Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

I love how people always skip the thousands of dollars per year / per seat Unity users already pay in these scenarios.

 

I don't think you're going to wake up from your slumber, nor gain the ability to consider things objectively.

 

Right, they are not the same. But based on my rough calculations in my use case, 2.5% revenue + the subscription costs are similar to the 5% unreal takes.

 

Ye the guy has interest in being ignorant . If Unity collapses his UAS business also colapses, so don't be too harsh.

 

Has anyone discussed how Unity is now heavily commercially incentivised to ensure 2022.LTS stays an underperforming, problematic stepchild whilst focusing on putting all their goodness into 2023.LTS?

 

The whole point is that Unity is now on the same model as Unreal, so the choice between the two is not about the money you pay for the engine.
The choice is now really only about what is more suitable for your task, and what features you get.

Edit: actually, Unreal's model is more convenient as you avoid the 2000/year per person upfront investment...

 

Of course most of us will skip that. The difference is 1 000 000 - 40 000 = 960 000. Let's say $2000 per seat = 480 developers! Does indies have to pay seats for 480 developers?

 

That and going off grid remote and wanting to work..or how about the post-nuclear armageddon brain toy to while away the nuclear winter with.

 

Unity gets used for lots of enterprise applications that do not sell in volume. Unreal makes games.

 

Hi, please do the math for a company that made $400k last year and 5 people use the engine for both Unity and Unreal, thanks.

 

I have always felt this to be true about Unity. They seem to have pre positioned Unity engine as the premier mobile platform, and are far behind AAA quality that comes out of the box for Unreal. Since my goals excluded hyper realism, Unity was never off the table.

TBH, I had always thought it would be a technical issue that pushed me to look else where.

 

End of NEXT year (2024).... They really need to release the removal of the splash screen for all versions. Its an act of "we care" but in reality it doesn't appear that way. Especially those who use to pay for plus now have to pay 2k to remove it if they update their game.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...updates-for-graphics-and-performance.1482069/

 

"If your 12-month revenue surpasses $200,000 USD, you need to upgrade to Unity Pro per the terms of your subscription."

Does all 5 people make above $200 000, or only the company owner?

 

Isnt for personal license a Company revenue ? Which means if lets say Unity dev salary is lets say 50k a year, u probably have to upgrade to pro. Since ur employees salary counts toward cost of the game they develop.

 

I'm sure this is what you meant, but for clarity, end of next year. https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...updates-for-graphics-and-performance.1482069/

 

Hey there. I just have to drop some words to unity and the decision of the fee they made.

1. I used unity over YEARS. And i think, if i accepted the TOS at the point, where they said, i can stay on this TOS forever, i have to keep this point. Any future changes on the TOS i don't have accepted will never hit this accepted TOS already. Just to say that. (I think, the law in my country will agree to that point)

2. Unity destroyed her own main-project with just one decision. Unity will loose so many developers, that this will kill unity. Theres no way around that anymore.

3. I never got money with my small projects. I never want to get money with my small projects. But even as this user of unity, i see this change and thinking: "Yep. this is a sinking boat. The fee-iceberg cutted the unity-titanic right under the waterline.

4. I think, there will be someone looking closer to the deals right before the announcement dropped in ... insider deals or how this is called? ... They will look very closely and checking it very specific. Its toooooo obvious.

It was a beautiful time with Unity, before this stupid CEO decided to smash a hole into the boat and let it sink.

Bye, unity. Bye.

 

The legal entity is doing the payments and has revenue as far as Unity is concerned, not the people in it.

 

Are you seriously this oblivious to the terms of prior that are still the basis for this?

If Unity thinks you've got funding of more than these thresholds, long before your game is released, then they're going to hit you for the premium subscriptions. And they do, and have done this inaccurately and inappropriately for years, quite frequently. True, these controversies have been overshadowed by IronSource and then this most recent, but I didn't think any Unity users were unaware of the contentions around how Unity determines the funding of their users.

 

I've tried going through this entire thread, the FAQ and "fireside chat" and although I saw this question being asked in a few different ways earlier in this thread, I didn't see it explicitly answered by Unity. Apologies if it was.

The question is: Are the fees, like the "Editor Terms"/ToS, going to be tied to a Unity version?

I.E. If someone uses Unity 2023 LTS to publish a game and has the current $X.XX/"Initial Engagement" or 2.5% revenue share numbers as what they need to pay, and then say in 2025 these numbers increase by 5c and 0.5% for example, would the increase affect the customers that are using or used Unity 2023 LTS to publish their game?

Basically, once you're in this ecosystem of paying the "Runtime Fee" are you going to be required to pay whatever the current Runtime Fee rates are if they change, or would the rates be associated with a Unity version and be fixed?

This is a big one for me because if you're subject to changing rates for existing games then that's basically the retroactive problem again and we'd have an unknowable future liability problem.

