Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Everyone looking for certainty in their engine maker's TOS and approach to users.

 

Ok... this i s good to understand better.


https://unity.com/runtime-fee-estimator

 

Yeah there are more devs who can handle C#. Unity is a bit easier to get into. But that's more a hobbyist perspective.

 

Can we stop with this please.

Yes its a real thing, but this is not it, because no company who pulls this, aims to destroy their brand over-night or lose 8% value of stocks. Even now the community is split with 33% thinking the new plan is not good enough, Unity have already lost devs to other engines and more have started evaluating other engines. Trust is not yet rebuilt even with this new plan, and a further subset of dev's are just using it to give them time to move away from Unity in the future, whilst the really big companies may give serious thought to switching or building their own engines to avoid this sort of fiasco.

You could have maybe argued this if Unity had come out with this exact deal over a week ago, but with royalties at 5% and then back tracked down to 2.5%. Then it would make sense, but thats not what happened.

 

Did Unreal drop the fee to 0% after the obvious backlash of the crazy huge 5% ?

Not really, so why would anyone trust them more than Unity ? That not only heard developers, but changed to remove the splash screen altogether and can use Unity for free until already have enough to afford Pro

Also have lower to vastly lower fees than Unreal.

 

I was able to tackle DOTS at earliest versions. I'm pretty sure I'm capable enough to figure out something.
Plus having an access to the engine sources always make things a lot easier.

That reason is called Scope. And also, Quality over Quantity.

With the trust gone, I don't think indies will continue to pick Unity blindly.
And well, payment requirements doesn't exactly favour indie dev anyhow anyway.

Do this. Open Unity's runtime fee calculator.
Set Personal and revenue >200k but less than 1kkk. See what it tells you.
At that point, you're still paying ZERO to Epic. Note that Unity uses company revenue, not product revenue.

Magnificent calculator for some reason doesn't tell you the cost of Pro seats required for your indie dev team.

 

Considering Epic share is 0% on the Epic Game Store, you're comparing 2.5% + monthly fee vs less than 5%.
Also, if you get an income of less than $10,000 in a month, you ower Epic exactly $0 whereas Unity will take both the monthly paiment AND 2.5% (unless they clarify and say they deduc the monthly paiment from the revenue share, but even then, it's still more than 0).
So it may end up being more expensive going with Unity than Unreal.

 

Everyone who takes their business serious (AAA companies), and look for an actual game engine instead of framework to extend and play around .

 

Good and necessary changes. Well done on that.

It's unfortunate that Unity leadership put so much needless stress and worry on so many people for such a long time to get here. It really seems unclear to all of us why it would need to take this much time and drama to introduce a rev share model. It's a lot closer to "copy and paste" than it is to "rocket science".

Marc's interview with Jason Weimann left me with lingering concerns. Could Marc please tell us the real reason why management is so hellbent on this impression fee scheme?

Is the logic that Unity dominates the mobile free-to-play market and wants to monetize that, but is competing with other engines on the high quality stand alone/AAA titles, and they don't want to make themselves less competitive there?

Trust isn't just built on you doing the things you promise, but it's also built on you respecting us enough to tell us why you're doing the things you promise. Giving us the contradictory message that you simultaneously want to raise prices, but also want to save us money just sounds like you don't respect our intelligence, and you're up to something sneaky. Please just tell us what you're actually trying to accomplish with this. It can't possibly be worse than what people are imagining.

 

Developers who have moved over to Unreal. Simple as that, really.

 

So far does not look like that at all, even big companies value ease of use and versatility over a crazy hard to use engine that just has little better base visuals.

 

Which is a tiny fraction comparing to Unity games count.

 

I thnk You've been living under the rock for couple of years...So far all AAA companies that doesnt use their proprietary inhouse engine turned their eyes on UE not Unity for PC / COnsole games.

Even Indies should seriously take UE into consideration its completly free to use till 1mln $ (apparently less than 90% of indie devs make 1mln$ per game ). And u get tons of services for free when u use Unreal .


Unity will fall down quickly the moment there is a crack in the mobile market that will allow other engines and services to tap in...

 

Another thing you're also missing is: Unreal it's only the 1st $1M Life-time for a product that is free - then 5%

Unity it's the 1st $1M in the last 12 months - so if you sit on $999k per year, you can make millions without having to worry (except for paying for Pro), Unreal you'd be paying 2nd year onwards.

