New products and prices coming soon

CryEngine is also very rough around the edges. From what I've heard, even more so than Unity. Although that information might be outdated already.

@rnakrani :
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Suppose you're a personal user who manages to make a game that makes him 100k $ in a year. For how long do you have to pay UT exactly? Can't you get a perpetual license after the 24 or 36 month subscription anymore? Do you have to pay UT for an indefinite amount of time or what?
I'm confused.

 

I'm confused myself. There needs to be some clarifications regarding perpetual licenses.

http://unity3d.com/migration-roadmap

"In June we are launching subscription-only licensing for Unity."

It seems pretty cut and dry, perhaps it is not?

 

Way too complex. I'm out, going to transition to unreal.

 

Ok lets make it simple,
You should have only two licenses "personal" and "pro":

personal:
- free - all included( profiler, lightmapper, etc..)
- no dark theme
- unity splash ( or maybe customisable splash)
- not eligible for services
- unity multiplayer 20 ccu (the only service available)
- build for : standalone ( mac, pc, linux), webGL,

pro:
- $25 per month ( 300 a year - 600 two years, close to the old license)
- dark theme
- no splash
- eligible for services ( + $ per service )
- unity multiplayer 50 ccu ( +$5 every 10ccu - decreasing prices over a certain amount)
- build for standalone ( mac, pc, linux), webGL, iOS, Android ( +$30 every other exotic build )

Unity version X license should be $550 - but should not pay for the services at the same price as pro subscription

I prefer the "pay for what you use" than "pay for everything you dont use"
It is better to have 40% of the community that pay $25 than 95% that pay $0


Guys from the community if you agree with this post quote it entirely

 

Or behave like a grown up and simply say that you agree with it. No need for spam here.

 

I have question about Unity multiplayer if I would have two licenses that would mean i get double the concurrent users? 400 in pro and 100 in plus?

 

I agree with most of the content, just not the price. I don't think this would be financially feasible model for UT. I would like to see "pay what you use" model, but it would have to be financially feasible for both, UT and its customers.

 

All I need to know if is for how long I have to pay UT.
Here's the thing: UE4 might be more expensive for successful games with their royalties, but there's certainly less risk involved (if my concerns turn out correct). The royalties scale with your income. If your income approaches 0$, so do the royalties you have to pay to Epic. Or in other words: If you make your game in UE4, the license costs won't ever be a problem because the game will always pay for them by itself.

If you have to subscribe to Unity for as long as you sell your game that made +100k $ once, you're still going to have to pay if your sales are 0 in a few years.
That's what scares me. (135$ + taxes)/mo might not be much for someone who just made a hundred thousand dollars plus, but you cannot know whether there are hard times ahead of you or not.

Can I get a perpetual license after the subscription, if I launch a Unity game made with Unity Personal in the future?
That's all I want to know.

 

@bugsbunny :
Thanks for that. I'll wait for someone to confirm that though.

 

I own Unity Pro + ios Pro + Android Pro since Unity 3.x.

I strongly dislike the new scheme. It's actually a price increase without a clarification on what happens with updates when you choose the pay to own option. (My guess is: pay more to get updates.)

Say what you want. The best comment from the blog is this:

Hey Microsoft, can you please buy Unity as you did with Xamarin and make it completely free and open-source?
Yes you’ve been evil in the 90s-2000s but you’re becoming so cool… we promise a lot of HoloLens apps…

 

This is where unreal's payments scheme wins every time, 5% of nothing is nothing which is what 90+% of unity users are going to make. Sorry folks but that's the sad truth of today's over saturated games market. With unity's payment options most of you will be out of pocket. At least unreal has a more honest payments plan, it costs you only when you actually have the income to pay for it.

At least some good has come of this unity announcement, it forced me to download and try Unreal again, this time in anger. I'm currently porting one of my games to it and so far it's going great. C++ can be written in a much more c# manner and is not so different. I've even spent some time making the Editor view ports set up and looking like I have it in Unity with their version of hierarchy and property's all placed the same so it's becoming less alien by the hour.

