Official FAQ - Analytics MAU Pricing Model Update

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So for 2M MAU, it's $7500. Compare that to GameAnalytics that costs $499 for the same MAU. What is your argument for that much higher price?

 

This is exactly why we left deltaDNA. Our game attracted a lot of players in tier 3 countries that downloaded the game organically (we didn't acquire them) but didn't monetize well. We were being punished by this type of pricing model so had to leave.

 

I don't understand how this change is justified, if i understand this correctly our free game's usage(not monitized ) of unity analytics (with 200k users) goes from entirely free to over $1000 / mo This is INSANE. This goes entirely against the stated reason for changing the pricing model of reducing the occurrence of surprise bills.

For this price i'm just going to build out my own internal analytics system. And you guys are going to loose any potential revenue that would have been gained.

 

Thanks for the recommendation btw, i may just have to migrate over to their services if this goes though.

 

This is incredibly expensive. To go from $0 to >$10k month for our game is impossible to understand. For me it reflects poorly on Unity to make a change like this so late in the transition to the new system which was already looking pretty pricey.

Also it is really not great to have this hidden away on the forums rather than on your pricing page. https://unity.com/solutions/gaming-services/pricing

I was lucky to find this while trying to solve a problem I was having with migrating to the new system. So only a few hours were lost on moving to new analytics. We will be moving away from Unity for analytics and probably services in general. The judgement shown here was too poor to risk relying on UGS.

 

While it is definitely easier to track expenses with the new usage model, i still have a lot of issues with the transition.

1. A two months notice is not enough time for a change of this magnitude.
   We are suddenly forced to reevaluate our analytics solution and make changes to production out of the blue.
   This is the kind of change I would expect to get notified with at least 6 months in advance.
2. The new pricing model is significantly different from the previous one:
   Previously, if a user only played the game for a short period they would have a minimal impact on the analytics cost. Now every user costs the same. Realistically, given the time, I would have to reconsider what data we are tracking when, and change our implementation.
   
3. My rough estimates shows a significant increase in our theoretical costs.
   This is probably caused by the fact that we were already on the edge of the free tier. Maybe the previous free-tier was incredibly generous, but still, this is very problematic.
4. How can I be sure that you won't make another change in the future?
   It's vital for the expenses to be consistent over the release window, so that I can properly calculate the cost in advance. I'd rather pay a little more for another service if I'm sure their pricing is locked in.

 

Out of the box idea to minimalize the costs for this integration:
You could track the MAU on your own server and ping this to every player on startup before initializing analytics. If this amount is above x (say 50.000) you could choose to not initialize/enable analytics. In this way you can see the real MAU on your own server while still having pretty much data. The amount of data with 50.000 (or more, if you like) is already so much that you would probably still have reliable analytics.

Edit:
This should be the way to do this:

Code (CSharp):

1. if (DAUMaxReached)
2. {
3.     s_ServiceStatus = InitializationStatus.Failed;
4.     return;
5. }
6.  
7. await UnityServices.InitializeAsync();
8. List<string> consentIdentifiers = await AnalyticsService.Instance.CheckForRequiredConsents();
9. s_ServiceStatus = InitializationStatus.Success;

Where s_ServiceStatus would be a custom enum that you should use to check if you want to fire analytic events or not.

 

So there's no way to automatically cap the usage at 50 000?

 

Well, that is not an acceptable pricing model for free2play games, time to leave :/
@epicstorydennis said it all

 

We did not migrate from Legacy Analytics because of the onerous amount of work imposed on us by the transition (manually entering definitions for all of our events). Instead we just stopped using it.

However, we still use UGS for Unity IAP, which causes basic analytics stats to show up. Will this cause us to be charged for Analytics, even though we don't use it directly?

 

Are you guys sure you posted the right numbers? I did some quick calculations and if I have around 408K MAU and sending the exact 500 events per MAU per month and using the exact 0.05 seconds of SQL processing per MAU per month I would be paying around $590 a month with the current pricing model whilst the new MAU pricing is going to cost around $2255.. That's a whopping 3.8x cost. If you divide the new pricing by 10 it would come to a much more reasonable $225.50 a month for the full usage, let's say you divide the numbers by 5 to get closer to the cost of the original pricing model then it would be around $451 a month.

I've already switched to Firebase for my own game but still have the UGS Analytics library in my game simply because I haven't removed it yet, definitely going to remove it before putting my game live now to avoid accidentally causing a lot higher cost than expected.

 

Honestly this was my thought as well that someone forgot a 0 when typing out the pricing or something.