And if you can't factor a $2k license in to your budget once you pass $200k/yr - then there's something wrong with the way you're doing things.

 

But actually that fraction is what brings Epic money: AAA studios releasing large games. It's not the quantity, it's the quality. It doesn't matter that there are more steam games made with Unity. Actually that shows that Unity might be easier to get into, but that doesn't mean that those games are good ones.

And the studio I work for as a freelancer seriously thinks about moving away from Unity. Not because of the latest terms but simply due to the lack of trust.

 

5% above 10k per quarter.
Its a fair price I think if I ever make something that succesfull that goes beyond 1 mil as a small indie dev team.

What you don't think about is that this is 1 mil per product.
You can make multiple games for free basically and pay 0 if it never reaches 1 mil.
Like e.g. a game that sold for 600k, then a different game that sold for 500k equals zero payments.

That's a gold mine for indies.

The problem is that you don't have to pay anything in the same case just by picking different engine.
And, you get nothing in return (at best, or IronSource at worst).

 

First of all, a bigh thank you to the guys who responded to my last message
(LDiCesare, TX, Izardo2012, florianalexandru05, DwinTeimlon, scg_studio, elias_t)
of the last thread. You guys gave me sound of mind.

No matter how generous Unity, as a company is now, I think what people really want is a something in the ballpark
of

a license change freeze for 5 years.


AND changes to be reviewed, with us, 1 year before the 5 years are up.

Selling of some of the companies aquired since 2014 that do NOTHING for 90-98% of the userbase would also be welcome.

WE DON'T want Unity to have to go out of buisness, but putting your earning at a disadvantage by having to bow to us after what happend in the last weeks IS ALL ON MANAGMENT.
Don't come to us, if you things go belly up, with the blame.
Put your best feet forward and stop being so shifty(that's why the freeze is a good idea)
A lot of important contributers to your income are gone FOREVER.

If we can, could, Unity back out of public trading....that would be the best.
But I aknowledge this is a flight of fancy.

 

One more thing to note that isn't obvious. Indies are the mass market for the Asset Store.
With indies gone - there won't be anyone purchasing assets continually over time.

My advice - think ahead of time. Start porting somewhere else today.
You don't have to drop Asset Store right now.
Just have a backup plan in case of just another TOS change.

 

Now that the financials are similar with Unreal, the real question is:

Keep working with Unity and enjoy their broken feature set, uncertainty regarding company direction, subscription fees, shrinking community, CEO that calls you a f***ing idiot, PR employees that call you confused, stagnant development of the Engine while big money is thrown out of the window, and so on and so on.

Or use Unreal.

 

I have one suggestion to the pricing suggested.
The FAQ says "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?"
The suggested answer is to go with the 2.5% revenue fee.

I think this would discourage people from going to GamePass for instance.
First, if you cannot count the number of "initial engagements" on the platform, you don't know whether or not you qualify for the fee.
I think that any deal in which engagements cannot be counted but are being paid a lump sum should be counted separately.

If, say, Microsoft pays me $1 to put my game on GamePass, then I'm fine with paying 2.5cents for all the initial engagements on that. If I'm not making any money from in-game transactions, I really shouldn't be paying more.

I'm not sure it's possible to make the terms like that, but I'm afraid that nothing protects developpers from risking crossing the 1M threshold from the point of view of Unity, without being able to prove otherwise, meaning we are again at risk of losing money if we get the opportunity of selling our games on things like GamePass (and bundles and whatnot).

 

No, I will always remember what Unity did because I have experienced it.
Yes, I am preparing to transfer to the Unreal Engine. What outrageous things have they done before? Please let me know. Because I haven't experienced it before, I wasn't a user of it before, and without conclusive evidence or screenshots, I wouldn't know how bad it really is. Thank you.

 

honestly I think the ones who really got the raw deal are the people who were using plus

for the rest, the major concern is only 1 :
WILL TOS CHANGE AGAIN IN THE FUTURE?

it seems like yes, it will change again

This whole fiasco has shown me that I actually depend a lot on unity. I tried other options, went on discords for info on how to port what I currently had in unity. And when I asked people how do do X, they always suggested me that its all wrong, you should do Y. Now there are perfomance issues, then i tell them: but in unity I could do x and it worked perfectly, to which they reply, then go back to unity. There is a ton of abrasion. I could maybe do the port, but it would be such a waste of time, maybe of years, and need to rely on ppl that are not receptive to the way things work in unity.

