Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Worse, they are going to still need to know your revenue. They are going to use chatGDP to guess your revenue then if you are over the limit charge you based on installs. They could just as easily use a revenue share. Either way you will be stuck arguing with them and having to provide your tax returns to prove what your revenue really is.

 

Exactly. Too many downloads now becomes a terror story where you could lose your house and end up in personal bankruptcy. Every night you go to sleep afraid you will get viral success.

Unity is now only feasible if you charge for every download. Otherwise you are gambling with every cent of your personal/company finances from the moment you upload your game to a given distribution service.

And if you then instead charge a fee for every download, you can no longer participate in ad-revenue, microtransaction, or optional subscription revenue, which are some of the main ways people try to get their game out there.

The entire reason Unity became popular and dominant in mobile is that there was no risk except the time we invested in developing. Now not only can you make $0 at the end, you could lose every penny you have out of it.

Unity debt collectors could come repossess your house or you could have to declare bankrupty to escape them.

F***ing crazy. You would have to be nuts to take the chance.

 

And if that license says

"Unity reserves the right to change the terms of service at any time, for any reason"

Guess what? You have a contract as legally binding as it was in all the other ToS agreements.

You have only one right, with that phrase, the right to hire a lawyer... ..and dont expect Unity to roll over, they know numbers, they know they could end up taking massive revenue from some studios, they knew this could potentially make companies lose money. The bean counters who came up with this scheme know numbers and money.

And dont expect to win in court either. The courts don't care. To them, you dont have to accept new ToS, you can simply "stop using unity's product" if you don't like the new ToS.

 

This is really short sighted decision.
I am almost decided to go with Unreal next project.
Also, I want you to have me a detailed guideline how to sue you that we started project 2 years ago not knowing this to happen.

 

Art assets will likely be fine for any major engine that supports common standards. Scenes, scriptable assets, timelines, and any other Unity-based asset files are obviously worthless. Editor code can go right in the bin. Probably most runtime code will be useless or only have snippets here and there that are refactorable. The best things to look for will be libraries that handle agnostic stuff like complex math stuff or data structures and algorithms that will be just pure C# with nothing referencing the engine.

 

10% impact is a lot. And 1% of unfairness that many have show their revenue per install calculation is absurdly unacceptable. By this model you are not charge the one who really should pay. Instead you are squeezing blood from the crab (my native idiom, cannot find comparable idiom in english)

Even with your clarification the most important part is still not accounted for, worst case scenario is F2P game that only show little ads and a bit of IAP. Suppose the can get 10 million players in one year (mostly try and uninstall) but have exactly 200000$ gross revenue. Your model suddenly cost them 10 times their revenue. And this could happen anytime in one's poor developer life

Your acknowledgement is not make anything better and you are so wrong to think we are confused. No we aren't. You are doing everything wrong. Each of you make flipfloping statement that contradict each other. We understand correctly from the start and you try to toned it down by accusing us being confuse is another arrogance move and I bet you are aware of it

If you don't want to be counted as the one responsible for this fraudulent I would like to suggest please bring someone responsible for this to announce the truth of the whole situation first and foremost. I know you are already investing in this plan and don't think you are doing anything wrong, but this mess should at least be declare what is the truth behind it. So we can consider what can we expect for putting our trust into you

 

But to move them to other engine, UAS EULA has to allow it + the asset author has to allow it.

 

Unity is sinking and it seems the staff doesn't care. This will have very important consequences for many people and companies. It's a disaster, and only Unreal and Godot and other engines are going to celebrate. I'm myself starting Unreal on my Mac, fortunately I was just starting my next project, others have a big problem with projects well on the way.

Maybe there will be changes when the Unity staff sees this madness, but then it will be late. The ship starts to sink and everybody is going to the boats.

 

You've started getting it. It's dumb not because "boo-hoo they asking me to pay", it's dumb because they asking me to leave. Insistently. Why would I even try to stay if any other competitor is better at this point?
And that's why they try to apply changes retroactively. You're not gonna get much money from devs who using other engine. But if you can push it on devs who already used yours, that's other talk.

