Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

It's real.

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

e: Also, I expect the social team is about to get hurled under the bus.

 

This is a good point, although when I try to apply it to some percentage value, it becomes less scary in my mind. At first I thought that this fact could kill a lot of smaller studios. But then I did a little thought experiment.

What if the company has 5 full time employees, and they are making 80k a year salary, and the company is just making enough off its games to pay them. So the company's net revenue after all costs besides the license seats is 5 x 80k = 400k revenue a year. That's 10k in license fees, or 2.5% of their net revenue. So it would be a lot less of their gross revenue.

But at worst, that ultimately means the license + rev share cost will be capped at still under 5% revenue, even given this tight, barely-scraping-by theoretical company.

Obviously there can be companies doing far worse, and this will just add to their hurt, but given the above scenario, I think those companies would already be doomed anyway. But license fee && || revenue share, that company would be done for. Sad in that scenario, but not architected by Unity greediness.

So I think that license fees plus revenue is silly. Make it just one. But I don't think it's reasonably capable of exceeding the 5% revenue share of Unreal in most practical situations. Happy to be wrong though.

 

Worse, they were talking about an archival system.

"Oh we never use the backups, just toss them!"

...

Sir, the backups aren't there to be used frequently, but to recover from when the current version fails.

They're also often used quietly and quickly by people who aren't bothering to do it in a way that can be tracked. Because usually you're looking for the last working version, and otherwise you're likely using a downloaded version to do a deep dive.

Which

Can't be tracked by Github.

 

If you have rev share kick in after specific revenue number (eg. $200K). Then Unity is making 2.5% only after you achieve that revenue. If you have devs that want to deploy to console, AR, or improved physics they need to buy Pro license before any revenue. So Unity makes money during development, even before the game is released. They'll never remove the license fee because of this. You have two sources of revenue, one is % of revenue after you make money and another is during development phase.

 

Because they know it won't work. They tried this move, everyone was ready to walk. They try it again, we're out of here. Even more so, because alternatives like Godot are getting more interest, more support, more time to develop into a stronger alternative.

A consolidated front and real backing from devs in a position to impact Unity financials (stop using Unity services) established the operating parameters the execs have to work with. they know we can't be pushed around and they have to tread carefully.

Over the coming years they may inch the revenue share up. Over the coming years, more devs will take up other engines adding to healthy competition and giving us more choice, so when Unity hit your limits, move on...and that risk is what's going to keep demands from becoming unreasonable.

 

Well in future there may be not enough devs using Unity to revolt when they create another idea

 

Truthfully, with current TOS documents there is no guarantee. You can't know. You have to trust that they won't, and that trust is what was eroded by this mess.

 

I'm wondering if paying 2.5% also gives people extra special support from the company, or if they're left leaning on us forum dregs.

 

I see it as such: They tried to cheat on us six years ago, so they put on a promise ring and said 'we will never attempt to cheat on you again'. Then they took off that ring, cheated on us, and now they're putting it back on saying 'we will never attempt to cheat on you again'.

I ask you to find the pattern: Abuse towards clients -> please forgive us, it won't happen again -> abuse towards clients -> please forgive us, it won't happen again -> [...]

If anyone is inside Unity that's reading this right now: Unionize. It's time to protect yourselves.

 

An interesting point on seat licenses versus revenue share - Unity currently knows how much it takes from seat licenses. If it drops those in favour of revenue, it doesn't know how much revenue it'll get as they don't have clear figures on Unity game revenue. That puts them in a difficult financing position. By maintaining the seat licenses, that part of the income goes unchanged and they can operate their business with a reasonably solid idea of minimum earnings.

Over time they may transition to a pure revenue model.

Bare in mind Epic only dropped the fees to $1 million after Fortnite became a free money printer. They make so much from that they can afford to throw their engine around for free. Hell, they give games away for free on their store. Prior to that it was 5% over $3000 per quarter.

 

In which case the alternative will be so robust and documented that the remaining Unity-users can just migrate.

 

You think in a year they will develop Godot to that extend .

 

Counts are self reported. You contact Unity with your initial engagement count, or revenue, and choose the lower.