Overall I have realized that yes, unity is the best engine, maybe only rivaled by unreal which I did not try because the costs would still be higher than currently unity

it would be great if unity could commit to ENSHRINE THE CURRENT TOS, and make it future proof

but for now it seems the results of the protest were enough and so they have no reason to do the last touch, they walked back a reasonable amount, and there is not enough political capital to push it further

My worry is that the community is fractured and when the worst comes again we wont have the same strength to stand how we stood this time around

 

Well, actually it's not very similar. 2.5% is not the only thing.
Imagine an indie team of 6 people using Unity Personal, the project's revenue is just over $200,000.
From now on they need to pay $11,262 for Pro, which is more than 5%
And keep in mind that 200K in 12 months is hardly cover the salaries of 6 people.
And I don't even include taxes, steam, etc...

 

They haven't said the 2.5% is locked to editor versions, only the terms. So in 5-10 years they can say

"Hey the fee is now 50%. But hope you are enjoying your fixed editor terms that have nothing to do with price".

If everyone falls for this it is going to happen all over again in the future. Hardly anyone (like 3%) has noticed this and staff won't address it when asked (so far at least) - They are ignoring it whenever anyone asks.

This was a huge part of the reason for the uproar. I feel like I am taking crazy pills

EDIT: You know what I am done. This is my 4th comment that will no doubt be ignored again and I have spent far too much of my life on this **** show and now don't trust this company as far as I can throw it. I am going to finish my current project, get it live and if it takes off focus on porting out and getting the f out of dodge. Peace out

 

its worse, nothing is locked at all, it could all change again tomorrow

 

You are wrong. Unity did what they did very consciously and willingly. It is our reaction that made them backpedal. And there are still things that are unclear and things need further changes. Starting with "Runtime Fee". Ask yourself: why are they insisting on this so hard instead of a tier based revenue share model? The answer is: it backdoor for something they will implement in the future. It is so shady behaviour. If the community is split %33 no to %67 ok, then they have already won. Which makes the whole thing a tactic, a real thing.

 

Thank you to all Unity employees and the community from the bottom of my heart for fighting to change this insanely greedy pricing model.

The new changes are okay for me, so I can finish my current project on 2022LTS, which is several years in the making. Once this is done I will switch engines as the trust cannot be restored.
___________________________

I have been working with Unity for over 10 years and it was a blast. Though the last several years were disappointing, to say the least. The engine progress stalled massively, communication was atrocious most of the time. The TOS changes in 2019 and in April this year marked an all-time low until this pricing fiasco surfaced.

Unfortunately, Unity is insisting on keeping the vague install/engagement model which opens the door for more greedy price models in the upcoming years. I understand that I can choose between rev share and the installs/engagement thingy, but will this really remain like this? I doubt it.

The trust was finally broken forever when I saw the interview with Marc Whitten yesterday.
I urge you all to watch it and listen very carefully to what he is saying. It is linked in several posts in this thread.

There was no honest apology to the community, he dodged almost any question like a politician. The interviewer (Jason) also didn't make this any better, because he was literally apologizing before answering the tough questions.

Somebody took down this Git TOS and Marc Whitten didn't even know about it. It is his responsibility and he was not aware.

The C-suits which are responsible for this mess are still in charge and this will be the downfall of Unity in the long run, unfortunately.

 

I think if anyone here had to make a solution, given the knowledge that if Unity doesn't start to balance its budget it might not be around for long, this isn't a bad one.

The first plan was obviously a disaster, but the community spoke out and seems like we have a compromise.

Part of that has created a lot of reflection and debate on game engine business itself and how they should be managed / provided operated, and probably given more people over to open-source alternatives like Godot, which provides new kinds of competition which is always healthy

If Unity can also streamline the business side and refocus now on engine quality and features people actually want, and balance their budgets in terms of making sure everyone is productive and focused on that, its a net positive i think.

