was just a thought experiment on whether this was legal. 2) I would assume the game is distributed on PC and 3) the fact that the source code is now revealed to the user is irrelevant since this question is a thought experiment.
    – Cedric Martens
    Sep 15 at 21:07

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