Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Totally this, the tacking on of AI features that will mostly go unused by devs, and forced tooling integrations as some means of justifying this is just so utterly pathetic. I just cannot fathom what reality whoever suggested this lives in. 400% price hike for features you don't want + up to 150% of your profit margin on mobile. What a complete joke.

 

Just to add to the long list of potential edge cases people are discussing here regarding how installs are determined:

I have one Unity project that is split into two separate games, Baldi's Basics Plus (BBP) and Baldi's Basics Classic Remastered (BBCR). Each game exists in a git branch of the same project. Despite sharing most of the same framework they are separate games (One essentially being a sequel to the other). BBP is a $10 early access title that has not met either threshold. BBCR is a free title that has met the lifetime installs threshold, but since it's free obviously not the income threshold.

What I'm wondering is, will Unity recognize these as two separate games, or will installs of BBCR count towards installs of BBP? If, in the month I launch BBP version 1.0, I see a big enough increase in sales that I pass the income threshold, will I have to start paying for installs of BBCR as well as BBP? I just want to know that whatever method is being used to determine installs won't confuse the two games as being one. I wasnt know what defines a separate game under this system.

 

There are no words to describe how baffling this is.

 

don't try to discuss with them , just boycott and move to another engine , we should have left from the day their CEO called us F****ing Idiots

 

I'm personally considering Unreal. Not that different, plus theres tons of advices on how to move your project between un*ty and Unreal in the internet. Might even consider a partial exclusivity deal with them.

 

If you make over 200k / year from donations, that's pretty impressive! Otherwise you won't pay a dime.

 

Because they

But right on time for an official post today that we all get in email.

 

Last week i was so happy to get the ok in the company from higher up that something new would be done with newer engine than the old crap orge3d version from god knows when, but now i just can trash all ideas regarding that.

 

Don't understand me wrong but I think it's best for everyone here to stay on topic. There are millions of Unity developers out there, this is a huge thing. And they're currently all keeping an eye on this exact thread.

 

a small list of side effects to this plan:
- firstly, how are installs tracked and monitored? Does every runtime come with spyware and need an internet connection?
- how will revenue be reported?
- do pirated installs count?
- i guess charity bundles are no longer viable as they may cost thousands of dollars, regardless of revenue for the dev
- angry players can mass install and re-install a game they don't like, knowing it costs the developers money. or bad actors can ransom this for payment
- will copies that get refunded still count as an install?
- will demos count as an install?
- if a game on steam is multi-platform, I assume each platform install is counted?
- are installs during the game's development counted against the lifetime install? or copies sent to external QA, which could easily count up as hundreds of installs before the game is released?
- game pass and other subscription services count? even though the dev likely receives a one time payment of participation?
- do streaming services count as installs, and how?

unbelievably ill thought through plan. to say this disgusts me is an understatement.

 

It goes this way almost every time. Go publicly traded, the shareholders are more important than the consumers. Every. Single. Time.

Extract as much money as possible, company goes under, find a new company to do it to.

 

I just wonder why they couldnt just do what any normal company would and do a regular rev share

 

Unreal Engine in 2020
Alongside the reveal of Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games today also announced a change to the pricing of Unreal Engine. Previously the cost to use the engine for building games was a 5% royalty on gross revenue of the game. Now Epic says it will waive the royalties for the first $1 million in revenue, and then resume the 5% fee from there. This is a permanent change and applies retroactively to revenue from January 1st, 2020.

That works out to mean developers get back $50,000 (not counting platform royalties) from that first $1 million that would otherwise be paid in engine royalties.

Epic already waives engine royalties on all revenue generated from games sold on the Epic Games Store (where it instead collects a flat 12% platform royalty), but this change now means that games built with Unreal Engine and sold elsewhere will get a sweeter deal. Unreal Engine is also free for personal use, free projects, and linear content creation.

Unity in 2023....