I personally will just use 2022 LTS for now and upgrade as and when needed (buying Pro or revenue share if ever I get into that position, hope i do). Also experimenting with Godot now and its great for certain things and I love the openness / flexibility, however, for performance usecases and polish i'll stick with Unity

 

Wow! We're all arguing with eachother now.

That first Unity announcement really did cause catastrophic problems.

 

Very well said. I completely agree. All of them... One little contribution: imagine there are 2 sides in between executives and/or C-levels, one defending revenue share, one defending so-called runtime fee (which is actually a tax). This final outcome of the process shows that the company is far away from the real life, just dealing with politics but nothing more. We should expect anything from such a company, but not the truth, not a honest word about anything. Because politics change in time, one group gains power over another and bam! ToS changes again.

This is not the way of a B2B!

Also, another aspect: gambling games are still out of this. Don't they use your so-called "Runtime Software"? Or you see us as "dumb"s who will agree for that? WTF!

 

This is what I wanted to write. Team o 6 pays $11.232 per year (assuming you paid for year in advance) after reaching $200.000 threshold initialy this is more than 5%, but after you reach million it this becomes 0.11% for team of 6, however at this point you must pay runtime fee, so if you keep team size the same it's more like 2.5% fee + 1% from Pro.

The thing is:

• I doubt you can keep your team size so low for whole development timeline
  
• The team size could be initially greater than 6 anyway, so your fee could be like 7%
  
• Your game might be in early access for one year, in state where you actually pay ~5% fee before you earn more.
• Unreal does not touch your first million anyway, so at the point you reach million you have to pay zero, while unity throws on you sudden cost of

  team_size * $1872

  per year the moment you reach $200.000.
  
• Epic store ignores the fee

Obviously pro is per entity, so if you create a lot of games it scales differently, however for new small teams this is way bigger obstacle than unreal fee.

 

Is there a company that supports 6 developers with 200k ?

This is impossible by default.

I think that would be 3 developers max

 

The company has said the exact same thing before, even put that in the ToS, and then reverted it. So will the clause about Unity being able to change the ToS also be removed? If not, these words are completely meaningless.

 

Do you actually pay for developers, employee or every person who touch the engine?
For asset store assets the seat means every person who works with unity in any way, so your sound designer, level designer and other artists too, no?

 

More proof of my trust issue:
https://twitter.com/unity/status/1705317639478751611



Imagine deleting the TOS because it did not have many views.
They are still blatantly lying to our faces.

 

To anyone in Unity:

I asked this question before but let me ask here again:

I made my game with Unity and released it. In first 3 months, I made r amount of revenue and x number of engagements. Let's assume I am eligible for fees and paying you for 3 months.

Now, at the beginning of the 4th month, I release another version of my game made with a different engine. The following 3 months (months 4, 5, and 6) that version sells y number of copies and makes q amount of revenue.

Here is the question:

- Since, the project is still making profit, will I still have to pay my fees to unity for the 4th, 5th, and 6th months, even if those months are success of another engine.

Note that "I" refers to my company, not to me as person.

 

OMG, just leave me out of the conspiracy theory, a backdoor to something that you have no idea what it is, destroying their brand and losing developers, with potential too lose many more, a walk back that looks weak for shareholders. None of that was needed, simply using this plan but charging 5% and then walking back to 2.5% would have achieved the same thing without destroying all trust.

 

Wow, so gross. Continued active denial and refusal to own the reasons behind the loss of trust only further erodes the trust. Unity just reinforcing my decision to move on from them.

Of course you removed it before the pricing change. You removed all of the TOS protections we'd been complaining about losing long before the pricing change as well. That does not make those events unrelated to the pricing change.

I will never believe that the TOS shenanigans that occurred in October 2022 and April 2023 was unrelated to this upcoming pricing change. Not when one of the FEW answers Unity had on hand for us right after the initial announcement was basically that there was no legacy TOS anymore, only this new TOS. The quickness of that answer relative to the silence about many other things strongly suggests premeditation regarding the TOS alterations and github removal.

Get real, Unity.

 

The new policy seems reasonable to me.
Thanks for the changes.
I might still not use Unity for my upcoming projects (because I realized how fragile it can be), but I'm reassured for my current game (if it becomes profitable someday...)
I'll also add that would try to avoid anything tracking related in Unity as much as possible (like analytics, ads, remote config) since I have no trust at all in what Unity is doing.