 

From what I understand from the information on this link.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...al/UnityIAPInitializeUnityGamingServices.html
To use in-app purchases, that is, the "In App Purchasing" package without which it is impossible to implement in-app purchases, am I obliged to initialize UGS? Does this mean that if I implement in-app purchases, I must use analytics and pay for each user at the new prices in any case? Or can I not initialize UGS for the purchases to work?

Dear Unity Support, could you clarify this issue?

 

Overpriced. I currently do not have ads in my game nor am I over the 50k limit, but back then where I had ~1900 MAU and had non-intrusive, rare interstitial ads and rewarded ads I earned like 13$ per month from ads - the pricing for that would be, ignoring the existance of the free tier, 11,40$

Since well, ad revenue doesn't scale exponetially or something like that, it would probably be a similiar proportion at 50k MAU.

This is basically forcing developers to implement intrusive and annoying ads or IAPs if they plan to not lose >80% of their revenue.

Whilst sure, this data can not and will not be the same for everyone, it still feels way too expensive. Its definitely a lot more expensive than before. Reduce the pricing or at least make them brackets so you dont suddenly have to pay 300$ when you reach 50001 MAU. This change just makes UGS Analytics extremely unattractive to most people

 

You don't, the first 50K MAU are free, after that 50K if you go over by 1 you will only pay the $0.006 for that 1 MAU (it's a tiered system, every tier has its own price and min/max amount, anything over its max will simply flow over to the next tier)

 

I can't answer this for sure, but in the game I'm working on now, I use In-App Purchasing and Unity Ads, but I don't use the Analytics library at all, and my dashboard for Unity Analytics does not show any usage, so it looks like you *can* use IAP and Unity Ads without triggering Unity's analytics at these costs.

Also, this quote from the main post also seems to indicate that this only applies to actual Analytics calls and not other UGS products: "This is measured by the unityInstallationID or any custom userID that is passed to the Analytics service, and is specific to the Analytics product and not impacted by other products in the UGS bundle."

 

Fixed that for you.

 

I think Unity team needs to hire a Game Designer or Monetization Designer to design product pricing .
Except the Unity Engine has a reasonable price (my assumption), every other products have a price that no one can use, they can choose another product that has better quality but cheaper

 

If we are only using the legacy analytics still, will that still keep running under this pricing model or just stop when the transition happens?

 

Thank you for your clarification!

But why in the documentation of 4.9.2 version still is that mention about warning, if I'am not using initialization of UGS?

Screenshot:

 

can we just turn off analytics in the dashboard or do we have to do something else?

 

Not even commenting on the actual changes and comparing the actual state of the analytics service right now. Why hasn't this been communicated properly, and I'm just by chance finding this forum thread about the changes with the update happening in 2 months?

 

This is an insane increase in the price. If this does not change to something more reasonable within the next few weeks I will be abandoning Unity Analytics as well.

I can understand needing to turn a profit, but if you price yourself so high above your competitors, you're going to lose even more money from this change by having everyone abandon your services. You're not offering anything that we can't get for cheaper elsewhere.

Was your goal instead for a soft shutdown of analytics by having no one want to use it anymore? If so, your goal has been accomplished.

With this change I will go from being in the free tier of analytics to approximately $300/month. My game does not make that much revenue to justify spending hundreds of dollars a month on analytics. Not when I could use GameAnalytics for free instead. I do like Unity Analytics and I would be willing to pay a reasonable amount to use the service. Your pricing is not reasonable.

I also don't appreciate how you're trying to hide the ridiculous price of the service. The small numbers sound reasonable, until someone actually does the math.

 

To be fair, this was already like that before and is quite common for any SaaS product. You always have to do your own calculations (or use a provided calculator) to get your actual cost as each game/app has different needs.

 

Is that 500 events per month per user? If so that is even more insane. If a games goal is to get a lot of daily players, you can easily get past 500 events a month per user. That's giving people less than 17 events a day. GameAnalytics is free and offers 500 events per DAY per user.

"cost-effective"? What a complete lie. You're raising the prices by a ridiculous amount, hiding that its raising it, and trying to tell people you're actually making it cheaper. What a horrible business practice.

 

What if I only got 1 user ?
I use analytics, not for profits but for usage statistics of the application by the visitors of a Museum.
So, I'm limited to 0.05 seconds of SQL data explorer query time per MAU.
I think I'm going to exceed this small amount of free time.
How much do you charge the extra query time ? Is it free until 0.05 * 50000 (free tier MAU limit) seconds ? Or will I be charge 0.006$ for each extra 0.05 seconds ? Or else ?
Thanks.