 

Hey @Mike-Geig, I would appreciate a response to this: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/page-8#post-9290629

I'd like to confirm that this policy is based on game revenue alone and doesn't factor in the company's actual profitability?

 

Thank you Mike for some insights.

I have my doubts about this one though. I mean, one could potentially make a pirated version and sell the download link to it in its own custom shop. That way Unity would only track 1 install and lever out the tracking, right? Or how does it work?

Thx

 

So if I make a free game out of passion, with unity, without any kind of monetization
And the game go viral
I would suffer from my success and go bankrupt ?

 

If you need your game porting to unreal, send me a message

 

So like, DLCs and subscriptions wont count as additional installs but can bring new revenue to a game. lol. this will just promote different price models. more junk.

 

+1

 

Curious, what team? Legal team? CEOs? Who is the one to look at and say "This guy is the one that caused this." I want to avoid any future business dealings with said person.

 

Yeah, I agree. This is the sneakiest part of this announcement. Doing away with Plus is horrible.

 

That does not make sense, What about games distributed for free? Imagine a free game with 1 million installs, would that generate debt? pffff...

 

Does this mean I can have a "preview" version of my game which is free, and then a paid version of the game with more features, and the downloads are counted separately?
If so, this will be the only way to create a freemium game in Unity going forward as this per-download fee has otherwise tanked the business model completely. This is because acquiring users is not free, it costs money on ads, and most users will not pay any money for the download.

 

The only logical reason for this would be an attempt to get around insider trading laws? Maybe I should ask the SEC.

 

You can transfer projects from Unity to unreal? What the hell am I still doing here complaining. Thanks for the heads up, gonna check out some videos on that and see the process.

 

@Mike-Geig thank you for your patience, a video by Gamefromscratch just dropped that openly criticizes and what could be considered "hates on" Unity for this move, bringing a lot of fresh attention.

I would like to know one thing: was there ever any indication by Unity that this was going to happen?

I think a lot of frustration on our part comes from this change being completely out of the blue. There's a saying: don't come between a man and his meal. Ultimately, I don't care if you take away some revenue if it means I can sustain my way of living. But I don't know if that will be true. And I don't know if that will be true in the future. Unity comes out of nowhere with this insane breach of trust to its users.

I don't think Unity has done a good job of communicating how much money will be lost per money gained. A percentage of 5% is easy because I know exactly what I'm up against. x per user is scary because now I have to make sure I earn at least x per user. This holds true even if the $200.000 limit applies: you may find yourself in a situation where crossing that limit starts losing you money per user if you are a free to play highly distributed mobile game.

 

oh, I see, I thought it was if you made over 200k per year OR got over 200k installs.

Still, that is such an absurd business model

 

As someone who is still just learning Unity and not really invested in an ecosystem yet, seeing this type of thing, even if the whole thing is backtracked in an hour, makes me seriously completely reconsider if I want to invest my time and energy into it at all. It raises huge questions about the decision making is going on internally right now and the long term vision for the engine.

Unity is much more in line with the type of projects I want to make, but none of that matters if I don't feel like I can trust the ecosystem to not sabotage its developers. I'm sure i'm not the only one thinking this. Thanks Mike and the other PR people who'll need to take the brunt of the heat for this, I'm certainly not blaming you.

 

Unity to Godot porting studios, please publish your offers here.
Unity to Godot tutorial creators, please publish your channel here

 

So if there's a freelancer working for a mid sized company (which has their own employees with their own unity seats), and that freelancer works on their own computer with their own copy of unity.... and that freelancer is the one who ends up doing the build that gets uploaded to steam or the ios app store... is Unity gonna send the bill to that freelancer?

There's a lot of small freelancers that can end up working on a pretty big team. So even if the freelancer doesn't make $200k, the big company is making millions and has a ton of installs.

What should the freelancer do?

 

What marketing or PR person would let a company end something like Unity Plus without explaining any other accompanying changes assuming there are some?