 

So... Does Unity just expect us to forget that they:

• Quitetly changed and then removed the TOS from their Github, while now blaming "low view counts".
• Apparently attempted to make charges retroactively to companies who were successful (but weren`t even given the option to agree/disagree with the new TOS/charges)
• And sold chunks of stock before the announcement (Nadaq reports 2000 shares from the CEO, with the others directors selling anywhere from 20,000 to 68,000+ shares within the last month.)

just because we can now opt out of using their splashscreen (which, in my own useless opinon, should tell the company something if people are ashamed to show it to begin with) and only 1 person who isn't even on the board of directors (I think there are 12 of them), giving a quick "We`re Sorry" ?



We need something a little more concrete for the new policies you are promising, since Unity has already shown they are willing to change stuff on the down-low. How can we expect them to not try and pull this again a tiny bit later down the road?.

It would probably also be nice to hear some apologies from the people who made the actual decision in the first place (The board of directors). Marc Whitten is listed on their website as "a leader", but I am unsure if he has any actual say-so on what new policies get pushed out or changed, since he isn`t on the board.

 

A course change in the Unity management.

• Find out the person(s) responsible of the approval and publishing the initial plan, without even internal warning. They're clearly not qualified to hold such responsibilities, so either fire them or move them to positions where they cannot cause any harm.
• Especially the above for the person(s) who took the decision of taking down the TOS from the GitHub repo, no matter the reasoning. Unqualified persons must not be in charge of such sensitive material of the company.
• Communicate publicly how you're restructuring your management and the new goals for the company. No need to air names or positions, but we need to know that changes are made at these levels, how the company is pivoting to new goals, and those new goals in detail.

Without a serious course change we cannot trust that Unity won't be repeating the same, or similar actions.

Not only in the present disaster, but also in the past 7 years of "growing at all costs, burning billions of $ on companies pointless for the development community", which now need to be recovered as fees imposed to the community.

Actually we will be charged more for the same product without any value added. A product actually lagging behind the current technologies in several key areas for the actual developers, and without any signs of these key areas being addressed anytime soon.

Unity needs an actual course change in order to regain the trust. A simple "oops, sorry, we F***ed it up, here's an actually good deal", while being a good move, it's clearly not enough.

 

They are literally incapable of choosing to dump that stock. The stock market requires a scheduled sale of stock outside of two yearly (quite short) sale periods where you have control over the account (all done to make it nearly impossible for insider trading). John's sale of 2000 stock was clearly an automatic dump of stock to pay taxes on vested stock. They don't have control over that. As for Tomar Bar-Zeev, his larger sale is probably not a auto-sell to pay taxes, but definitely can't be manually done from his Charles Schwab account. That account is locked down by the bank. So it must be part of an automatic sale of X percent every available sale period.

Source: Me, I've worked at more than one company where vesting stocks are awarded. And I worked at Unity where my stock system worked exactly like this. During the period where my account is locked, it is literally impossible to interact by buying or selling. However, the system automatically sells X % of stock to cover awarded stock's taxes each 3 months that stock vests. And the beginning of September was a vesting period. So it takes a couple days for the stock to drop into the account, and then the account automatically sells, which coincides with the dates the sales occurred.

 

While it is true that they have to schedule the sale ahead of time (I think 6 months), they do have power to roll out licensing changes when they want. The timing is a bit sus. It just adds more fuel on this mess.

 

True, though I don't really understand how they planned to benefit from this. It would make sense to release a statement that causes the stock market to rocket up, and then sell immediately after... basically a pump and dump.

What benefit is there to sell at a low, and then try to make the stock go even lower? And if you are just trying to get out, and not make bank, why not just sell at a normal time. Why schedule to sell right before a big announcement and try to cast doubt on whether you are insider trading? It seems entirely self defeating...

I might be missing some master plan logic, though.

 

So, Unity doesn't do enough S***ty BS, we are still inventing this nonsense about selling stocks? Come on people!

As I see it, this is one of the big problems Unity carries around all the time. Unity never saw this as a B2B relationship. It was always B2C. Just think about it, they never treat us like a business, but customers. On the other hand we as a user base often play along with this, we can be easily distracted by nonsense like removing splash screen or flashy features which don't even need to be finished anymore. just introduce "the next big thing". Just look at the AI-craze. It's legally very non-starter as of today and still, they tried to sell it as a ground-breaking feature.
If you buy buzzwords, Unity will sell you buzzwords.

