Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

that's impossible.. how can we be expected to pay this?

 

Unity is EXACTLY targeting those small full time studios (which have barely passed their pricing threshold) with their current pricing plan:

1. the more installs you can, the smaller cost-per-install you pay to them (Large companies got more installs)
2. the flat cost-per-install favors big cos (large companies' games have better revenue-per install)
3. Unity Enterprise charges less than Unity Pro

It is insane isn't it?

 

That's trusting Unity will act honorably with nothing holding them to it. They already proved they will break their TOS. Why would you trust them on this?

 

The biggest problem with this pricing model is that it is fundamentally unfair. We all know that every game earns a different amount of revenue on average from each player. Casual games, for example, may have a large number of players, but each player contributes relatively little to the revenue. However, casual games do not receive any extra services from Unity, so why should they be required to pay a higher percentage of fees? Unity, I really like your engine, please don't dig your own grave!

 

That's a fancy way of saying that they won't be able to detect it properly on their own and that you will have to provide evidence that it's not legitimate installations.

 

Riccitiello forcing us to not be F***ing idiots by making it impossible to not think about monetization

 

You're right on that point, which I guess does self-resolve once a game's no longer popular, so the long-tail doesn't matter as much, and the I suppose on the consumer side it's more or less going to be resolved between Unity and the dev. Part of my misunderstanding there stems from just pondering a bunch of "what if" scenarios over the past day or so.

But my point stands, that installs don't necessarily correlate to revenue. It's a difficult expense to plan for when you might not know if an individual purchase of a game will result in one install, or five. Not to mention the unilateral changing of terms of service with no way to stay on an existing version under the previous terms, and the black box of "trust us we know" on install tracking.

It's impossible to audit because it's based on external aggregate data and proprietary data models. On the flip side, if it were specific enough to audit, it's a data-privacy nightmare for consumers. Plus, if it's really about letting developers keep more of the money they make on games as they seem to suggest in their announcement, why not just do a lower percentage revenue share? Predictability matters as well.

 

Ok... I went to the first page and now I see it has been changed:

"Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs.
(Updated, Sep 13)"

In this case what for they started the topic about counting installs?

[EDIT]
However this post on a blog remains unchanged:
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

 

Not to mention; how would you know how many "installs" actually fall under the fraud or re-install category.

 

Don't worry, there's a handful of idiots on here that will tell you it's fair and no big deal. We should all expect companies to change their terms and charge us 20000% more than we were paying before with no recourse.

 

I just have a concern in my case. I worked as a freelance developer and sold my built game for clients. Lots of project doesn't really matter but there is 1 project I believed still generate money for client. If that project somehow hit the threshold. Am I the one who will pay for the fees of the game or my clients will some how got the bill from Unity?

 

Yes, that would be much better if it is a low percentage (say, 1-2%) revenue share of IAP (all IAPs are tracked by Unity anyway) beyond a certain threshold (say, 1M per year per game). In that way, Unity can force the big boys like Tencent, Nintendo and miHoYo to pay, without affecting small indie developers

 

They will go with the safest option. They will have a range of targets for sales and on top of your development fees they will also have their own costs for advertising and publishing. If any potential future lands in one of these red zones it will be a dead deal right then and there. Even potential unforeseen successes are a problem as it is no longer pure profit for them in the long tail but a potential risk that they need to permanently balance for as long as they are willing to sell the game.

 

There’s a very easy way, in case of console/PC you compare the install data with sales data. Very easy to spot a discrepancy or fraud.

For mobile, Apple and Google already keep very accurate records of downloads and installs.

 

Well this is worrying, especially as there seem to be a few other sources that have mentioned that anyone who knew of this plan tried to push it back and apparently everyone was ignored.

AFAIK this is genuine twitter account and this person works ( or did ) for Unity.

https://twitter.com/jonoforbes/status/1702075391958204502

Jono Forbes on X: "@IRCSS As a unity employee until this morning, I assure you we fought like hell against this, brought up all the points everyone has, were told answers were coming, and then the announcement went out without warning. Those of us who care are out -- more resignations coming end of week." / X (twitter.com)

 

This. Devolver Digital has stated that it's important to know what engine you will be using, and if I had to guess they will likely turn down Unity games.

https://twitter.com/devolverdigital/status/1701685282129539485

 

so there is no limit? they will just send us an invoice for money that we don't have at all?

