Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Like @AcidArrow said though you can negotiate to reduce or eliminate your royalties. Which you will do if you're making millions of dollars. Unity on the other hand charges even enterprise developers, and it's a charge that you constantly have to track and report every month until you remove the game from sales altogether.

 

C# (for me) is so much easier to develop with in tools like VS. And Unreal isn't straight C++, but they have their own additional syntax/decorations that you need to learn. Their entire code base is so large over so much time, videos I have seen talk about "leave it alone, don't break it, make only the minimal changes you need to." It feels like a mine field when presented that way.

I prefer Unity because it is so easy to pick up from a programmer's perspective. (Models and terrain are agnostic to the engine.) If I were to switch to Unreal at this time, I would want to spend some time prototyping to get a sense of how to do things with it, and eventually get people with UE skills to help me code the game.

 

I think your point is fine, although I'd argue that at 200k revenue, 4k isn't really all that significant or unfair. Although I realize that is probably 100% subjective. I am most bothered by someone who is using any Unity version before 2024, that if they want to remove the splash screen, they now need Pro and must pay 2k dollars to do so. And most people will want to do that. So basically, you are charged two thousand dollars before you've made a penny. And that is definitely a significant fee.

 

One important difference people are not mentioning in their engine comparisons is, Unreal doesn't have a 1 million installs threshold.

A $20 game that sells, let's say, 250K-500K copies, makes 5-10 million dollars and has to pay 200K - 450K to Unreal, but zero to Unity, other than the negligible cost of Pro.

 

Soon to be less negligible.

Didn't know this forum is filled to the brim with people making millions of dollars every month. You learn something every day.

 

I don't know, i dont trust Unreal charging that huge 5%, why they would say so if they never plan to change it ?

Make no sense whatsoever.

 

What are you even talking about? That first sentence makes no actual sense, and 5% is not huge at all. Hell you're paying 30% to Unity to sell your assets and they're doing far less for you than most stores. How long is it taking them to approve of new assets now? Last I heard it was two months. Steam is 3 to 5 business days.

 

There are cases when the current terms that unity is presenting might seem better than unreal, but unreal is a different class of engine. At this point I'm not sure what point there is comparing them when free open source engines offer the same feature sets, bundle sizes etc. and are just as capable when it comes to mobile games which is the only segment that unity has really any advantages over unreal (mainly in terms of development time and bundle size).

There's also the cost associated with actually developing the game before you make a single $ where you may be paying a lot in licensing costs.

Basically I can see a reason why you might justify paying a 5% royalty for a AAA class engine but can't see why you would pay anything for unity at this point. 5 years ago perhaps but not today.

 

They can do the same thing with a revenue share and adjust it. Unity doesn't care about the revenue, they care about a runtime fee and terms to establish it.

I'll stick with 2022 going forward to not have the fee.

 

That's likely a reference to the engine source code itself not anything you would write. Which if we had access to Unity's source code I guarantee you it would be just as bad if not worse thanks to having to support two different languages at once rather than just one.

Creating custom game logic is a different story than they're presenting. It's far easier especially if you're creating it as custom nodes for Blueprint. I've created both custom nodes and custom logic that attached to the actor and it wasn't difficult at all. Hardest part is the same as with Unity: documentation is limited.

 

To me it seems it is to create the hassle to report "engagement" numbers, that goes away if you use their services. Do you want to be reporting numbers monthly to them, or do you just enable their analytics / ads / whatever and give Unity the sweet sweet data (plus increased entanglement to their ecosystem) they crave so much?

But there could be a deeper reason I'm not seeing, you're right.

 

That's not the best analogy. Steam is selling you entertainment, and they have a no-questions asked refund policy if you play for less than two hours. The Asset Store is selling you content that you can use in professional projects you make money from. For example, say that Bob sells an asset package containing some assets he stole from Fortnite. Susan then buys the package on the Asset Store and, not recognizing the stolen assets, thinks she now has a valid license to use them in her games. If Unity doesn't catch the issue, Susan might publish her games and then get slapped with a cease-and-desist or lawsuit. Maybe she gets banned from Steam for selling a game with stolen content, and now she has to try to convince Valve that she didn't know the assets she used were stolen.

Don't get me wrong, two months is ridiculous. Although the last time I submitted a package with an estimate of two months, it actually took more like two weeks.

 

Apple threatened to remove Unreals ios dev accounts and the only reason they didn't is because the judge forced them not to, but I'm sure all will be forgotten soon.