Shame on you UT for the blatant cash grab, giving those of us that actually want to pay such sh1t options. I'm now so glad I never upgraded to 5 pro. The plus option just highlights that whoever makes these decisions at unity really doesn't understand or know who their end users are. #fedupwithunity

 

Are you sure, the migration Unity -> UE4 is so straightforward task ?
Besides language change, UE4 uses other terminology and I think there is a lot of devil's in the detail.
I've also tried to go with UE4, however as 2-persons team it was very hard for me to switch (although I know C++ well) and I've stayed with Unity. Besides I've spent couple of hundreds $ in Asset Store :/

 

Phew! glad the thread remained in the powerful direction I left it. Well done guys - you're giving Unity clear feedback without trolling - lots of truth said in an adult way. That can only be a good thing, sending a clear message.

In other news, I was surprised at the roadmap for migrating everyone to a subscription. I think these subscription plans work fine if there's no competition. But If UE4 was to drop it's royalty model in favour of subscriptions there would be problems with the structure of it. Let's compare with 3DSMax which has classically had similar purchase pricing: http://www.autodesk.com/products/3ds-max/subscribe

It's a lot. But you get a lot. Frankly, Unity is still underpriced - I mean you could be thinking about 200k per seat licensing in the old days for some engines. So that's ultimately fair. I am torn because a) I know Unity needs to put the price up b) it is actually becoming harder to monetize people who were on the fence.

I guess Unity's game plan is to personally contact existing pro users to upgrade them with a sweet upgrade deal, and get the people on the fence (who weren't sure about pro before) to try out plus. To do this they need to think splash I guess. I don't think raising the revenue cap is a major deal. I don't care if it's 100k or 200k. At those scales (with plus) I guess they want the small indie and the small indie team.

The problem I'm having at the moment is why everyone considers the splash as an object of value. That's the stick, not the carrot. This says the services aren't good enough.

 

Terminology is different is all but not un learnable. Assets in the form of art and sound just import fine, I just import the package to unity then grab them out from there. Code assets are not so easy but then I consider myself a good coder so this isn't a problem either. There's nothing like this new payments scheme to incentivise you to get your hands dirty. Besides its fun to learn new things, keeps alzheimers at bay too.

 

Their updates just break things anyway.

 

whoooho in march 2017 came the ImageEffects(ProOnly) back...yes we all have waiting for this

 

Because having the Unity splash screen means you used a free version of an engine aimed at new developers. It doesn't promote a very professional impression.

 

I don't know why it's so hard to understand about the splash screen, I personally was a games player long before becoming a developer so for me it's easy to know what like minded gamers think. Because unity made the tool so available to the masses, the stores are full of dire games that the first thing you see is the unity splash screen. You can't help making the direct association that if it's written using Unity there is a very good chance the game is crap. Now the game has an uphill task to change the players mind and with the typical mobile player having the attention span of a gold fish it's a recipe for disaster. I'd pay the $35 per month if it got rid of that handicap and you can bin all the rest of the shovel ware services.

I'd like to add I've invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into Unity and don't want to change engine willingly, Unity with its business model is pushing me away more than Unreal is pulling me towards it.

 

OK so how would you suggest Unity actually solves it? It's one thing to lambast Unity when you're not happy but another thing to actually constructively suggest how it would work? It has to work because they need money. You need Unity. So where's that middle ground that results in a business handshake.

 

it puzzles me why Unity makes announcements regarding pricing without more explicit details for paid-up Pro users like myself. I understand that they're at a conference but this sort of brou-ha-ha has occurred before and could have been anticipated. There's no way I'm going to switch engines, but honestly why have the drama when there could have been some clarification for the paid-up pro users at the time of the announcement? Statements like "you'll be contacted with a personalized offer" are too vague - a more explicit or even a ballpark figure for the horde of us that are significant paying customers would have been the right path. Why have all the public-relations drama every time that they make a big change? It really is pretty poor planning, folks.