 

Thank you for the quick rundown on stocks and how they work. I have a few relatives who kind of do it as a hobby (just trying to make some pocket-change), but I honestly have no personal experience with how it works, especially in a professional business setting. I seem to recall that people have to pay a set fee/sell a set amount over a certain amount of time, but I`d be damned if I could tell you how it works.
_________
I was mainly trying to point towards the timing of it though. The CEO sold 50,000 in the last year, but I tried to focus on the sales in the last month. I agree with @JesterGameCraft , that is seems really odd that almost all directors made sales within the same 30-45 days.

Nasdaq also shows tye type of sale/transaction that was done (including if it was automated or not).
While some of it WAS automated, the 68,0000 sale (with another 75,000 apparently) and a few others were not.




The timing is just too close together for it to sit right with me. But perhaps they would be willing to address that too, hopefully.

 

So the FAQ says:

How does Unity estimate the Runtime Fee when I have not supplied data?
While we always recommend you supply your own data, in the absence of that, we will use our own data from Unity services that you have agreed to integrate into your project, and readily available external data.
​

What does "our own data from Unity services" mean? My app is health related, and I absolutely must NOT have any data leaving my app which I don't know about, because I need my privacy policy to be 100% transparent and accurate as to what data is being collected. If Unity doesn't explain this clearly and simply, then neither can I, and I'll be forced to jump ship.

 

I don't think you're missing any master plan here. All I was saying that they might have suspected the announcement was a gamble/dangerous, and decided to announce it after they sold their stock. But ya, I don't think there was any master plan to make boats of money. It's just a bad look on an already problematic situation. Seems like there was no foresight at all at making these decisions. No serious thought on the impact or just arrogance. Especially since we've heard that regular Unity employees tried to warn them.

 

The more important question is "Will it change in the past?" Unity claims the ToS permits them to retroactively add and change the fees. Clause 9.1 does seem to say that.

Do you trust them?

 

Just supply the data to them, or choose 2.5% rev share.

 

Unreal is also always less than 5% since the first million doesn't count. It's 0% up to 1 million, at 2 million it's 2.5% it approaches lim->5% at infinity revenue.

But I'm tired.

If you think Unity's Pro subs are good value, good for you, I just cancelled ours, you do you.

 

They removed it because the views were so low.

 

Yeah, that's why I had my ass surgically removed too.

 

Thanks, I will.

I think these terms are far from perfect. GODOT is really where it's at. No cost to you at all is great! But I think some people are needling at every possible angle, trying to look for cudgels to use against Unity. And granted, I am biased towards Unity given my history. So it's fair for me to get challenged too. I'm happy to see how I missed something or didn't consider things from your shoes too. But I think it's fair for me to provide my perspective of basically "It's not really that bad. Think about how much it will really cost total given X."

I definitely don't do it to simply be contrarian, single you or anyone out, or anything else. I just think there are perspectives worth sharing. I respect you moving away from Unity.

AcidArrow, you are a valuable member of the community, from what I've seen over the years. It's a shame Unity pushed you away. But it's not your fault they did.

 

It's not possible to say.
You could rely on wireshark and attempt to look into the data that the built in spyware sends but its most likely encrypted in which case you can only rely on their word and you know how much its worth.

 

As much as I love working in Unity, this is simply not true. In many ways the UE workflow is faster and more streamlined, it's just not as flexible. Basically, if somebody thought of it and there is a node/button/process for it, it's easier than Unity, if not it's a bit harder. And there are nodes for pretty much anything you can imagine.

Whereas in Unity, there's a lot missing, but you can (and it's fun to) set up yourself.

The reality is that Unity has fallen behind as an engine in terms of features and raw capability, and the relative pleasure of working in the editor is scant compensation for that. Epic relentlessly build up their engine with new powerful features driven by their own games and the games made by the developers whose success they rely on to get their royalties.

Whereas in Unity it's about pleasing shareholders and making announcements about things that often disappear into the ether soon afterward, while collecting subscriptions from all their users. That's why Unity is burning money and going nowhere, struggling to clear anything substantial off the roadmap.

The competition is very stiff, and if Epic makes big moves onto the mobile market and mobile ads space (which they may even end up doing with the very-pissed-off AppLovin) Unity will be fighting a very difficult battle without a clear advantage of any kind.

