Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

I am mostly okay with the updates.

The one piece still missing which will take time, are the legal T’s & C’s. Until we see those can’t pass judgement fully.

But I believe Unity has done a good job at trying to redeem the situation.

 

If you only get change notifications and the Github disappears again, you won't know. It's like a Warrant Canary for National Security Letters. "Unity has not changed their TOS today". I suppose it could be a website too, but will you check every day? You could just check the Github directly then.

 

I bought Pro back in the pre 5.x days just for lightmapping. I also bought the iPhone and Android separate versions. It makes sense business-wise to put advanced features behind a paywall but there is always gonna be the crowd wanting equal outcome for free or they just cannot make their game.

 

A) Means if you are a contractor for someone, or if you are a contracted studio, the money your client makes will be considered in your Unity plan. That doesn't mean Unity thinks they own you, and every service you provide to everyone forever, will be counted. If you go repair someone's refrigerator, that is providing a service. You aren't using Unity engine to do it so that wouldn't be included...

B) If you are the studios itself, then your aggregate revenue for the game you make is counted.

Although I will say that this wording makes it sound like it is based on your license and not each game, so if they intend that to be true, they screwed up with the wording.

Nothing here suggests you are charged for games in other engines, or non game related services. And that's not how anything works. No company can charge you for things you do outside of and unrelated to their software. So they probably didn't explicitly say, "This doesn't include if you go repair someone's fridge or make a game in Unreal" because they didn't think anyone would believe that's possible... My guess at least.

 

Here's another one:

Announce **SOMETHING** badass like a quality, well implemented Render pipeline, deformable terrain, even more streamlined prefab workflows. Provide updates every month or so showing your talented team commenting on the process of creating said feature, we want to see their faces glowing as they take pride in the badass stuff you guys are doing over there. Show you understand the foundations of your engine, and that you're excited to expand on them and create something living and evolving and relevant and good.

Few here are angry you are trying to make money, we're trying to do the same damned thing. What rubs us the wrong way, is you are burning the fields with all of us, you and us in it. You are dropping the torch.

I know what you guys at unity will say or think to proposition. "We did that before, we learned our lesson."

NO YOU DIDN'T. Fix the rot in your company so you don't fail. Announcing and trying to make cool sh*t isn't the problem.

 

Yer attitude says yer never gonna hit the financials you bandied about. If you are certain you will make those financials with your game then upgrade to get the splash screen removed and pay the piper..if you ever reach the threshold. Nobody gets out of here alive and there is no such thing as a free lunch.

 

The fact that you keep ignoring all the questions and answers on this thread while parroting the same messages like a telemarketer stuck with his script is definitely not helping.

For real, this is creepy. If someone acted like that in person, I'd run away.

 

There is no “for the game” part, it is the company’s aggregate revenue and funding, regardless of source, these have been the Unity terms for legal entities for many years.

For individuals it is as you say, and the wording is different
Unfortunately, since I am a huge 2 man team, all the revenue counts regardless of its connection to Unity, yes?

 

I just addressed that in my last post and said that you might be right about them charging per license - that or they messed up the wording.

"[revenue] generated in connection to using the software"...

And okay, it seems like you are set on believing that Unity will try to charge you for games you make in Unreal Engine or GODOT, and by extension of that logic, you must think they will charge you for the watercolor art you sell on Facebook marketplace and the time you help your neighbor change their oil for a couple bucks. I guess if that's what you want to believe, go for it.

 

xD

 

I'm really surprised there hasn't been more outcry over this little turd in the punchbowl remaining.

 

And people were wondering why Unity didn't engage with this forum about the changes...

 

I just wouldn't do business with a company I trust so little as to need something like this (which is my intention on all future projects)

 

If I sell that watercolor art as my legal entity, then it counts towards the revenue Unity uses for the sub tier thresholds, yes.

 

"we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen."

This is actually pretty insane. For a long time now, the Unity logo has been associated with cheap games, asset flips, prototype games... since only serious studios / companies would pay to remove it. Therefore, it was a bit like a badge of shame that your game had to wear until you could afford to scrape it off.

But really, it should be the opposite. People should feel proud to display the Unity logo next to their title. It should be a badge of honor that shows how much time and money you spent working on it.

I know it's not something that will happen overnight, but at least, they're going in the right direction. Also, the new pricing model is pretty good, even better for small indie studios (with the new pricing model for Personal)

Sure, trust is easy to lose and hard to regain, but in the end, they did listen.

 

It was good to see some Unity interaction, the posts were appreciated. We as a community could do more to foster a positive dialogue of getting this engine back into fighting shape.