 

If not that, at least, bad management! But, I think their insisting on Runtime Fee so hard is an indication of something. This is not conspiracy theory, this is the sense you gain with the development of a story (if you follow it carefully). If you are right, I expect them fully cancel runtime fee thing and implement a tier based revenue model which achieves the same thing. Until then, you seem to be so romantic.

 

I will do exactly the same.

 

It seems that I was the only one who supported Unity when everyone attacked him! In general, thank you Unity, our trust in you has not been shaken.

 

@karl_jones, @DairyFan28, @superpig or any Unity member.

When will the 2023 LTS version be released? Because people estimate summer 2024 at the earliest.

Why not keep the PLUS for everyone until the release of the 2023 LTS version? We need the PLUS to not pay the PRO to remove the Splash Screen, it's quite abusive and you don't take into consideration those developers who didn't subscribe to the PLUS in the past but we intend to release a game before the 2023 LTS version is available.

 

Get rid of the idiotic install fee, yes it may seem cheaper for some but like all pricing you will put it up sooner or later.
+ Sack the $1 reload guy = Trust partially restored.

Allow people on previous versions to remove the splash screen, do an Unreal and only let good games use it if they wish and then just maybe people will start having warm fuzzy feeling about the Engine again.

 

Hi there, while this new policy seems much more sensible, the sticking point of "How can we trust you ever again?" still remains.

My understanding is the language saying you're safe from future changes as long as you don't upgrade your version Unity was added after a previous kerfuffle that also damaged user trust in Unity as a company. During this last mess Unity seemed EXTREMELY confident in their legal standing that they could just, not honor that.

So unless Unity is willing to legally bind and shackle itself convincingly in a way that it can't just try this again later, it's basically gambling. Like, I might be willing to do that to myself, but I can't do that to people I work with. I imagine many other tiny-tier developers and partnerships are thinking the same thing.

No one WANTS to discard years of investment into your engine, but they also don't want to have this looming shadow of anxiety over them from using it. If you can address that sufficiently I imagine it will allow you to slowly regain trust. Regardless, many people (myself included) are going to be spending some time learning how to design our game systems in an engine and API agnostic matter 'just-in-case. It's probably something we all should have been doing anyway but this ordeal will have put the fear in many.

Addendum Edit: Oh yeah I almost forgot, yes leadership needs to change. The people who were told by the people under them "This won't work and isn't feasible" and went ahead full-steam into the ice floe anyway should not be allowed a chance to do something like this again. But also changing leadership means nothing without the aforementioned legal shackling. It's not fun thinking of your engine developer as a cartoon bulldog that needs to be kept on a long chain but that's kind of where sentiment is at now.

 

Yeah I don't understand why people think this is a MuCh better deal than Unreal. They're not calculating the software fees you pay per seat... plus I don't know if it's clearly mentioned if the 2.5 is on ALL the 1 million and plus revenue, or ONLY for the revenue earned AFTER the 1 million. Cos Unreal specifically mentions it will only ask for 5% on any earnings BEYOND the 1 million. Not the whole thing.

 

As far as I'm concerned, this whole thing is over with. I think it was turned a little too much into a conspiracy looking back on it. YES, the runtime fee initially was very broke and needed fixed. But I don't think it was designed to milk developers dry looking back.

I think this whole thing was originally seen as a bunch of greed and stupidity. But looking back on it now after having more info, I don't think it was really as much greed as people think. I think it was just mostly stupidity.

As far as "trusting" Unity, yea I get it. At the same time, can you really "trust" any company? I mean, come on, they're all companies and exactly that. We don't "know" them. They're run by people who want to generate as much money as possible, and that's that. Unity's probably no different. They made a really stupid mistake, and IMO lets just move on and move forward

 

More devs are not really happy it seems:

https://unitedgamedevs.com/

 

After the first $1,000,000, Unreal takes 5% if the incomes are over $10,000 per quarter, Unity takes 2.5% if the incomes are over $1,000,000 for the last 12 months, or an average of over $250,000 per quarter. That's a huge difference!

 

I don't see how "they are not evil, they are really stupid!" is better.

I am not saying anyone should abandon their projects, but if the people here, now, don't at least make attempts and plans to be less dependent on Unity, what happens next is on you.