Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Based off my understanding of the FAQ, if each of those platforms is a separate distribution channel (i.e. a different store like Apple App store vs Google play) then each of those will count as separate initial engagements. However, the initial engagement fee will only apply if the version of Unity is 2023+.

 

Hello, here I am, I find it acceptable. As long as there is no DRM embedded in the game itself, I don't care at all. Because it's OK in the editor and 30 days is also workable. Sure, without would be nicer. But Unity must also have the possibility to block accounts that do not adhere to the TOS.

More importantly, our games don't call home when WE don't want them to. That would have been a catastrophe because of the GDPR.

For the runtime fee see please my answer below

If you read the FAQ and try the calculator, you will notice that you do not really have the option to choose between the 2.5% license fee or the runtime-fee. Switching between the two is automatic, you always pay the lower amount: After crossing these two thresholds, you can choose to pay the Runtime Fee, either based on monthly initial engagements or 2.5% of your game’s monthly gross revenue. Ultimately, you will be charged the lesser of the two.

This runtime fee has nothing in common with the original one, because it is no longer about installs. Now a fixed royalty is agreed per sale or user. Because the initial engangements are exactly that by definition. The thing with the installs was absurd. But this is now a perfectly normal way to take royalties. This is how it works with CDs for decades.

That's why it's not a red flag for me. Unity isn't introducing anything that doesn't already exist a million times in other licensing contracts. And they're introducing it with an automatic limit of 2.5% of teh revenue which is great.

The reason why there is probably the so-called option between the 2.5% revenue rate and the runtime-fee in the first place is that it is a simplification of the process when the creator simply has no way to provide correct data because, for example, a deal with a platform is fixed:

For some of my distribution channels, I do not receive data that I can use as an accurate estimate for initial engagements. How should I report these channels for calculation of the Runtime Fee?

In these cases, in which your game has crossed the necessary thresholds, we recommend you use the revenue share.

In other words: If you have no idea how many copies went out, because neither you nor Unity have the possibility to find out. e.g. because analytics are disabled and your deal was for a fixed amount without getting download numbers from the distributor or you let your game be distributed completely free by users but still make money with it via displayed ads then simply 2.5% of the sales are taken.

That's a shame for you then, because it's the most expensive option for you, but it's super easy for everyone and you can easily plan with it and it's still cheap compared to Unreal or Flax.

So we've all been demanding that Unity not retroactively introduce any changes for older Unity versions and you're now demanding exactly that by asking them to allow splash screen removal in the older Unity versions for everyone? lol

What they should do to make it really practical and fair in the long run is to just keep Unity Plus license (i.e. the flag in the system) active for the users who are currently Unity Plus users, so that the current Unity Personal users can't suddenly remove the splash screen afterwards but those who could still could remove it in the future with these versions. Then no former Plus user has to go through the trouble of switching to a newer version just because they can't remove the splash screen in the future. Since the Unity Plus users are the ones who had less than 200,000 sales anyway, there is no incentive for them not to upgrade to the newer version to avoid the runtime fees.

Simple, fair and probably pretty easy to implement for Unity.

QFT

 

U can put ur pitchfork down...For now ...and stay alert on what they come up with 1-2 years into the future

 

It requires significantly less unnecessarily overhead and a culture that isn't hostile to engineering.

 

Unity doesn't need to block accounts that don't adhere to the TOS. If a game is released and isn't successful it's a waste of their resources dealing with them. If a game is released and is successful they can reach out and ask to see their finances and engagement statistics.

Concerning how workable it is: 30 days isn't sufficient for some parts of the world where an Internet connection may be a long distance away. It's an unnecessary restriction that only serves to encourage these people to never touch the engine. You being able to live with it has no meaning unless you live in the Sahara or something.

 

Enough do know to make Unity's financial outlook concerning. At this point I think they've at least lost 1/3 of their engine business. But I'm mostly concerned for what happens to those who remain as the financial situation becomes increasingly dire for Unity.

 

A multi-billion dollar corporation is still staffed by people like you and me. Just having more resources doesn't mean the company is more competent.

 

Diversify, if u finish ur project now in Unity and plan to stay...keep using other tools for ur side gigs, so when something bad happens its not a big shock to mvoe one

 

I think back in the day free users were advertising the Unity name with the splash screen. Annoying for a programmer though, especially if youre testing you just want to run your app but have to wait a few seconds for what might be a quick start up test. Thats a positive move I think if I heard right that its gone in 2023.