 

May i ask why you would accept someone elses advertisement in your commercial product if you bought parts from them? Have you ever seen a Siemens or Bosch logo on a Mercedes Benz just because some gears or electrical parts are used to build the car?

 

It's be said over and over again, for the plus option at 35 per month raise the income cap to 200k, get rid of the unity splash screen and allow us to have our own and stop being petty and let us skin the app to our colour choice. Then the plus tier actually gives us something over the free tier and we still need to pay more when and if we are actually financial successful. 100k is not being successful, it's ok for a one man band but add just one extra developer into you team and the 100k is nowhere near high enough.

Currently no one in his right mind would pay for the plus tier, just stick with the free version, unity will make millions if it could convert even a small percentage of its free user base to paying customers, plus doesn't do this at all.

 

I think the real question is why does Unity suddenly need 2 to 6 times as much money from every Pro developer. I'd actually expect the product to get cheaper as they get more developers using it, not more expensive. At least not so drastically.

 

How sweet that upgrade deal should be? I'm literally forced to pay 4-6 times the current upgrade price to get the next major version. What deal can compensate this?
Even people that own Unity Pro + iOS Pro + Android Pro had to pay $2250 for one upgrade previously, and now will have to pay $3000-$4500 (2-3 years lifecycle).
This new price scheme is bad for everyone, except the small part of the 9.5% that were subscribed to Unity Pro + iOS Pro + Android Pro, which is what, 3% of the entire user base?

 

For a small indie team the services just aren't necessary or all that useful. All of them are available free from other vendors (and in some cases, such as advertising, you really wouldn't want to tie down to a single source as you'll need to use and adjust based on where the income is coming from).

The other issue there is, while paying for one seat to 'buy' those services might be justifiable if you're going to use them, if you need more than one Unity seat, you're paying for all the same services twice. Even though your company will only be using them once.

If you're not doing f2p most of the services are pointless. If you're a 1 or 2 man team or not planning on being massively cross platform, cloud builds are pointless. Again, it's a usage case thing, but the Pro subscription 'values' all seem to be based entirely on one use case.

As I've said before. The splash screen is the killer issue for most devs. In the early days of Unity, it was pretty cool for some developers, but generally speaking your average Unity game was bloated and pretty amateur looking. Nowadays, you can do a *lot* more with it and experienced developers can get a lot out of it. Unfortunately, because there's a free version that you can release games with, 99% of the Unity games on the App Store are essentially junk. So when the average player downloads a game and sees "Made with Unity" on the front, they tend to associate it with those junk apps. There *are* exceptions to the rule of course (getting "Made With Unity" on the front of the Hitman Go games was a very good idea) and a percentage of knowledgeable gamers will make it past that point without prejudice, but generally, having that screen on the front of your game is a big penalty and makes you look unprofessional.

The editor skins thing btw is complete nonsense. It has no value whatsoever, but gets dangled as a "pro" feature because all the previously useful pro features have been given away for free. Make it a free feature and let everyone create new editor schemes and customisations on the Asset Store. There's a whole new revenue stream there.

 

I've had a night to think of this...and I'm ok with the price increase.. for NEW users only. Hopefully, the deals they offer existing pro customers in the "subscribe-to-own" plans are worth it. I can understand that in order to keep development going they need more income, but this pricing scheme suggests the opposite of "democratization"...at least as far as pro users are concerned. Why they didn't announce more information about upgrade paths and prices for pro users is beyond me....this entire thread could have been avoided. I, like others find it infuriating that I can't bake a decent light map in gamma space 1.5 years after initial release...

Either way, If I was looking at purchasing Unity Pro going forward as a new user, it would be a difficult decision. Many people are going to find a 3k investment steep vs 1.5k. I wonder what the plan is for the academic pricing?

It is almost like they intend to reduce the amount of pro users in favor of plus and personal users.

 

I think you guys shall remove splash screen.. the people who make good games do not use it and the one who uses mostly create bad games so what common audience think that all Unity made game sucks....