This isn't a business in which you can wallow for 5 years and then just get on with it like nothing happened. Everything moves fast, and Epic are a heavyweight moving like a flyweight. Unity will need to do a lot better not to end up on the canvas.

 

Unity starts a new scam era in the tech services changing past TOS, imagine pay 10 years $99/year for Amz Prime and then that Amz change old TOS and force you to pay $299/year for the 10 last years.

 

Summary seems to be the last week’s drama was caused by malevolence or ineptitude.

Does it really matter which?

 

No, but for the record, the board asked if there was a way and Ricitiello said yes.

 

My thoughts this morning...

Unity will layoff large portions of its work force before it closes its doors, because they know that the Unity engine is an extremely good product for many market segments. So their business will self correct - eventually.

Unreal's simple 5% gross revenue model adds trust for business adoption. You can readily plan for it. You can effortlessly pitch it. And any change becomes glaring.

I know that people say that trust is lost and that the trust begins with new leadership. I would certainly agree. But I would add that an extremely simple pricing model would go a long way to help build trust, especially when Unity gets itself into the red.

Honestly at this point, all I need is an iron clad ToS for 2022.3 LTS not to ever require revenue sharing. The 2022s have the features I need. But until I get that, I will have to consider alternative engines.

 

Real questions:

Does anybody know what they're doing tomorrow? Does anybody know what they're doing?

 

People before runtime fee: "I love Unity, it has is flaws, but I love the engine"
People after the runtime fee(v1 or v2): Unity is s**t, worst engine ever, unreal is better in every way, godot is better, the engine i build 20 years ago is better"

I understand the frustration and I had it myself, but let's be real for a moment.
Also if you think unreal really is better in every way then why are you still here?!

I wanted to change , but after the new new fee I'm pretty happy and at least for the moment I'll stay. Let's not forget that they have to add some very good features to 2023 LTS and after to convince people to upgrade and pay the new fee.

PS: and they moves the TOC many months ago that's true (and nobody notices), but the excuse ("nobody was looking") was lame...

 

I know, it is a Sunday, so I will be calling my family, I'll have a game session with my friends (Baldur's Gate 3), will have a lovely, although late Sunday lunch with my daughter and then I will work a bit on my personal project.

I imagine Unity employees will have similar, although also different Sunday.

 

They can just move fixing annoying bugs to 2023 lts instead of 2022 .

 

At least that is something that you always did because it has been the same for a long, long time.

 

Really, Unity!
We used to think about how to pay once.
Now we're thinking about how to pay twice!
Subscription plan... and for each seat!
And a runtime fee !
Greed is not good.
There are strong alternatives and competitors !
Retreat, there's still a chance to stay a big family.
And you have a big share in the market.
So far !

 

Technically now 2023.3 is 2024 from what I understand so...
But let's hope that now they are really forced to really upgrade the engine...

 

2023LTS is delayed. It's releasing in a year more or less if it's not delayed any further and from the blog post I don't see anything special. Incremental improvements in some systems per usual.

 

Because I have contractual obligations to some ongoing Unity projects. Not for long though. Also just because Unreal is better on many ways, Unity still has some advantages, like more adaptable to different workflows and more freedom to write your own tools. Unreal has the capability to extend the editor, but no way as flexible as Unity is.

Good for you, now, imagine, other people have other decisions based on their own pros and cons.

 

I know that, but in 6-12 months they must add some really good features to the engine if they want people to change to 2023+.
Now they just solved the runtime fee problem, but I hopw that at Unite they will reveal some good plans.

 

I hope none of the people who were unhappy with the shenanigans surrounding the Terms of Service and it's removal from Github are now happy with this situation because if you are you're falling for it.

 

many people now write on this forum that unreal is the holy grail of engines, without flaws etc
I didn't say that unity is better , but it has advantages. I didn't say you shouldn't change, if it's better for you. Just make sure that it really is right for you etc etc etc.

 

The rotten company can parasite on an engine that was designed by different people in different era only so much before the greed and incompetence drive even that last one good bit about it to the ground.

 

It made me cringe. They shot themselves in the foot again with that comment. It doesn't make sense in the slightest why they'd remove it because there aren't a lot of views. That's incredibly irrelevant. Maybe that was their logic for removing it, and they are being honest, but that was objectively dumb logic then.