 

The Terms of Service still say things like "Unity may change the price o(...) with prior notice" but give no hint of any notification delay. That means, the contract allows to litterally change prices overnight.
Also, " Unity reserves the right(...) to (...) modify these Terms (...) without prior notice"
I see nothing about protection against retroactive modification of terms, or changes without prior notice in the additional terms of service either.
Otherwise said, your terms offer ZERO protection to your customers.

Also, why do you want to force internet connection for Untiy Personal? This is an example of change to existing terms of services that is uncalled for. Would it apply to all versions or only 2023LTS+?

Lack of exemption of the 1st million has been stated in one post but I it is not obvious either in the calculator or the terms.

It's nice to see you updated terms, but nothing that you wrote has any legal value.
Did you hear what people said about trust?
You should publish/have published sensible TOS at the same time you published the new pricing system. Not doing so means the pricing system is nothing that can be trusted.

I wouls also like to know if any changes are made to the board.

 

At some point the Hub will get an forced Update, and then you are locked in into the Always on. No Matter if you agreed or not.

 

The only people who actually think this are Unity devs themselves. Most people never actually even notice because the splash screen doesn't show up until, say it with me folks, after you have bought and installed and launched the game.

The fact is that the splash screen removal is the easiest concession they could have made because it costs them literally nothing but there is a perception from a lot of people in the dev space that being able to do that was somehow meaningful in any way whatsoever when it absolutely wasn't. I've been involved with lots of game releases, both with and without the splash screen. I've seen the sales figures. There is no actual difference between with and without, even accounting for refunds.

But they immediately get into the good graces of a lot of the easily distracted because the only real value proposition of Unity Plus for a lot of people because of the big deal about the splash screen made in dev communities and nowhere else. Most people were never hitting the revenue cap of personal and they needed something to complain about once Personal hit feature parity with Pro. The splash screen problem is a myth.

edit: here, I'll quote myself

 

Because it's the best commercial engine on the market (unequaled for mobile development), extremely user friendly and intuitive making it ideal for education, and has the most generous pricing scheme on the market.

This was always the case and will always be the case with any public company. You'll have to take it up with the previous owners of Unity who decided to go public and put it up for sale.

 

As an avid S*** poster (who was recently banned from this forum) This is terrifying.

 

I'm not greedy, $199 999 per game/year are quite enough for me, but if by any chance any of my games exceed that amount, I think it's perfectly fine and fair to give a portion of the profit to the Unity cause!

 

The new terms are great, from my perspective - better than I expected to see in today's announcement. I'm back!

That said, there are things that affect me as a Plus subscriber, but I'm not going to bother reiterating what others have already mentioned. I can live with the time investment and expenses related to upgrading my projects for 2023 LTS next year and will appreciate having $40/month back in my pocket when the subscription expires.

 

It is not per game. It’s all your Unity games if you are an individual and all your revenue regardless of source if you are a legal entity.

 

People should watch this if they haven't.
Q/A with CEO

 

Substantively: New rules are acceptable

UT is business, and I'm not a businessman, I understand. It's just my 2 cents

I. Force to show splash screen on free tier is first reputation mistake by UT It would be better force to NOT show Unity logo on free tiers
II. investing to big companies (Weta Digital, IronSource) that make UT lose scope on improving realtime(!!!)-user expirience, Editor QoL, runtime performance, scalability
III. NOT investing to engineering and make evolving ALREADY EXISTING technologies to help ALREADY EXISTING projects and developer evolve their product
IV. POORLY investing to so basic and important aspect as runtime-UI toolset, that would be production ready, performable, scalable, feature-rich, and wouldn't be deprecated in future
V. invest to tens of new AI/Online services: Ads Mediation, Analytics, Player Accounts, Liderboards, Analytics, Economy, Cloud Diagnostics, Authentification, Cloud Build, Cloud Code, Cloud Save,User Generated Content, User Reporting,Remote Config, AI Tools. Because it's subscriptions and it generates money, of course. Biggest part of community - indie developers. They don't use 90% of this. Medium sized companies like us not use, cause it's not battle tested / production ready or has more tested 3rd-party alternatives
VI. Announce Tool1 -> Experimental -> Deprecated -> Announce Tool2 -> Experimental -> Deprecated -> Announce Tool3
VII. NOT investing to make profitable games by itself (Chop-Chop Open Project stopped, Gigaya cancelled )
VIII. NOT investing to 'gameplay framework' (Game Foundation deprecated)

And you have to raise the rent. This is ridiculous.