Then on the contrary, if it is just a straight "Rates are associated with Unity version and won't change if you don't upgrade from that version" then that also can have a negative consequence if the rates are, however unlikely, lowered in future versions. So ideally if rates are objectively improved then that would be retroactively applied to previous versions so developers aren't trying to update all their old games to a newer version just to get better rates.

 

I think this is what they are telling us now, but it doesn't really matter, since these are just words and are not legally binding at all and things can change a lot in a year or two.

 

If only quality was confined to graphical and audio fidelity, polish, scope, and throwing vast sums of money at something, then AAA would still make the best games. And modern Hollywood blockbusters would be the best movies... But quality isn't confined to that.

Unreal is great though.

 

Again, I haven't really seen that explicitly said, but if you know where they have I'd love to know. I'm not assuming by default that the Runtime Fee rates will be explicit in the TOS so version-locked TOS means that unless that's said explicitly.

 

Well obviously.

They are still charging a lot more than before. Just because they back-pedaled from an extremely horrible pricing, to just a terrible pricing strategy, does not mean it's a good thing. This is exactly what devs were talking about was going to happen last week. It's text-book corporate tactics.

 

I do not think they said it explicitly.

I think I understand better what you mean. You mean once you accept the new terms ("accept the fee"), then they can change the fee at will and retroactively for everyone that has accepted it.

It's possible.

My point is that even if they say "no we will not do that", they may do it regardless.

 

Well Unity needs money , after beeing in red for some times. So they ahve to squeeze devs one way or another.

 

Development is a very long process, ToS protections need to be included in the license to ensure that developers won't be charged retroactively and that they can continue to develop with the product they are using with the terms they agreed.

I think that 2.5% revenue share after a threshold is very reasonable, but the Runtime Fee should disappear (even if it benefits you because you'll pay the lower amount of these two, it opens a dangerous path and these fees may change in the future). Also many people don't want to get tracked every time they install or run an application.

 

Yeah, that's my point/question.

I guess I'm in a position where I still need to know what they're saying to my face that they're going to do before I even bother thinking about the "trust" part of it. It's almost a guarantee that the rates will increase at some point. Maybe that'll in 2 years, 5 years or 10 years. But they won't remain the same forever, so I think it's very important that they can give an answer to my question. If the answer is the "good" one, then we can choose whether to believe them or not.

 

I understand, it is a good question... I doubt you will get an answer.

 

Or they can set out to develop their own games like a normal game engine company. Eat their own dog food. Show us the capabilities of their engine. How amazing would that be? Would show us the true greatness of their engine and make money.

 

Did they get what they wanted? I'm sceptical that they even got what they needed, never mind what they wanted. Do you have figures? Feels like they had to do this just to stem the bleeding.. Could be wrong, though.

 

For the people arguing about the cost difference between Unity vs Unreal I would say the difference is marginal. Use the engine that is best for your project.

If your company is making $200,000-1,000,000 Unity makes it harder to scale up your team. Unreal is better for indies trying to bootstrap and Unity is better if you make more than $1 million per game. That was already true before this change. Unity was already worse for bootstrapping indies. Raising the revenue cap and removing the splash screen made Unity more indie friendly not less.

For now, in my opinion, both engines are viable options. I would not advise switching because of the fee changes.

As far as the trust issues. We need an Ironclad TOS.

 

Not "our", "you", really in this moment I and many others dont trust in Unity.

 

So, I'm guessing the $100k revenue limit for Personal still applies to versions prior to 2023LTS

 

Here's the catch.

Imagine you've got multiple games.
Game 1 sells for 1.1mil.
Game 2 sells for 200k
Game 3 sells for 100k

With Unity, you have to pay that 2.5% from each game (plus seats etc), because your company reached the threshold.
With Unreal you'd be paying only for the first game.

With Unity it would look like this:
1.1mil * 2.5% = 27.500
200k = 5000
100k = 2500

Total = 35000 + Pro Seats

With Unreal you'd be paying:
(1.1mil - 1mil (because first one is free)) * 5% = 5000
Total = 5000

So which one is more profitable?

Indies will consider more Unreal for their use cases.
Large corps (AA/AAA) will also use Unreal just because its more robust.
Who's going to use Unity then?

Probably mobile market for the time being while indies still exist for the engine.
Afterwards - no one will. Nothing lasts forever I guess.

 

"

• 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.

"

The fees are based on game revenue not company revenue. Seats are based on company revenue. So it would look like this.

1.1mil * 2.5% = 27.500 + seats
200k = 0 + seats
100k = 0 + seats

 

and or slash costs... they employ 7000 people and buy companies for billions

 

This is not true, the thresholds are per game. It says that very clearly in the FAQ.

No offense, but I wish people would stop cluttering these threads with misinformation that can clearly be understood by reading the information released so we might be more likely to get answers to actual unanswered questions.

 

7000 employees, yet their most important released feature after ~1y is... splines. Makes you think

 

So, its still more costly in the end?

 

This is not true. You'll only pay the 2.5% on that first game with Unity. But you'll need to pay for the Pro subscriptions. That also assumes that a 2.5% royalty is better than paying on the installs and that you've got over a million installs on that game.

