Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

I think because it's so variable to the number of people you have, people just default to 1 license. If you look at an indie studio in the same way as any other business, but assume that at a small company everyone has a license, about 1/3 of revenue goes to salaries, which means you're looking at $250k to $300k revenue per employee on staff if you're hitting the $1 million threshold to require Pro. Meaning that once it kicks in, you're likely to need around 4 licenses, but it could be higher depending on total revenues and other stuff. Based on that, one can make a pretty ballpark estimate that Pro licenses are probably going to take up about 1% of your revenues on average. Maybe a little less (5 licenses would be 1% in that situation), but 1% is a nice round number to add on to the other charges.

Unreal doesn't really matter much here except to compare rates. Either Unity or Unreal has to be more expensive, that's just how it works, but being the more expensive option isn't necessarily a deal breaker. It's all about what you get for the money spent.

What people should focus on, is if the terms are acceptable or not. That runtime fee really isn't acceptable to me, so I won't be using versions of Unity where it applies. Because quite simply, Unity was and seemingly still is willing to completely burn down their company to include it when there's other accepted ways of getting the same or more revenue. Without a lot more explanation as to why it's there and what Unity is expecting to get from it in the future I can't trust agreeing to it right now.

 

Yes you can (you should be once they change the ToS to allow this).
But eventually, mobile platform support will catch up with you and you will have to upgrade.

And as @Praetorian1 correctly points out, you will need Pro to remove splash screen. Updated pricing of Pro is soon to be revealed. Presumably it will be higher, not lower than the current 2000/year.

 

It's all multiplication. You pay 5% of your revenue just like you pay 2.5% of your Unity revenue. Ignore that highly deceptive calculator and just do the math yourself. It's not hard.

$4.000.000 * 5% = $200K
$4.000.000 * 2.5% = $100K

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal

 

At 5 million monthly revenue, your budgets are so high, that you can get a custom licensing with Unreal upfront for a prearranged price.

 

Not really, the 2.5% is the worst case scenario in Unity, if you game price is very low. If is high can be nearly nothing.

 

If you're making millions of dollars you're not going to have a high price and few sales. You're just twisting it to sell your side because you want to keep people here buying your assets (which I've bought some of and now deeply regret my purchases of seeing your reasoning).

 

Ah, yes... The guests... but, what is the engagement here? poop per pounds, or urine per liters? And it is based on self reporting, right? I should watch my guests how much they do to keep record of this data, otherwise, my architect will use an estimate. By the way, how does my architect collect that data?

 

There is one possible problem also - mostly for non mobile games (AA titles) - all new editor features will be introduced in 2023 LTE, to keep you want to update.

 

HA! "Running" is not even the right word for what they're doing to their PR operation. I think one of the biggest problems is that Public Relations even exists as a concept. PR is, more often than not, a sort of filter for how an organization deals with the public. It often obfuscates and manipulates. It rarely speaks plainly and rarely for the public's benefit. If you want to be transparent, you don't have PR-trained people. You instead come out and speak forthrightly and truthfully and have two-way conversations and make yourself vulnerable, rather than constantly conniving ways to say things in a way that will be interpreted the way you want.

PR is a mask for organizations. I hate being talked to by masks.

The people within your organization can talk behind closed doors to figure out what you want to do with your company and to decide a way forwards and to get your stories straight but eventually, one of you will have to come forwards and not only speak the truth but to engage people in the crowd on an individual basis to field questions. And sometimes, a hard question will come along for which you DON'T have a good answer, one that may even put you on the spot.

That's what making yourself vulnerable is. So, you have to take that lump, and you have to say: "You made a really good point. I don't have an answer for you right now. We have to talk about this. I'll have an answer for you in about 3 days." And then you can go and talk with your organization heads and then 3 days later, you either tell them you have an answer, or you ask for more time to think about the problem.

What you DON'T do, when you're put on the spot like that is to make up some vague reason or lie because anything but the actual truth leaves open a gap for us to interpret things, and we will ALWAYS envision the worst, and it means you have to have a very good memory to maintain a coherent structure of lies, and when the charade is revealed it will destroy trust along with your ability to make convincing statements, and ironically, also make it harder to lie in the future.

 

Personally I'm ok without the new features Are we talking features that are production ready on Unity's standards? Yeah, I'm ok without them.

 

The calculator is what they will be charging with, why would ever ignore it ?

See the example above, Unreal will ask $100K and Unity only $10K. 10x more for a $20 game!

 

I mean they prepared for this and probably that's why they are delaying 2023LTS too...

 

You have way more confidence than I do, and what's worse is it's unfounded confidence.

 

Unlikely. Mobile build tools aren't built into Unity. You can build Android or iOS with any version of Unity, you just need to install the proper version of the tools and link them. Console support could be an issue though, Unity has dodged that question, but I seriously doubt that a Playstation 6 whenever it comes out will have Unity 2022 support to build.