 

I also forgot to mention... this is entirely pivoting around some supposed technology they have that will totally work correctly all of the time.

Where is this magic F***ing box that makes all of this work reliably in a way that any sane publisher would have their mind put at ease?

 

Yes, it is. I don't think today's statement does anything to redeem Unity, but it does clarify some of the confusion about re-downloads and stuff.

As for the whole thing. I've never felt so incredibly saddened and disappointed by a company's actions in my entire life. If the confusing fee structure wasn't bad enough, the uncertainty aroused in ALL of Unity's customers, from massively successful studios to fresh indies and everything in between, will potentially be felt for years to come.

15 years to build a reputation, 3 years to weaken it, and 1 stupid day to shatter it into a thousand pieces.

 

The install and reinstall thing is a separate thing in this instance.

Old games would need to remake 1M per year to even get back on this discussion.

Honestly the only ones affected by this are mobile ad/gacha games. Cuz they are the only ones doing the weird low cents per player but a looooot of players.

In my case (and in most devs's case) I will just look at unity request price, open up steam, epic, whatver and see how many copies have I sold. Do the numbers match? Cool. Do they not? Unity can take it up with Steam (epic, whatever), I aint paying until they prove where these extra installs came from.

 

The whole thing reminds me of Lithium fiasco and unity connect.

Basically, judging by past behavior, now the company will continue to stubbornly insist that all is well and that they know what they're doing. This could last couple of days, couple of months, or, in the worst case, a couple of years.

*sighs*

 

Thats sad.

 

Mobile development is F***ed with Unity now. I feel so bad for you man. Jesus Christ. This is crazy. None of us signed up for this when we started working on Unity.

Most people for mobile are monetizing free to play mobile games with ads, microtransactions, and/or in-game purchases/subscriptions.

I think you are okay in that they will not charge you retroactively for any past installations. But if you get 100,000 installations per month and are over their annual revenue cutoff, you are going to be on the hook for $180,000-240,000 per year. So if you make $1,000,000 per year from those 100,000 installations per month, you are now giving an 18-24% income tax to Unity.

If you are distributing for mobile through Google Play or Apple App Store they are also taking their percentage cut. Between Google/Apply/Unity taxes we can easily go broke. At least Google/Apply only charge you a percent so you can't completely get buried.

With Unity charging for every download (even if someone only plays for 10 min and stops) you can end up in debt if the downloads to revenue ratio doesn't work out (which one can't even predict until you launch).

 

A CEO could care less what any of us think. The job of a CEO is to make the tough decisions, get some hate, and then bail under "new leadership", driving speculation which can bounce the shares back up.

Feels like the only reason this isn't backtracked yet, lacks any real substantial information and hasn't been really modified in any substantial way, is because they're waiting for a critical mass of users to just say "why didn't they just go with royalty %?".

Then they can proclaim "we listened". Just like they always have.

 

For anyone curious he was a senior software engineer working on XR and PolySpatial among other things. He had been with Unity since 2016.

 

So much this. Ignoring the fact that the plan is outright bad from the start and needs to be reversed, we have no legally binding license or T&C to examine to truly understand all the details. Nothing that was written on the blog, social media or this thread has any legal weight at all.

 

Going to get my popcorn to watch them do acrobatics trying to damage control THIS.
While I'll be moving to another engine

 

Fee is the part of plan? Is Rici a trojan horse sent by aaa industry?

 

Then, why not just use sales data instead of this bananas install metric?

 

I have no problem with unity charging a royalty, hell they can charge me 10% without any threshold, literally from my first sale, I would be totally fine with it, the problem is they are charging 0.20c x install, which is absolutely absurd, I bought a steam game 2 days ago at 80% discount for a little more then 1 dollar and I installed the game 3 times already on my pcs and steam deck

That dev would be charged 60c by unity, after steam cuts and taxex the dev would be 20-30 cent in NEGATIVE for a sale, I can't understand you people comparing this to unreal 5%, this is nothing like it, this system can easily cost devs more then 100% their revenue even without the whole piracy thing, just from users normally installing the game between devices.