 

Well, unity now doesnt have a way to compete with old unity for be used only one platform .

 

Even if all the services were free I would not use them. I don't need them. Don't want them. They offer absolutely no value to me, and it seems many other people are the same. Because of this we are left with the 'petty' differences between versions... the silly UI color, and the Splash Screen.

I understand it's 2016 and Unity needs to raise prices on their paid tier in order to grow as a company. I completely support this. I am heavily invested in Unity and want them to grow and dominate forever! However you can't grow as a company and also jack over your longterm loyal user base and not see consequences. Trying to hide a price increase by couching it in the corporate 'new exciting products' doublespeak is aggravatingly dishonest and makes me wonder how this company will be changing long-term. Just say you need to increase prices and offer a few additional small benefits and people would not feel like they were being bent over the table.

For me (a current perpetual Unity 5 Pro license holder focused on Desktop) I would be more than willing to upgrade to the 'Plus' tier IF they REMOVED the splash screen. I would still be paying more money to Unity than I do now, but at least I would not be getting less features for that extra money.

 

Based on the official replies in the blog post comment section I think there will be no discount at all.

 

The better option might be to reduce revenue cap.

On splash screen I think you can add watermark somewhere on our custom splash screen.

Also give dark theme to everyone as it contradicts "Personal stays as it is. Free and fully featured" isn't dark theme is editor feature too?

Highly relying on this two features to increase "pro subscribers" doesn't seems good strategy....

 

On a different note, comparing how engine X is less buggy than Unity doesn't automatically make Unity better, forking out so much money with so certain outdated features and components is really irking. Terrain is still terrible, SpeedTree is still broken, new input is being worked on and current version opened to anyone, nested prefab is still long from being done, Enlighten still has major issues, the promised progressive lightmap baking is still not being released (despite the final version of 5.4 is to be released by the end of this month), and many more.

I'm not saying other engines have it better too, they also have roadmaps that promised a bit too much and hadn't deliver yet, broken and buggy features, each of them have their pros and cons, but at least you don't pay and have crucial bugs and such at the same time. That's not justifiable.

However, I do like the new direction Unity has taken, opening up the betas to everyone and not just Pro, emphasising on high end visuals and image effects/post processors, but at the same time, these new licensing schemes are doing exactly the opposite for anyone to be enthusiastic about them. We are finally getting .NET/Mono Upgrades in 5.5, new GC, Director/Sequencer, but I just don't see how anyone who is either a licensee or plans on releasing a commercial game can be enthusiastic about features that will eventually cost much more when other engines already done it a long time ago. When you look only at Unity, you see these as great features, that they are finally stepping up the game, but at the same time, when you look at other engines, you will think it's not a big deal what Unity is doing right now.

Getting a bunch of services that are more or less for teams who are heavily invested into mobile games is not what everyone is interested or willing to pay for just because. You may have no royaltees to pay, but you definitely loose more if the sales of your game doesn't meet its trajectory. "We succeed with you even if you don't".

 

By making the plus version have a fully customizable splash screen. $420 a year to remove a splash screen for an indie making less than a hundred grand is way more than fair. Everything else in the plus plan is literally worthless to me.

I'm a current perpetual pro user, and if this pricing model stays the same my likely plan is to hold on to my version of Unity 5 as long as I can, likely years, until I will be forced to use the free version. This is bad for both me, and Unity. This whole thing is ridiculous.

 

If you don't want to go on the new subscription offer, you can stay on your current subscription with the same price you are paying today until July 2018.

 

The Epic EULA is strict that you have to credit them in-game regardless if they allow you to see a splash or not. So perhaps that stipulation can be added to counterbalance the splash being removed on plus (if it were to happen).

 

Will Unity Plus offer a team license, or is that feature still restricted to Unity Pro & Enterprise?

 

You have to admit, that UI skin is pretty dank.