I've no choice to not use Unity for work, this is not my decision. But I've also created/ported tens of free tools on GitHub, that are exclusive for Unity, answered questions on forums, shared my own solutions, effective experiments, suggestions. And I don't think that I would make this in future

Unity was my specialization for ten years. Now I need to learn another engines, cause it is not evolving where I'm expecting. This business harming itself and my mental health

 

I’ve mulled this over tonight and the conclusion I’ve come to (which is speculation on my part) is that the runtime fee has some relationship to the deal done with Apple in H1 this year. Something to do with an agreement around the installation of the Unity runtime as part of VisionOS at a fee no worse than a typical Unity customer would have. It’s the only lens I can find which makes the emphasis on installs and unnecessarily convoluted approach make sense, particularly with regard to the subordination of the potential concerns of the existing Unity community. Time will tell I guess.

 

True, but the point is they just jeopardized all that in one fell swoop. Godot is on the map now, and the industry has a fire under their butts to produce an alternative.

This is a discussion of momentum. If in a year Godot has a quality render solution, can port to consoles, and a few more bells and whistles it will be a sign that in 3 years it will be a superior product.

This is the development lifecycle of many games.

We're just tired of this. We're tired of this stagnation, we're tired of being seen as the enemy be those we are working with, we're tired of watching this medium decline.

In the here and now, Unity have not shown themselves to be the solution to the years of decline, they are part of the problem.

Why should we believe that in 3 years Unity will be the best platform?

 

Many of us Unity users aren't looking for a "killer feature" like Nanite or Lumen. We're far more interested in the power of things like DOTS or Unity Game Systems or Mecanim and Cinemachine, the freedom to code in C#, the Asset Store, prefabs and Shader Graph. Most of Unreal's "killer features" seem more like toys, something to play with and market with. Overall Unreal feels more like Mario Maker than a blank canvas like Unity. Many of us want a blank canvas and not a coloring book like Unreal.

 

Read this:
https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/205253119-Can-I-make-a-commercial-game-with-Unity-Free-Personal-Edition-#:~:text=Resolution:,most recent 12-month period.

 

3.xx owner here. So glad I bought up a bunch of software back before all this subscription based junk started. I'm not saying unity should do it, but some companies sell a one year sub, but after that year you still perpetually own that version.

 

The main question is now. Is it enough for Unity to survive?
The stagnant development is not important, because you look at feasibility at the begin.

The question is now "Will Unity enough money" long term.

Strong words for a Engine in which every second Developer buys Asset Packs for game mechanics to archive his unique artwork of a game.

 

Unfortunately this just looks like unity really doesnt care about developers at all. This is still double dipping. Theres no changes to this business model that will make it look good. You charge once just so we can use unity, and then you charge us again when we succeed in using unity? I really hope that people will stand against this, but i also realize that even if changes are made, the trust is already gone. Its even more unfortunate that the people who have worked so hard actually developing unity are probably not the ones making this decision, which only deepens the tragedy of the gaming industry.

 

Unity Plus is no more and removing the splash from Unity Personal moving forward was intentionally done to get people to upgrade to the new licensing scheme. So I hate to break it to you but this isn't gonna happen because Unity is basically saying upgrade engine and license and/or to Unity Pro or you have to show the logo now.

 

All I can see from it is that you really want to keep that runtime fee idea anyway, and are trying to hide it by renaming it into "initial engagements". The metrics are still proprietary and there's still no reason to trust them.

You need to kill the idea with fire, and fire people responsible.

Whoever came up with it, did massive damage to unity, and communication was handled abysmally badly.. As a result any sort of "estimator" does not really matter at this point.

 

Because presumably they will have a greater revenue stream. But again, many of us don't think Unity is "stagnating" just because they're not wasting resources on headline grabbing features we didn't ask for, chasing trends that make tech bloggers excited but leave us developers scratching our heads. What they're doing with DOTS and UGS are far more exciting than a new ray tracing system that 90% of our customers won't even use

 

The FAQ says : "game", but in runtime-fee-estimator mentioned "revenue", so I'm not sure whether you are right.

"Does the Runtime Fee apply to my game?

The Runtime Fee does not apply to any games created with any currently supported Unity versions including 2022 LTS, 2021 LTS, 2020 LTS, or any earlier versions. The 2022 LTS is our latest supported version. The Runtime Fee only applies to games created with or upgraded to the Long Term Support (LTS) version of Unity releasing in 2024, currently referred to as the 2023 LTS, and any future associated betas, Tech Streams, or LTS releases.