 

The threshold for the fee is per game.

The threshold to switch from Personal to Pro is the aggregate revenue and funding (from every source if you are a legal entity, "just" related to Unity if you are an individual).

 

How did you come up with $250K?

 

Right?With 7000 people they could've made about 10 games by this point easily.

HELL Nintendo only has about 7k+ employees. Wiki says 7317 (2023).

Absolutely ZERO excuse for Unity to not be in the game making business.

 

As a consumer, no, you should not build your relationship with a company on trust. You build it on a mixture of regulation, consumer-protection laws and contract law. There are exceptions and there is a baseline level of trust which is needed - but it's a low level of trust.

However, as a business things are different. Business relationships are built on trust and law. In most countries many of the disagreements that would be handled by regulations and courts of law, if the relationship is one of business-to-customer, is handled through arbitration in the case of business-to-business. Now, countries differ a lot, but this is the case in general.

A business which becomes untrustworthy at a B2B (business-to-business) level will have problems. Anyone who has operated a start-up or one-person business, also knows that one can sometimes start off at a low level of trustworthiness simply due to being small and without deep pockets. This affects business dealings - from liquidity (you often need to pay in advance if the other party lacks trust in you) to being able to land long-term contracts.

So, yes, game development studios should be able to trust Unity. And note that trust is about sticking to agreements, not just the letter, but the spirit - and about being a predictable and reasonable business partner. It's not about being generous or friendly.

I feel that part of this whole situation is because there is a tendency at Unity to not treat the relationship with game developers as a B2B relationship. I'm sure the big clients are treated as such, but it's perfectly normal for a software company, service provider and/or technology platform to have a ton of small and medium businesses as customers - and being able to do this in a professional manner, as a B2B relationship.

It's even visible in some of the language used by certain Unity executives. "Users" for example, is something that while it can be used at UI/UX and technical level, when addressing the commercial aspects, it is not a good word to use for customers. Unity has customers, and those customers have (internal) users of the editor and (external) users of their application (eg players).

Unity has to step up their level of professionalism. They shouldn't make announcements like the original one before the legal documents and technical details are fully ready for perusal. Because a business that cannot trust the developer of something as important as a game engine to be professional and reasonable in its dealings? It will pick another option. It may even make considerable investments to reduce this risk.

TL;DR - Unity should remember it is a B2B company and stop acting like a consumer-oriented tech company. Trust matters infinitely more as the former than as the latter.

 

Yeah I said "thresholds" because there are 2 thresholds to cross to have to pay the runtime fee and both are per game. I wasn't commenting on the requirement to pay for Pro seats.

 

Where did you see this information? Unity Pro plan says "game", not total income from all games:

"My game exceeds $1,000,000 USD gross revenue (trailing 12 months)"

 

To be honest, thats a really poorly written, presumptuous and vague statement that I do not think is constructive. I don't understand why building a business while paying the new runtime fee policy is "not an option". The original runtime fee was preposterous, but the revised runtime fee is a very reasonable and workable solution. Far from being "not an option".

I think people should avoid making blanket statements like "the game dev community has no choice but to focus on other engines" and "the community will not rely on Unity and has already started migrating to other engines". I'm part of the community and neither of these statements apply to me. Neither Godot or Unreal are remotely suitable for what I work on, and that is true for a great many people in this community. Speak specifically for those who you are speaking for, not "the community" as a whole.

It's also disingenuous of them to say that Unity is unwilling to communicate, as far as I know they consulted on the new runtime fee policy with many community members to get it to where it is now. Thats already a far better response to community push-back than I've really seen any other company do, so credit where its due.

I don't think this kind of vague anti-runtime-fee-in-any-form attitude is helping, and implying that the entire Unity community is going to dissolve to nothing because of it is false and needlessly alarmist. This fee in its revised form is demonstrably cheaper than Unreal, so I am really not seeing how it is going to destroy all these indie studios who are supposedly migrating to Unreal because of it.

 

Yeah, I've missed the two different ones threshold thing. Sorry about that.

In anycase, it still seems like more expensive option to go with Unity unless planning to do long lasting service projects. So idk about that.

 

"Unity is cheaper than Unreal because 2.5 < 5" ignoring all the gamedevs that make from 200k to 1m that are paying thousands of dollars per year per seat to Unity and are asked to pay even more now if they have a breakout hit.

 

GG indeed. but i don't think any paying customer is happy. happy are those who use personal and dre

they got exactly what they wanted. they smuggled the runtime fee in, and we don't have any idea how they will exploit it later. but they will, now that people accepted it. and i think people paying 0 anyway are those who mostly accepted it.

secondly, maybe even bigger thing, they got away with massive increase in plan prices, and those will hurt devs the most. all in all, they will get hundreds of millions cash in with these changes, and who you think will pay that? we will. it's ALL taken from devs. devs that currently make $1000 dollars per game on average

plans + royalties is a disaster for devs in the long run.