BTW Epic released statements through it's attorney's that it would abandon Unreal unless Apple was forced to keep it's dev accounts active.

Recently Tim Sweeney said something to the effect of, "We are willing to sacrifice everything in this fight"

I'll let you imagine what "everything" means.

 

Unity doesn't really check for copyright infringement though, nor does provide any guarantees. That scenario you described is not uncommon on the asset store.

 

My point is he's completely fine paying 30% for very little but he's not fine paying 5% for a great deal. Unity has incomplete functionality. Unreal has polished complete functionality. I think it helps that I started in a time period when what you paid for an engine was six to seven digits upfront. By comparison 5% looks like a steal to me.

Worse part is Unity has proven they might just pull the rug out from under my feet. Epic has yet to do that. That alone is worth far more than the difference you pay once you're successful.

 

Very little? They host your files, which can be gigabytes per package IIRC, process payments, offer volume licensing, provide customer service, pay the lawyers that write the legal agreements, etc - and they charge similar fees to Steam and Apple and Google.

Unreal only charges 12% if I'm not mistaken, but that's just Tencent's aggressive strategy for clawing out market share.

 

Unreals 5% are only interesting when you have a suprise success because under 1m$ its share is zero.
It means 95% will never see a invoice or is game developing a licence to print money?
The other 5% which calculate with over 1m$ revenue can make a custom licence.

 

The cost of hosting and distributing files is not as large as companies like to make you think. I've been hosting a copy of the Standard Assets 2018 package that I updated because Unity couldn't be bothered to, and I've yet to receive any notifications from my provider that my shared hosting plan of $15/mo is using too much bandwidth.

Steam's bandwidth usage is likely through the roof but Unity's Asset Store usage will be way lower since there are far fewer customers. Like you said earlier they're hosting for professional projects.

https://ryiah.com/unity/assets/StandardAssets20184.unitypackage

 

Many indie PC games, even if not very succesful, end up making 1 million USD cumulative over the years; only "hits" will have 1 million installs AND make 1 million USD in the last 12 months. That's my point.

Here's a more modest example that I hope your ascetism finds less offensive. Your $15 PC game sells 40K copies the year you release, then 20K copies per year, let's assume this figure is stable for several years. These are pretty "meh" figures, by the way.

In this scenario you'll never pay Unity any revenue share. But in the middle of your third year, you just surpassed Unreal's 1M dollar threshold. You are earning 300K/year and paying Unreal 15K bucks/year. Unity would cost you 2K/year. If your sales double, your Unreal fee also doubles, yet Unity still costs you 2K/year. You're now married to Unreal forever, their bills have become a part of your life as long as your game remains published and sells 10K per quarter (EDIT: I didn't know about this threshold).

Keep in mind paying 15K out of 300K gross income is pretty painful. Valve/GoG will keep nearly a third of that, then maybe you have to pay one or two salaries, and other operative costs.

I've been criticizing Unity all past week like crazy, and it's still obvious some of their managers need to go and the ToS fiasco is pretty lame. They still are making some blunders and confidence lost isn't easy to recover. But the deal they propose in the last ToS is good. At least from a real-world perspective.

 

From what their insider program told people about their communications with Unity in the aftermath of the previous announcement, the sticking point Unity had is that the runtime fee is non negotiable with their customers, they have to have it. Anything else was up for reworking to craft some sort of billing structure their customers would be comfortable with, but establishing the runtime fee would be happening.

Unity clearly finds it to be more important than essentially everything else.

 

Except Unity doesn't do any research to determine if assets are stolen from anywhere. When submitting something, you click on a box saying "I made this" and they take it at face value, so that puts the legal responsibility on you and not Unity. They'll take assets down if you show them that the assets are fraudulent, but if someone goes after them they can just point at the agreement and say "Hey, Bob swore the assets were his, go after him. We did our part by removing the assets from sale."

[citation needed]

--Eric

 

This isn't true, but whatever. Make S*** up all you want.

 

Unreal Engine has a minimum threshold of $10.000 per quarter. If you don't make at least that much money you don't have to report or pay anything. If you make less than $1.000.000 in that first window of sales and then sell less than $10.000 per quarter after that forever you owe them nothing.

 

Thanks for the clarification, I had no idea. Still my point stands, I think.

 

I think you got this totally wrong! Unreal does not charge you 250 K monthly. It charges you 5% on the revenue, that's 250K total from the 5 million. Which is also wrong, as first million is waived. so its a total of 200K.