 

Just to clarify, when you say UGS Analytics SDK, it only means the new analytics and not the legacy one (ie legacy is UnityEngine.Analytics in code)... and also what's still not totally clear to me is if we don't install UGS Analytics SDK, then our legacy events stop working in a few months? Or do they get auto converted to UGS going forward as well?

 

It is 500 custom events, meaning not the ones already sent with the SDK, but your own defined events.

 

Just letting you know you've lost a customer here. I've already switched analytic systems due to your unreasonable prices. I would have paid for your service if you were reasonable with your pricing.

Anyone looking into alternatives should consider mixpanel. Their paid tier is quite pricey, but they have a generous 20 million free events tier, so if you were in the free tier on Unity you'd most likely be in their free tier as well.

It's far more powerful than Unity Analytics is with more features, even in the free version.

 

So there are two major concerns in this forum:
1. The pricing is considered unfair
2. The events limit is considered unfair

It would be nice if Unity could respond on these concerns. What is the plan of continuation @clarec_unity & @Laurie-Unity . Will you consider this as invalid concerns or will you revise your plans?

 

Yes i also am waiting on a response to these issues.

Additionally, i would like to add why hasn't the pricing page been updated to reflect or note these upcoming changes:
https://unity.com/solutions/gaming-services/pricing

 

Also just something to note here for unity developers + managers. Just because people aren't posting here doesn't mean that people aren't watching this. I know at least personally several commercial projects that were planning on using the Unity Services and now are totally moving off all services including networking relay because they can't trust you won't raise prices unnecessarily on your other services. This sets a terrible precedent and destroys trust in the company and gives even more reasons for people to look to other engines such as Godot if they are no longer tied to your game services.

If you want to keep people using your engine and ecosystem you need to make it a hard choice for people to leave and give lots of services that can be easily integrated from developers at a reasonable cost. If not people will just move to alternatives.

 

I agree 100% about trust. My post a couple of weeks regarding the unfairness of this pricing and how the new pricing was not being published outside of this forum was ignored while other questions were since answered. I understand it is easier to answer questions than address concerns but I hope at least to hear they have acknowledged the concerns.

We have since moved away from using Unity for analytics.

 

Redid the calculation and the cost I calculated here went from $2255 down to $1353, an improvement for sure but this will still end up being 2.3x more expensive then the current consumption based model assuming you use the full 500 events per month and the same amount of query time.

I am happy to see that you folks took the feedback and have taken action based on that but I still feel that a 130% increase in cost combined with a reduction in usability (due to the new 500 event limit and 0.05s of query time per MAU rather than what you actually need when you need it) this is going to be a tough pill to swallow for many developers wanting to use UGS LiveOps.

 

Similarly for my case it goes from $860 down to $517 with the new pricing, while a good decrease this is still significantly too much from going to using ~30% of the free tier previously to paying this much each month. So while appreciated that you guys are taking the feedback, in practice this doesn't really change anything for me.

 

How can i disable completely Unity Analytics on dashboard?

 

I’ve just read the email and appreciate the change you’ve made.

My game doesn’t have many active users. 30k+10k MAU at most so I’m safe in free tier. However, thinking about a userbase close to 1M MAU, it’s almost 0.3 cents per MAU is expensive for 2nd and 3rd tier countries.

Considering a game with ads having $30 eCPM in the US, players will need see 1 more interstitial or rewarded ads to balance the analytics cost. However, that count will be jumped to 4,5 or 6 ad impressions for other countries which is quite difficult

 

At this point we will be rolling our own analytics service using QuestDB as a database backed for storing events, which works for us since we have fixed cost colocated hardware that is underutilized currently. But i understand that doesn't work for everyone.

 

I would just like to voice my concern with everyone else. Unfortunately, I am in the process of moving away from Unity analytics now. I have already transitioned from cloud build, and will also be finding an alternate solution to remote config and leaderboards (I was really excited about unity leaderboards, and the integration process was great). We cannot afford to rely on Unity services anymore. There is just too much (proven) risk that at any point, a service you rely on will become prohibitively expensive, with only a short amount of time to transition from it. An extremely worrying and disappointing trend from Unity.

 

Hi,
Can we just disable Analytics in the UGS Settings panel (see screenshot) or do we have to disable Legacy Analytics in the Editor then rebuild / republish all our games?

 

Looks at the new prices.
Realises we don't need analytics anymore.