 

This is the bit I don't get. For games that are sold (i.e. not free to play), the initial engagement fee seems to work in the same way as a revenue share. So based off my interpretation of the FAQ an "initial engagement" amounts to a purchase. So why not just say revenue share? (btw if I'm not making sense, I'm not disagreeing with you, just confused about the use of the runtime fee)

 

And what if the developer doesn't care? For example, I have a court decision with which I can wipe my ass, because someone simply did not comply with notarial contracts. I got justice in court and it didn't help at all and that with a dispute value of over 150.000 EUR plus 5% interest for 21 years. There are a lot of people who don't follow the rules and just don't pay. With such people often even an arrest warrant does not help. If you can at least block their account, that's at least something. The really bad ones won't be impressed and the actually harmless just lazy ones might change their minds just because of the possibility of been blocked and submit their sales figures in time to Unity. Apart from that, there are many other reasons why an account could be blocked.

 

There seems to be alot of hate speech for the company allowed in the forum. Its a big put off as a reader. It would be great if 'unity subscribers' had a tag on their profile name in chat so we know who to take seriously.

Bit like all the youtubers spinning speculative negativity 'for views' getting on the negativity train 'for views'. There should be a hammer, unity is too soft.

 

Breach of trust. The situation should not have occurred. People responsible for it did not meet any consequences.

 

Correct Me if I am wrong, but this does not sound better than the CURRENT EXECUTING POLICY

The following Terms apply ONLY on 2023 LTS (which does not exist at the moment)
- Optional Splash Screen on Personal, Forward-looking Runtime Fee with limit.

Which means:
- Upon the removal of Unity Plus, in order to ship games without Unity Splash Screen; creators, studios, and businesses now are forced to upgrade to Pro.

My Question:
- Unity Personal now has a higher limit revenue cap, does this cap apply to the Editor versions prior to 2023 LTS? Or the Personal Cap is stayed at $1,000,000 (USD) and the small businesses are now forced to purchase Pro.

Please do not promote with these two statements combined like this, since they seem to have different scopes of application. Optional Splash Screen only applies on versions starting from 2023 LTS, whereas the removal of Unity Plus hits retroactively to all creators, studios, and businesses that use prior versions, as a member of the game industry, we all know porting a finished, shipped game to a newer, potentially unstable versioned engine (even LTS) is not a one-click job.

Edit: I am aware that we are able to extend, or upgrade the current Plus plan for one year, but that is just a temporary solution, and it does not help in the long term.

 

What if the developer simply uses a pirated copy of Unity? The answer is the same by the way. Unity shouldn't waste their time and resources chasing someone that doesn't matter.

 

This is because it is a fee and not a share. It is only limited to 2.5%, not a percentage per se. It applies per sold license/user of your game and the runtime is used by the player when playing the game. A good name for this would be? Runtime fee.

 

Yes, you are right about that. But somewhere at Unity there is someone who earns his salary by taking care of exactly the implementation of this "feature". And someone came up with that because it's his job to come up with things and he becomes redundant if he doesn't come up with anything more to present to those who decide about his job, who then in turn convince others that this is very important, who decide about their job. Etc.

 

Good changes! Thanks. The key for us here is the option between runtime fee and fix rev share. Having a lot of installs with low ARPU this helps a lot.

 

The door-in-the-face technique is a compliance method commonly studied in social psychology.[1][2] The persuader attempts to convince the respondent to comply by making a large request that the respondent will most likely turn down, much like a metaphorical slamming of a door in the persuader's face. The respondent is then more likely to agree to a second, more reasonable request, than if that same request is made in isolation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique

Unity gave the loud crowd what they wanted (e.g. no splash screen in Personal) as they want to shut them up. Plus is gone, and anyone who actually makes it with Unity will pay more in the future. At the end this is price increase, Unity got what they wanted. This is why for example: Marc Whitten made $16,203,891 in total compensation in 2022 and everyone here talking about pennies in comparison. https://www.salary.com/tools/execut...ry-bonus-stock-options-for-unity-software-inc

 

I think what I'm tripping up on is, in a practical sense, the outcome seems the same as a revenue share. So why not, for the sake of ease of understanding, call it a revenue share instead. No need to clarify what an initial engagement or what a distinct user is, etc., because in the end you essentially pay a fee (or share) per unit sold.

I'm not disagreeing with the fee. Just seems to add some confusion for me. That said, if I'm in a position where this becomes a problem, I'd be paying someone else to look after it.

 

And mark my words, they will get a nice bonus for this "new plan" .

 

Long term, they want you to upgrade to 2023 LTS and accept the new terms to not have the splash-screen. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to determine if that's a wise course of action.