 

About the Splash Screen:

I understand that Unity can't give it away for free as they need to make money and this is an enticing feature.So, I agree to require Personal Edition users to use an official Unity splash screen.

But I would love to have the option to choose from several premade splash screens with slightly different designs, so I could use one that works better with my kind of game. I am mostly talking about background colors here. For example, the current splash screen in the 5.4 beta has a white background. My game currently starts with a dark background Color and bright font, so the transition from pure white to essentially black is very jarring. If I had the option to choose a splash screen that had a dark background and a bright logo, the startup sequence of my game would be a lot smoother.

Having the option to freely choose the background color would be even better (to match a theme color of your game maybe) but at least having the option of choosing a dark or bright splash screen might already help a lot.

 

So many people say they don't need or use the services, so UT bundling more services to the Plus sub without a custom splash screen kills its value entirely. Pro has it all, but there's nothing for users who don't want the splash and don't want anything else beyond Free.

They really, really should make it like so, simple as that:

- Free: full engine, splash screen, no services (or very basic ones)
- Plus: full engine, custom splash, some services
- Pro: full engine, custom splash, all services

This will make people upgrade from Free to Plus in no time, and big developers would see value in Pro. That is what it should be from the beginning.

 

We're discussing internally what would make sense for the customisable splash screen for Plus. We are open to suggestions on what could possibly work, as it hasn't been set in stone yet.

 

after having the night to think about it...

I will continue to use unity 5 pro and not upgrade to subscription.

what features do i need?
The features I needed had been delayed for so long that I've already purchased the plugins.

We had to wait to 5.3.2 until it was stable enough so when that time comes with unity has this new feature do you want to upgrade, the answer will be hell no, not even if you paid me. maybe in 6 months time I might but that new feature probably broke everything including the forum and the kitchen sink.

i'm really trying to think hard what do i need? (what feature would make me want to upgrade)
well my game has all the tools I need. there not great but then none of unity's official tools have ever been great.
All i need now is more art and a stable version of unity. oh and hats off to you guys fixing the bugs, unity in its current state is very stable indeed.

could anyone tell me what features would you need to make you upgrade? lets just say the price was the same as before?

 

Question I didn't see being answered:

If I subscribe to current Pro today, will I be able to migrate to new Pro/Plus when it launches, or will I be bound to a 12-month contract on the old Pro?

 

Fully customizable, no Unity logo. For $420 a year even then I feel it's overpaying for it.

 

I want my 750,- $ upgrade

 

Fully customizable is the best way to go. People are paying for the engine every month, after all.

Possibly let them enable the Unity splash with a checkbox or by not making their own, some people would like to use it. If then, make a special one, to give a more professional look to their game (something like Unreal's splash).

If, after 9 pages of discussion, UT still fears that their engine and services are not worth it to ask the higher price of Pro and must lock it down using the splash screen, turn it into a mandatory watermark at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds, and let us customize the splash. It's a lot more discreet, does the job for you, delivers more value to our products and everybody wins.

 

You might as well just sell the dark skin separately, because that's all people are interested in when it comes to the Unity Plus subscription.

I do admit that it is disappointing when free engines such as Unreal Engine 4 offer customization as a right to owning the engine, versus a privilege of payment.

 

Just clarifying: I'm saying that Unity fears that the Pro doesn't have value so they must lock the other ones under a splash screen, but I truly believe they are wrong! There is great value in Pro, and there would be subscribers to it. In the future, new services could be added just to Pro, and everybody else would have to pay separately, increasing its value. There's no need to force professionals into subscribing to a license they see no value or need.

 

Unity claims this to be an improvement to their previous pricing plans, but this feels more like a desperate attempt for more income.

Events such as this make customer really consider switching to free engines such as Unreal Engine 4 or Cryengine.

 

It's not a right. You need permission, and it's spelled out in the EULA. You also have to mandatory add credit in your credits regardless if splash is used or not.

for people previously having to license multiple platforms it is an improvement, and it is an improvement for personal users. It just doesn't help the middle segment (where plus is focused).