 

It's quarterly too which means per month it's only about $67K which is only $13K more than Unity.

 

Is it though? for 5 million Unreal charges you a total of 200K. I'm not sure how this would be divided, as I guess every quarter you get charged something (if it's above that 10K limit). But not even 67K monthly, if 200K is the maximum they can charge you.
And at a point where you expect 5 milion in sales, maybe the custom licensing is even an option, i wouldn't know.

 

I just learned they have that 10K/quarter threshold, my apologies for the mistake. Still any published game that reached 1M USD is likely to make 10K per quarter for a long time, so it's unlikely you'll go under the threshold in a long time.

 

I'm just dividing $200K by 3 which makes it $67K. Unity's $54K multiplied by 3 comes out to $162,000.

 

I like the fact that Unity's announcement, even the second one, makes it so clear what the math is that everybody in this thread providing examples of the math contradicts the math everybody else provides.

Unity really made it very simple to understand.

 

Incidentally all Epic Games has to do to beat this is reduce their royalties from 5% down to 4%.

$4.000.000 * 4% = $160.000 per quarter or $53K per month

 

Exactly. Think about it: if I will pay $2000/y for my company, I would go for Unigine, which is way beyond... So, it is not

Oh, don't forget the gambling games are excluded from this nonsense... We accept it, then we deserve to be served as dumbs.

 

Unity has the Shop System much longer than Unreal. Someone postet that over 50% of Steam Unity Games make less than 1k$. The Unity Shop with templates invites cheap games and mass production. Unreal5 has the same model now, only less matured.

 

But it's not per quarter or month. It's 160,000 total. Total. that's it. You pay that spread across the whole time your game makes money.

Or am i wrong?

 

Nope I just hate the Install/First interaction nonsense, The games currently made with Godot(https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/) put me off even looking at the engine as it didn't seem to impressive, and the visual coding nonsense in Unreal, the editor crashes, Epic Store and the Epic Store put me off that one, Though Unity's own little launcher is starting to bug if they just drop the install nonsense and kick the $1 reload guy out the building my search for a new engine would cease.

 

What Ryiah is missing is that the example on the image (and most examples in this thread) are ridiculous. They show a single developer with one Unity Pro license making $4million per month and then going "look, huh, in this scenario Unreal is pretty bad".

Can we... can we stop talking about Unreal? I'm tired. Unity can suck or not suck regardless of what Unreal does.

 

Ha

Happily in 2023 LTS Mathf has new methods to help you:

Mathf.ApproximateMonthlyCharges
Mathf.CompareToUnrealEngine
Mathf.GuessNewToS
Mathf.HowLongWillThisSagaGoOnFor

 

You're not wrong but the examples aren't good either as mentioned by @AcidArrow. I'm just working within the confines of those examples. 2.5% versus 5% isn't as great of a difference as a certain individual keeps trying to pass them off.

 

To add to this, Unreal, out-of-the-box, has some very good project starting templates for FPS. Here's what their new project window looks like:




If you're making a game that falls under any of these genres, you can pretty much hit the ground running. You can focus on swapping out assets (such as models for the character) and you start with gamepad support and a lot of the process has been streamlined.

From an EXTREMELY SUPERFICIAL experience, I find the Unreal engine just a little more stifling to work with because of their strong emphasis towards visual Blueprint programming and it's easier for me to get under the hood of Unity. Also, I don't completely share the disdain that people have for SRPs as I did originally (I really need to update my avatar) but only because I understand them a lot better now, but I think that the frontend for dealing with them is still very cryptic to the average end-user.

By contrast, Unity's new project window:

It's a lot more blank-slate. You have to import Unity's new input system packages and then set up things individually, so the process is not as streamlined, but people like me who have "paid the price" of learning how to deal with this will generally be okay while newcomers tend to get overwhelmed.

I think this mess was extremely avoidable. For one thing, when they released the original, cursed plan, they should have said: "we are considering going this route but we want your feedback. We would eventually like to have this settled by January 1st 2024."

Instead, they put out a very slick blog post and infographics that made this all look very official and CARVED IN STONE. And then they stonewalled us for 10 days when the pitchforks and torches came out, and they gaslit us with the "CONFUSION AND ANGST" line. It was so f---ing bad that "confusion and angst" is now practically a meme amongst the unity community.