 

the personal cap is still 100k if you dont upgrade to 2024

 

Have you tried playing a bit with their calculator? There are many scenarios where it is not a share but clearly a fixed fee per number of licenses (however they call it). At the end it is just different but not more complicated than a share. Both is perfectly predictable but the fee can be cheaper than the 2.5% "share".

 

I am still moving to UE4, but I would be happy to see your repair terms.
Try to gain everyone's trust, guys. This is what you should do.
If you want to make money, you should not rely on harvesting game developers' wheat, but launch your game mall (similar to Steam, why not create it?). You can also create some of your own games and put them on it, or more mobile games, such as Epic using their engine to develop Fortress Night.
Epic is about to launch a new solution,
When your game is exclusively on their platform for 6 months,
During these 6 months, the commission fee will be waived.
Even if this plan is not pushed out, it is still very attractive.
You can refer to this discount.

 

A public company, doing something out of the goodness of their heart? I dunnnoooo

 

as i remeber 2023 LTS planned for end of 24 year ? so one year to wait for changes

 

promising news, but im a bit apprehensive about whether or not something as bad is this goes down again in a couple years :/

 

It'd be good to define precisely what is "gross game revenue" in the FAQ. From this quote, it seems to mean the game's total revenue, including all parties involved in its sale, not only the developer part. I guess it still doesn't include the VAT and other government and local taxes, but I think it should be clarified.

That's why I think the Unreal 5% rev share is actually too high, because for Steam and other similar stores with a 30% cut, it means 7.1% of the dev revenue. For an old-school retail deal where the dev typically gets 20%, Unreal's 5% game revenue becomes 25% of the developer income, and Unity's 2.5% cap becomes 12.5% of the developer income.

 

If that's the case then thankyou unity for listening and revising you're initial policy. I'm never thrilled about pricing model changes and increases, but I am pragmatic understand that they happen. Communication is key, particularly giving plenty of notice. I'm sure some people who should know better will remember this in future.
Is the discount for using unity services quantified anywhere? Or will this be on a case by case basis? And do I need to negotiate it up front? Or closer to the time at which I will (fingers crossed) start having to pay royalties?

 

You can achieve the same thing with tier based revenue share. Why not do so?

 

Dear Unity,

Not sure you will read this, but it worth a try. I have been using Unity for various projects, professionally and not, since 2010.

I have seen this engine grow (and become messy at a time). Whether you love it or you hate it, it is undeniable that Unity is a great Engine, that dominates Mobile and XR space, and many great projects have been shipped with that.

It is public that financially you are not doing well, losing 193 mill in the last Q and almost 1 billion per year.

Maybe, beside laying off 8% of your workforce (which is still massive, considering Epic has 50% less people and, honestly, better technology), you should lay off your CEO as well (11mill / year paycheck) to start with.

Also, I would like to say that the Unity Community is a great community. If you had come to the Community with honesty we would have helped to become profitable. We want you to be successful and profitable because your tech helps us creating great art and projects.

Please, come to the community and let's start a conversation to really help you getting out of the gutter...oh, and sack your CEO...we don't need another 1 dollar recharge fee like at EA.

 

I totally understand their intention as you mentioned.

From our practical experience, it is NEITHER a safe NOR wise decision to upgrade an existing, stable build of the game to a newer version of the Engine, our team has faced various issues when updating our current game from 2019.4.X to 2021.3.5, then we have found severe IL2CPP generic performance issues, in order to fix this issue we then upgrade to 2021.3.27, which have editor crashing issues on finishing editing prefabs, so now we are using 2021.3.28.

Our game also runs on Consoles, which means for every version upgrade we need to redownload and install all the dev resources for this specific version of Editor.

 

Indeed, plus the initial engagement of players, means that they now simply count sales essentially.

 

Thanks, but I do wish for an official answer/clarification from Unity, or at least clarify it in the FAQ.

 

The result changes drastically depending on how expensive your game is. It is possible to price your game such that it would make very little difference, but that's probably unlikely.

For freemium or mobile games, you will probably be better off with the 2.5%, but if you sell your game for more than a few dollars, the per-unit fee will be quite a bit cheaper. I ran some hypotheticals on my game's sales from last month. 2.5% amounted to about $24, and the $0.15 fee was about $13.

 

Just smack the whiners and sh*t disturbers. These type of people choke up in business so they never will be relevant as they think their almighty frikkin' opinion is. The histrionics on display were like...errrm..can't set time...34 secs in..

 

Updating major versions mid-project is a disaster waiting to happen. Still developing on 2020.3 for that reason.

 

To be accurate, you have to count sales & returns per country, which is cumbersome manually, but it should be automatizable, at least with Steam reports.