 

[QU

They are targeting to their top 10% of earners and it is insane that you could pay $1.5 per customer if someone installs your game 10 times. 100,000 sales per month is a huge number few will breach that level but you may only need 10,000 sales per month to have a 100,000 installs per month.

If you earn 10 dollars after Royalties, Taxes, Wages and advertising expenses. You are selling $20-30 games and doing well. That is 15% of profits gone.

 

Exactly. Anyone saying this is "no big deal" because most people will not be that successful is crazy.

EVERYONE who goes into game development knows most games will never have runaway success, but runaway success is exactly what we all hope and strive for. You cannot plan your business model around the idea that if tens of millions of people download your app/game because it becomes popular, it will potentially bankrupt you given that you don't know how downloads will convert to revenue until you actually launch and can see what happens.

This is absolute Russian roulette. And the extra layer of it is that they can change the fees any time they want, so you could be just skating by making a small profit after they take their cut, then next month see another fee rise, and end up buried.

The only way this works is if you are not offering any free-to-play downloads, know exactly what percent of downloaders will convert to income, and/or are absolutely sure your game will be a failure or at most a middling success.

If you are developing for mobile, this now means the only safe options are if you are sure your game will be a minimal success or you are charging every download (which doesn't work on mobile to begin with).

 

This right here is the crux for me personally. The onus is on me. I now have to take time out of my day *every* day to justify that Unity shouldn't just get payed more at point in the future in perpetuity. Doesn't matter if the game is fifteen years and being installed on new machines by users that bought it ten years ago. I have to prove that. And every minute I spend doing that is money that I lose even if I do prove it because it's my time being spent.

 

As they say, "this, too, shall pass".

A good idea would be to start damage control. See if you can migrate your game to flax, godot or anything else.

 

Exactly

 

I guess GDPR is no longer an issue overnight and they can track the end-player info now.

 

I highly doubt a response like that on a forum is legally binding. You need to wait for the license agreement. Until then all of this is just marketing and public relations.

 

Unreal and Godot could be worth a look.

last time I checked they have no pay-per-install costs.

 

Oh sweet so it's worse than I thought. Just re-installing counts too? Unity literally wants us to pay because someone ran out of harddrive space and had to reinstall to their shiny new SSD they bought?

 

As mentioned multiple times, this is wrong. This is a free game and won't hit the revenue threshold.

 

This didn't happen, don't make stuff up. Unity has already made several stupid statements on their own, there's no need to lie inventing new fake statements and confuse people.

 

What is needed is add a cap to the ammount related to actual revenue. E.g. max of 5% of revenue.

That would solve any issues and make it same or better to Unreal option.

Plus then the scheme would make lot more sense.

 

Where can I can read this utter bull crap of a statement. He is considered one of the most untrustworthy people in the industry. I have to see the full statement.

 

Really? What capitalism has to do with Godot or open source in general, who also drive innovation forward?

 

So this decision is driving away development talent too, that's great! Big things coming for Unity clearly. What a disgrace.

 

https://medium.com/@bobbyjuncosa/op...sm-which-is-why-it-works-so-well-207ee7f9ec6f

 

at first look yes but they have changed TOS with new fee rules.so its not game with people emotions its serious decision/
and royality plan dont need this shoking ceo - they scared big companys allready/ companys will invest in own game engines or switch it.

 

115 pages and only one Unity employee has appeared, and only at the beginning. It is a very clear sign that there is internal chaos in the company of biblical proportions. At this moment Unity is staggering, and has three options: either it remains the same in its policy and falls, or the CEO is fired, or it is bought by another company, which organizes a new coherent payment system, or it directly returns to the previous one. In any case, the chaos in Unity is total and is already having disastrous consequences, no matter what they do.

 

like the part where the TOS can change as they feel like when ever they want to any version of unity and games that have already been build and released years ago ?
i 100% hope you stay with Unity.. dont worry they care about you..

 

Tell me how you skipped reading the thread without telling me how you skipped reading the thread. Not that I blame you with 115 pages. I've skipped a ton too. But even I know that there has been more than one employee.