Now, I've had my fun in the previous trashfire thread with my theoretical extrapolations of what the C-suite were up to based on the moldy scraps of what they fed us over those 10 days (colorful and romantic descriptions of execs fleeing in opulent escape-yachts), but over here, in this new trashfire afterparty, I have a clearer (though possibly equally inaccurate) mental depiction of what is going on in the Unity HQ (again, extrapolated based on what little they show us. "As a Large Language Model, the accuracy of my extrapolations improves with the transparency of the organization I am analyzing.")

Current extrapolation:

The C-Suite is made up of execs who have kept Unity afloat with venture capital. They're good at talking to people with extremely deep pockets. That's their main ability. They can also recognize potential value in companies, and the same can be said about JR, having acquired many very good companies in his various tenures as CEO during his notorious career. This skillset, sadly, does not necessarily come with the ability to manage those companies, nor does it include the insight into how Unity is experienced and used by developers. The C-Suite is not composed of people who fire up the Editor on a daily basis to work on a project or are involved with selling these projects. They instead witness outlier projects that manage to move billions of dollars and so their far-sighted vision focuses on those distant targets while blurring all the problems near to them (such as directing the focus of internal developer efforts on stuff like AI while there are still problems plaguing the editor). They are bold strategists, but lousy UTTERLY ABYSMAL tacticians.

The C-Suite IS comprised of "money-men", but this is not necessarily out of a greedy desire for the trappings of wealth, otherwise they would all be snorting recreational pharmaceuticals and smoking fine cigars with their feet up on the desk, but because that wealth is what they use to acquire companies like Weta Digital. Wealth is their hammer, and when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

With regards to the Unreal engine, Tim Sweeney, for all his faults, has made video games himself for a very, very long time. I've played a lot of his MS-DOS games, back when they came out on floppy disc, back when I could buy shareware games for a buck a piece or on CD compilations. So Tim actually understands what it's like to be a budding developer and I would say that he actually bends over backwards for developers even if it sometimes comes at the expense of customers (such as with those notorious epic store exclusives). Also, as the "underdog engine", I think that Tim generally can't afford to destroy the smaller business he has with unstable business moves, and since his engine is less suitable for mobile platforms and is more targeted towards desktop and consoles, it is less prone to the afflictions that often plague mobile markets, simply because fewer developers are using his engine and making fewer demands for mobile features.

 

Just what was needed!

 

I mean Unreal has its own set of "interesting" problems, plugins flying in limbo, being in experimental or beta state for years, but Unity is worse in this matter, that's for sure.

 

Complete was the wrong word but the functionality does feel polished even if it may not be. Unity on the other hand feels like every feature is at odds with the other features, and even when leaving development hell it's unfinished (eg DOTS is great but also missing a ton of stuff).

It definitely forces you down a very specific path while Unity largely lets you do as you want. I think in that regard it might be easy for some people to come to the conclusion that it's very difficult to get started when they're just trying to force their style onto an engine that wants nothing to do with it.

It also defaults to a very high quality preset like Unity but unlike Unity it includes Lumen which is incredibly slow on old hardware which tends to lead to the conclusion that it requires powerful hardware when it actually doesn't.

I never went in with disdain but I made the mistake of going in assuming that HDRP was the better pipeline only to discover later that URP was largely good enough while being way easier to use and having higher performance.

 

My architect has built me a bathroom. I paid for it. but, now, they are charging me a fee per poop.

 

Can you not avoid some of the expense by only flushing every few poops?

 

Why would you let an architect actually build anything? Besides the factual error what an architect actually does (sorry, I'm feeling smartass today), Unity doesn't build your game, you do. They provide the cement mixer, some cement, some water, a bunch of shovels and other equipment. And then charge you for when your guests are using the bathroom.


---
Also: hahaha, they unpinned the other thread (or I was just dreaming that it was pinned?) so it can be buried deep on later pages soon...

 

Unity's twitter account says:

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.​

This is unbelievable. Literally. Who is running the PR operation over there?

 

The 5 million is monthly, not quarterly.
So would still be $160K vs $50K in Unity, even with 4%

But now is $200K vs $50K, so the difference is devastating

And this is assuming a $5 game, if is $10 the Unity fee is much lower ($35K) and lowers further as price goes up

 

So you can just stay below 2023 LTS (for example 2023.1.xx) to not pay runtime fees?

 

Yes but you'll still need to pay the $2,000 for Pro to remove the splash screen