The fee will only apply if ALL of the following criteria are met:

• Your game is made using a Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise plan.
• Your game is created or will be upgraded to the next major Unity version releasing in 2024.
• Your game meets BOTH thresholds of $1,000,000 (USD) gross revenue on a trailing 12 month basis AND 1,000,000 lifetime initial engagements."

 

It is good that there was additional input from unity staff to help clarify things, the problem it is quite strange because you are ignoring the elephant in the room (all the other important questions and fears).

In the main article there is claim that Unity exos "talk with the community", so we expect unity stuff to note our fears, demands and pass it higher. Instead what we perceive is "here are changes, deal with it".
We know you are probably not allowed to answer those questions or to speak about certain things, so instead you could at least let us know that: this and that is noted and we are going to try create dialog about this problem to gain your trust back.

 

The threshold for whether you can use Personal is what I’m describing.

Once you have a Pro license, it is per game and tied to Unity.

200k threshold where you are forced to Pro is all revenue for legal entities

1m threshold revenue for the fee is per game.

 

Now that I'm thinking about it, I may as well stay on an older version until they stop supporting it.

 

The "Terms of Service" are not on the github repo, only the additional terms are. This document needs added to the github repo, or better-yet only have one document.

The terms need to explicitly bind Unity to the terms on the github repo.

From the terms of service:

Twice now, Unity has used this clause to attempt to retroactively change the license. Both Unity's lawyers and two other lawyers I've seen comment that it legally allows them to do so. My reading concurs. Remove this clause.

 

I think as a community we should be fair. These updated terms are pretty great and in many cases fair. Now Unity should need to ensure us that the trust and any out of the blue change / announcement will not be broken out of the blue. I wish the engine success. About self reporting, guys, unreal also requires self reporting sales. Its not something out of the ordinary.

 

I can confirm.

The last time I was so excited about a new feature that I worked on a beta version was improved prefabs. (for those who didn't know, back in the day, you could not have prefabs within prefabs so this upgrade was a massive productivity boost).

Since then, I'm not sure anything new was released. It's been all v2 of existing features, fake features with no future or Asset Store best sellers being cloned or bought.

I'll never understand who thought I'd be satisfied to learn that the assets I bought on the store are now available for free to anyone else thanks to my subscription money. It's like spending extra to order ice cubes at the restaurant and having the waiter put them in a microwave as part of the service. Why would you bill me two services that cancel each other and expect me to be satisfied about it?

 

Look, I'm a bit broken in two about this issue. I've never been a contractor for Unity stuff, but I've been for other things, and these costs are hard to explain to clients sometimes. The thing is these clauses discourage companies from replacing employees with contractors, and that can be a good thing. I think that's the main motivation behind these clauses, and that's why they feel ultimately understandable to me.

No, it's the same. Before, even with Plus, you weren't allowed to do work for a company that made more than 200,000 usd.

 

I think it's hilarious that the thing people are most excited about is that they can finally hide the Unity splash screen. If that doesn't say everything that needs to be said about the company at this point, I don't know what does.

 

Eh. The installs ("runtime fee") thing is still a huge red flag. You can say "it's cool, just choose rev share! ", but this complete and total refusal to drop installs means this WILL be "revisited" later. There's no other reason to keep it. This is the whole perpetual/subscription thing all over again...that was also "it's cool, you can still do perpetual! " for a short time, but then look what happened.

Also, the phone-home thing is a no-go. 3 days offline, 30 days, whatever, it's still excessively invasive DRM and opens up lots of interesting ways to abuse customers in the future. DRM in general is a problem I've become increasingly less tolerant of (mostly only buy games on GOG for several years now), so I guess that's it. Unity's always had DRM but this is a bridge too far. Good luck to those who find these terms acceptable, at least they're somewhat less bad, for now.

Mind you, I do respect that Unity doesn't require moderators to toe the line. (I mean, assuming they're even aware of the forum. ) I wasn't quiet during the Lithium debacle either. Lots of other companies would never allow that.

Yep, like JetBrains Rider. They do encourage subscriptions by lowering the yearly fee for each successive year you subscribe, up to 3 years I think, but at least it's not "no subscription, no app".

--Eric

 

Yeah, i'm just wondering what's going on there. Last week i was afraid because of the price increase from 400€ / year to 1800€ / year and now i get everything for free?
Of course, that sounds better.

 

the online requirement is a bit annoying. Is it 30 days now? I mean beats 3 days at least. Sometimes I dev on the go with no internet but I have never been completely offline for more than 3 days tbh.