 

I just state the facts from the calculator, nothing more or less.

 

Console support will be an issue. I've had to deal with them in the past and it's a real headache. Unity versions often don't line up between them.

A calculator you don't understand or know the formulas for. You're taking a company at their word when said word is worthless.

 

Totally agree about PR operations in general. But usually they're more competent than this. If you're going to lie to our faces, at least make it a little bit believable.

 

$10k per month, that is a monthly fee.

 

Which multiplied by 12 is $120K. Funny how that works.

 

If so, then the new editor better be a striking one. for example, nanite like feature that enables handling of 1000 times of current polygon count handling, then a realtime indirect lighting solution with no baking, procedural generation tools that can easily be used by anyone, not to mention quixel quality assets to be used inside the engine... those are dreams... the reality is: let them make those weird editor layout exceptions go, let them fix the Render Texture exception in HDRP slowing down both editor play mode and the build, they should fix some weird bug preventing me to download my paid assets from asset store, etc... can you feel the distance? Like 10 AUs or more...

 

Indeed, same is the $100K for Unreal, in that month. All is calculated with $2 Million per month assumption, for $20 game and 100K sales in the month.

2 million x 5% = $100K

In a year is $1.2 million in Unreal and $120K in Unity

 

$4.000.000 * 5% = $200K lifetime. To pay $100K per month the game has to make $24.000.000.

 

Yes, agreed to that, if you go by year.

I just take a single month for simplicity.

 

Seeing that your simplicity is leading to incorrect math I think you shouldn't try to simplify.

 

My brain hurts. Unity have let me down. Everything is just one big pile of bullshit. There is only one cure and one way to end the headache, uncertainty, paranoia and confusion.

This is my last post here. I'm going elsewhere. I'm not going to say where but it will be somewhere where I am confident that I won't ever have to go through this kind of bullshit again.

Hand on a hot stove etc.

 

I certainly hope that Unity will build and run flawlessly on newer platform targets. I'm just worried that changes in OS or newer hardware will collide with older Unity code, and it will not get fixed on the 2022 LTS.
But, I didn't yet get the math straight on whether to stay on 2022 or go for 2023 while being potentially subject to new fees.
On newer projects I don't care, I will not work with Unity on those.

 

0:47

 

The reality is that when you calculate with over 24m$ you can negotiate a custom licence with unreal.

99% are like " Oh no my single Developer Game which i sell for 30$ sells 20m times, and Epic cost me a Million dollar more, no Diamond collar for Brutus." Maybe start playing national lottery, for less work and same chance.

 

By the way, following this link to the Unreal EULA i discovered that in Oculus store the first 5,000,000 are waived.
That is some special program for Oculus store? I don't remember anything like that.

ii. the first $5,000,000 in lifetime gross revenue for each Royalty Product from the Oculus Store (or its successor).

OK everyone, I'm dropping out of the Runtime Fee Math thread

Good luck to everyone on adjusting to the new reality!

 

People like you will probably never be satisfied anyway?

Yes, from $200,000 you have to use Pro. So what?

You've had to use Unity Pro for $100,000 and up since 2005 anyway. Now it's $200,000, what's the problem? It's better now than it's ever been.

Both want fees starting over a million. If you made a $1,080,000 within the last 12 months and you had more than a million downloads Unity starts to be ALWAYS cheaper for you. (for a single developer)
If you sold 999,999 copies for $30 then you made almost $30,000 but you owe Unity nothing. Same scenario with Unreal and you would owe Epic $1.5 million.

 

Afterlife?

 

Exactly, Unity fees are always lower to vastly lower than Unreal, potentially by multiple millions, depending on game pricing.

 

That would be against the retroactive TOS: the architect will guesstimate the average poop per person in each household and could sue you if it doesn't match your report.

 

Pro has been getting increasingly expensive.

 

(It was always $200k.) Sorry it is $200k for 7 years now. If you reached $100k, you could buy a Plus subscription for $300-$400 per year (which also had the option to hide the splash screen if you wanted). They just deleted it.

 

- Encroach ten steps
- Apologize while taking only half a step back

 

Unity Plus came out in 2016. Prior to that it was just Personal with $100K and Pro.

This. Once upon a time you paid $1,500 for a perpetual license and $750 if you wanted to move to the next major version. A major version occupied a two year period on average making it $750/yr upfront and $375/yr to upgrade.

Unity is considerably more expensive now than they were before, and the best part is back then they were turning a profit according to Aras.

 

- We have very bad news for you: you will be pay a new Runtime Fee.

- Oh no please no!

- We have good news for you, you will be pay a new "monthly initial engagements" fee.

- Thanks.

 

It's pretty unlikely. You can build for the latest Android builds using Unity 2017 right now if you want. The build tools for mobile are really flexible but sometimes can be a pain to get configured correctly. It's possible that eventually you'll run into problems but it's difficult to say when that might be. Certainly not in the next couple years.