Like surely they don't expect people to get Pro just for dark mode and removing the Unity logo. A tier intended for studios selling potentially millions.

 

Agree, for me I will start looking at Godot today.

 

Well, gotta mitigate that install price loss somehow. I think you may be onto something.

 

Absence of revenue split and ongoing fee was the main reason we went with unity. But with those changes - we need to rethink our path.

 

Wait... what happened to plus? It disappeared today with this announcement? Will the plus monthly be charged pro now?

 

WHAT?? When did this happen?

 

I hate to say it Mike, but a chart isn't going to change the fact that this FEELS predatory. This FEELS like a decision made by someone not in the industry. This FEELS like an upcoming mass exodus due to trust concerns. There is zero reason to not have a % sales setup. This is done to continue making money off of a product that has a one time sale. Now do we get to calculate how many installs someone may make and adjust our prices? That makes no sense and is very anti-consumer.

 

Nice one Unity, you're actually motivating developers to go learn Godot or just outright switch to UE5.

 

I tried to summarize, and write as readably as I could, my questions and concerns about these announcements.

• Installations and revenue are two separate units and two separate times, isn't it possible to owe Unity more than revenue ?

From my understanding, installations are being counted when both thresholds are met. However, here's the "naive" version of the question:
In the case of a "late success" game, installations have been steadily "piling up" for years. But a spike in sales and therefore installations (even REinstallations) leads to both thresholds (revenue and installations) being met.

However, due to the previous years, the installations are at 1M, while yearly revenue is at $200.000

Does this lead to the developer owning 100% of revenue ?

• Do Demos count as "installation" ? If so, is there a way to separate them from the main product, by being another project for example ?

If I intend to distribute a demo version of my game, built with the same Unity Project, but with different settings (less scenes, for example), do these demo add up to the installations?

If so, a demo being downloaded 1M times, and sales leading to $200.000 sounds very possible. And, as stated before, leads to the developer owning 100% of revenue, doesn't it ?

Same question goes for QA versions, press versions...

• Can Piracy can also lead to installations reaching a much, much higher value than revenue?

This has been partially answered before, Unity already has ways to detect pirate versions. "active monitoring to prevent that". I do believe piracy is unavoidable, I accept that they can be sales that are lost, but it's a whole other problem if they are counted as installations despite Unity's efforts.

• Is there any form of safety, a "revenue percentage" limit, to the per-installation fee?

I think this is what my questions boil down to ; being two separate calculation, it's easy to fear unlikely, but not impossibles, scenarios where the developer owes >100% of their revenue in a single month.
How can Unity ensure that this fixed price additional fee doesn't lead to the developer owing more than their revenue?

• How are installations tracked by the developer, or Unity?

In order to respect my users' privacy, as well as GDPR, I haven't enabled any of Unity Analytics for my project. It isn't even in my Dashboard.

This means that as of today, I do not know how many people have played or downloaded my game through Unity's dashboard.

How can I, or Unity, know how many installations of the games have been made ?

• How is game preservation, and/or "abandoned games", affected by this ?

I can understand that this is far from being a concern of Unity.
My first Steam game sold 50 copies. Woo hoo, I know, lessons have been learned. You can obviously guess it's not getting updated anytime soon.
Overreaction, but should I "remove it to avoid getting a bill 10 years from now"? What I mean by that is it is difficult to project in the future.

 

Unity, I understand you need to generate revenue but please, take into consideration what this implies for small studios that publish free to play mobile games. We generate quite a lot of downloads but the revenue behind is nowhere near enough to compensate the insanely high cost per install.

 

LOL this Unity. Thank you for the stab in the back. I've been paying for unity plus since it came out, only to be able to change the splash screen. Now you're forcing me to go back to unity personal and well... I plan on keeping my splash screen, no hard feelings!