 

@karl_jones I have started my project on Unity. I have sold some x number copies and got r amount of revenue. Assuming x and r are eligible for thresholds. Now, I moved my project to another engine, and replaced the build. I sell x + n number of copies for r + m amount of revenue. Will I be responsible to pay Unity with that m amount of revenue I make with another engine?

Also, will I continue to pay the revenue share for that r amount I have made with Unity as the game continues to sell after switching to another engine?

For example, I put my game with Unity on store and 3 months later, I switch to another engine. I pay my revenue share to Unity for that first 3 months. In 4th, 5th, and 6th months, will I continue to pay Unity the same revenue share, or will the sales with new engine add up on it, or will switching to new engine (having paid for the Unity part once) will reset the whole thing and I will not pay any fees anymore?

And "I" here refers to a corporation, not individual.

 

Thanks for the apology - so any measures Unity is taking to stop this from inevitably happening next year and so on or nah? Cool cool.

 

What am I missing? They can still change the price to whatever they want whenever they want.

Would love to be shown how and why I am mistaken because I am pretty sick of this bull**** now and just want to move on.

I can't see anything about the price being locked to the major LTS versions in the open letter or the FAQ. So there would be nothing stopping them just upping the 2.5% (and the runtime fee chart) to whatever they want at any time - Which is what I thought the internet has just been on fire about for 10 days? Or were people just enjoying being angry and actually didn't care?

"The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond [......] For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. "

https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

https://unity.com/pricing-updates

So 2 years after your game went live, they say to you...

"Hey, the 2.5% is now 50%. Hope you are enjoying your editor version terms that have nothing to do with this price hike".

 

Yikes, not a good look, really wish Unity could fix their communication. Don't know what is more frightening that this is genuine or they thought it was a good 'excuse'.

-> https://twitter.com/unity/status/1705317639478751611

Unity@Unity
Genuinely disappointed at how our removal of the ToS has been framed across the internet. We removed it way before the pricing change was announced because the views were so low, not because we didn't want people to see it.​

 

So, I've finally in all these years went and read Unreals licensing terms. And honestly, I don't see how current Unity's terms are better.

In Unreal - it's free until 1000000$ per product.
Then 5% based on quarter if product sells more than 10k (per quarter).
No seats, no pro requirements, no runtime mess.

And it's actually getting cheaper and more accessible over time instead being more restrictive in costs.

It's a better engine for the indie small studios now. Wtf?

 

And this survived more than 10 hours on Twitter? WTF?

 

There is no "earning back" trust. Its gone forever. The only thing you can do is add legally binding language to the terms of service that they are irrevocable so that there is no longer a need for trust.

 

...

What?

 

A significant improvement for sure, and having people from Unity actually respond is good. I'm still migrating away from Unity, and here's why:

• The current leadership do not care about the engine, or it's core users. For years now (hey since 2020, I wonder what happened then?), the engine itself has been declining significantly. It is fractured - three render pipelines, two input systems, a ton of packages, two ways of handling game objects, etc. Requiring Pro for console development is the most blatantly anti-indie move I think you could possibly have made. The internal game was cancelled because "we've learned everything we can" - what obvious and blatant corporate nonsense? The lead up to release and post release are two massively significant times in game dev. Again, all this was after Unity went public.
• Trust, in a word, has been shattered. Unity (the company) has been on thin ice for years. Unity (the company) has now shown willing to retroactively change terms and delete the terms of service. There is every reason for them to do that again, and no guards in place against it. If they add it to the new TOS, they can just delete it again. Without a significant change in leadership, I don't see how anyone could trust Unity with their livelihood after this, when they can give you less than 6 months notice of a retroactive policy that has the potential to ruin your livelihood, and stay silent about it for an entire week. They had input from the insiders and employees that this would go down in exactly this way. They had notice, they knew what would happen, they rushed it out anyway, then stayed silent for the whole week.
• There is obviously still some bitterness from the Unity management about this: "When we first introduced the Runtime Fee policy, we used the term “installs” which the community found to be unclear so we’re using the term "initial engagement" as the unit of measure." - nobody found installs unclear. Nobody. We repeatedly said as much. "You just didn't understand" isn't an apology and it speaks to a much bigger problem. F*** you to whoever wrote that, edited it, and signed off on it. A genuine and heartfelt F*** you.

I have used Unity for a decade. I've had Unity Pro for 8 years. Two licenses for the last 2 years. This should've been the initial announcement, there should never have been retroactive license changes, no deleting the TOS, no stupid poorly worded announcements. Trust is broken for a lot of people, and these changes don't address that. Unity (the company) has a long way to go to restore that trust, and blaming your users for being "too dumb to understand what an install is" is definitely a step in the wrong direction.