If I were going to put money on a bet, I would bet that VR headset SDK's will be the first thing that require updates to 2023 to avoid breaking. Followed by Apple's headset (I would include Hololens 2 here too, but it got discontinued so won't see updates). Then WebGL. Then the next generation of consoles. PC and mobile are likely to work though for a long long time.

 

8

Except just a few days ago Unity was claiming they had proprietary tech that could do that estimation calculation to such a level of accuracy that we could totally trust them to tell us how much we owe them with zero input from ourselves!

Again the communication from Unity is so inconsistent I have to wonder why they allow, or rather expect any Unity employee to even comment on this stuff. That is not meant to be a dig at you, I’ve known you long enough from your activities on the forums, before being an employee that you love Unity but also are part of the community, but the inconsistency of comments is really making it hard to give Unity as a company the benefit of the doubt

 

The terms are 2023 and later has a runtime fee. None of the language so far suggests the actual fee table is locked to an editor version. It appears they can change that at will.

At least we have a way out for now. Stay on 2022, don't upgrade. You're probably going to want to consider other engines in future projects too. I've got nothing against paying Unity more money, I would be fine with a 2.5% revenue share. But I do not trust a runtime fee, that even up until now they've shown nothing but bad faith in explaining, advocating for, and insisting on.

They're willing to burn their company down over something that amounts to pennies when people are willing to pay a lot more with more industry standard payment terms. Everyone should be skeptical of that.

 

They had people in the forums answering people on that point last night. And the answer amounted to, "why can't you upgrade to 2023?".

I'm on 2022 right now, but might revert to 2021 if 2022 doesn't get proper support. It's going to be 4 or 5 years minimum before I consider going past that. I expect Unity won't do much with the runtime fee for a couple years, then a few people will make games with it after that, and then Unity might try to up the fees and monetize more. There's no trust there now.

And while Unity to their credit did come up with a solution that makes me willing to continue using Unity, they are doing nothing to build trust, and even further erode trust in convincing me to upgrade.

 

No thanks

 

Is there any prediction on when the 2023 LTS version will be released? I can't wait to get rid of the splash screen, it has always bothered me, even before the recent events.

 

Being a public company we can also estimate how much they get from seat licenses. The create solutions division of their 10K is seat license revenue plus their other subscriptions. Given how unpopular those are, most of it can be assumed to be Pro licenses. 380,000 developers with Pro is how many are out there as an upper bound. Numbers in the past have come out between 250k and 300k, so that seems to track with their public reports.

 

Check the article after you've watched. He makes a number of corrections in it.

 

The longer I absorb these new changes, along with comments on the forum and other social media the more concerned I find myself that this isn’t over. My greatest worry is that we still don’t have actual TOS, so even if you are happy with the proposed new plan, we have nothing that enshrines it into a legal framework.

How long will we have to wait for the TOS? Days, weeks or months?

What if when the TOS appears Unity have screwed it up again? I mean the level of incompetence shown from Unity is astounding, from the original proposal, to the explanation of why TOS GitHub was removed, to Marc Whitten not even knowing about the GitHub TOS and wilful ignorance of all the warnings. I just don’t know if I trust Unity to get it right.

This is of course all assuming the new proposal is good and with the more replies I see here, plus issues that were immediately obvious I think it still has serious problems. A large part of the problem comes from the fact that the plan is still needlessly convoluted, with two different fee metrics, double dipping (subs + fees), weird terminology (engagements), fees on monthly basis ( I make games , I’m not an accountant), etc.

Not to mention that Pro and Enterprise pricing is going to increase, but they can’t tell us by how much yet, even though that could seriously adversely affecting the calculations people are making as to if this is a good deal!

The only absolutely positive from this new proposal is the commitment to not have it act retroactively in any form, that it will only affect products created from 2023LTS onwards. If nothing else that at least means if you want and can switch engines you don’t have to worry about any future payments to Unity.

I find myself so disheartened by all of this as I want Unity to succeed and remain viable for years to decades to come, but I don’t think they have found the solution yet and honestly probably need to go back to the drawing board.

 

It was better when nobody forced anyone to pay anything for nothing.
Also note that those Pro license pricing costs aren't final. Plus is gone but now you're forced to buy Pro. Which costs even more.

That and the whole gaslighting thing.

At this point I'd say costs are equal unless taken to an extreme edgecases. Which means whoever has the best reputation wins in the long run.


Tl;DR: you do you. I've had an interesting dive into Unreal today, and it was surprisingly enlightening to see how it's done otherwise.
I've never thought Unity could become this mess, but this timeline just keeps delivering.

As a small indie dev I've got plenty of opportunities and choices.
And its wiser just to pick the best engine for my case - pay 0. Not pros or fees.

As a sole entrepreneur I'm still bound by contract to Unity.

 

Nothing precise, but check the official thread here https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...updates-for-graphics-and-performance.1482069/