 

I'm literally researching spline extrusion and deploying to android on UE5 as we speak, I'm at that point where I need to condense and clean my project and since Unity seems to be on the way outs might as well do the cleaning over there instead!

 

Mike, since you obviously have absolutely no understanding of the sales side of the games industry, I understand why you might be under this misconception, perhaps since no one at unity has ever shipped a game you might not understand how the games industry generates revenue

Here's some maths for you. Console platform deal for a monthly game as an indie - get paid up front $200k, 14+ million installs to be expected. Just about the only safe way to make money in indie games. Unity charges you $280k

Humble Monthly deal, give over 200,000 keys out. Unity gets paid $40k, Humble pays you $30k

You have just made your product completely unviable for indie games, anyone thinking of releasing an indie game on this platform should just get out immediately because unless you are the 0.1% of devs who wins the indie lottery, Unity is going to make turn your only safe revenue sources into your bankruptcy

what an embarrassing and out of touch post, and that is ignoring things like.. g2a scamming keys, people being able to spin up a VM to charge a company infinite extra installs, pirate bay copies of your games, charity bundles. 200k installs in a free charity bundle means you pay Unity $40k? Goodbye charity games

You clearly do not even comprehend what a terrible decision this is, you have made your product as useless as garbage even as if the tech stack itself wasn't becoming slow as a mummy and increasingly unviable. I have been using Unity since 2011 and I would now sooner roll my own engine than ship a game on these turns that are designed to put developers out of business. Truly unhinged decision makings from blowhard nobodies who have never shipped a game and don't understand the first thing about video game financials

 

I think I'm as confused as most people reading that post... I would advise immediately pulling the post and getting it reworded to be much MUCH more clear. Any time there's a post made about service changes that affect people this much, there should be a LENGTHY review process to ensure there is nothing that could be missread, and this article is full of information that can be read in multiple ways.

If I've gathered from the forum clarifications correctly, this is a ONE TIME FEE per install after a certain threshold, not a "Monthy Rate" as listed in the graph (which is likely to be the MOST shared piece of data as it is a visual tool). Is that correct?

The article states it in a very murky way with a lot of qualifiers and no clarity. "...each time a qualifying game is downloaded..." "...initial install-based fee..." these both sound like they could be applicable in a scenario of an ongoing fee.

 

I think this is really well said about the breach of trust.

I've been invested in unity since Unity 3. I've paid perpetual licenses, and after that subscribed to Unity Plus for years. I have 4 years invested in my latest game Wilderless, and had planned to leverage it as a basis for my next game.

Now that Unity plus is being removed, my options are to downgrade to Unity Personal or use Unity Pro, which after the year long grace period, I would see my yearly cost go from the current $600 CAD to $2700 CAD. This in itself is a huge shock, with no communication about it prior to this morning.

Add to that the uncertainty and lack of clarity surrounding the unprecedented per-install fee and I am just baffled as to how Unity could think this would benefit its users, including Indie and Solo devs.

 

Dare I ask this, but what about those who make animated movies using Unity? Will they be subject to the same rules?

 

Regarding install detections: My guess is that they're working with main platforms (Steam, consoles, mobile) to accurately detect single user installations. Should help circumventing privacy/piracy/re-install issues and getting accurate revenue numbers (otherwise they're not going to be accurate no matter how much they try), but it will require some connection between your unity organization and their platform user, so I'm not sure of that.

 

I think it's a legal issue. Unity will soon suffer serious losses in the Stock Exchange. I paid over 40K dollars for the Unity Pro license for 3 years. We pay this money as Unity software fee. Saying that the money you paid was wasted on January 1, 2024 and that you have to pay for every download over 1 million is insane. Why are we paying you for a game we don't make any money from? We get paid $0.001 from 1 ad impression to 1 User. The fee Unity demands from us is $0.02. To earn this money, we need to show 20 ads to 1 user. At least 40 ads to make money. Unbelievable!