 

i thought it was clear that they only charge for installs, just one install, the initial one, the first time you buy or install the game

 

These people have no F***ing idea what they are doing. They have turned Unity into a suicide roulette machine.

 

Unity, in all your "clarifications" you are missing the most important point: We no longer trust you.

- You stealthily removed the perpetuity clause (section 8) from your terms of service sometime in the past year. This clause was added to provide certainty to developers after the last fiasco in which you attempted to make TOS changes retroactively.
- You then went ahead and made draconian changes to your terms, with an intention of applying them to existing projects.

Thank you, but I will keep using versions from before the TOS changes, based on the old TOS that still had section 8 in them, and future projects will not be made in Unity. Unless something really drastic changes in the company. No amount of clarifications regarding your new draconian model will help regain that trust.

 

This info unnerves me even more than the charge per install mandate...

 

It was free before for most people. That literally hasn't changed. What *HAS* changed is the need to carefully monitor all sales for the shelf life of the game. Also the gambling aspect of you might end up that one unlucky dev that will be featured in Kotaku in a year or so that had a runaway hit and ended up living on the streets as a result. The risk ain't worth it.

 

Hello, I would also like to express my thoughts on the new "plan pricing" in uNITY.

As a small indie developer, I don't have significant income from my released games, but I'm still concerned about their decision in this regard.

I was just about to finish my project and start delving into the stable version of DOTS and Netcode for GameObjects. However, their decision is hindering both the release of my game and my future plans to learn their technologies.

With this decision uNITY wants to S*** on my head, and other developers who love their engine (so far).

Nonetheless, if I want to find a job after the new year (2024), I will probably be unable to do so because uNITY has decided to update its pricing plan, and companies will likely start moving away from uNITY.

What do you think uNITY should do to become UNITY again?

 

better? think again.. Unity is not just trying to steal the future of game devs, trying to steal past too with this model!

 

Are you guys seeing something i'm not?
- starting indie making their first game: it is the best deal for new indies, you do not have to pay anything even if you make a 20$ game and sell like 150.000 copies

 

Not true they have been clear that you will be charged for each unique install based on their AI system. Which will use hardware data like MAC addresses and motherboard type maybe even bios version and on Windows 11 TPM 2.0.

 

Well, we are kinda all United now...
...against this bs.

 

Tbf I haven't read the asset store license in a long-time. It used to real Perpetual World-Wide Non-exclusive. That was about five years ago when I sold an asset myself. I haven't had a reason to look into it much in the last year so I don't know the details.

It's a good point to make though. Thanks for the heads up.

 

how? they are going to charge for new installs after 31 dec and only if you meet the reqs

 

My game ARPU is 0.01$, this will kill my game.

 

Now contacting some great asset developers to know if they have or will have Unreal versions of their works. Bye bye Unity, it was nice while it lasted.

 

Exactly. It is complete suicide for a mobile developer using any current standard means of mobile monetization.

These people have absolutely no idea how the games industry works. How the hell are they the ones making decisions? Any average teenager with a cell phone would understand this intuitively.

50% of mobile games are currently developed in Unity because it was previously safe and could at worse leave you with nothing earned if you fail:

https://www.cubix.co/blog/50-of-all-mobile-games-are-developed-on-cross-platform-engine-unity

Unity mobile will now be dead since you can end up personally bankrupt with debt collectors knocking at your door every time you upload something made with Unity to App Store or Google Play.

I can't fathom who would be crazy enough to release a game with this engine now unless you are releasing a major console game where you are charging for every install. That is NOT where Unity has market dominance, so what are they thinking?

They don't understand modern game economics and they don't understand why Unity is popular. Unity is dead with this.

 

We're looking at the long term future and the potential for Unity to change their mind at any point in time like they've just proven they're willing to do.

 

According to their own post it is every install. Even if they walk this back it's too late for me. I cannot trust them ever again. It's also contingent on the magic gelatinous cube in their server centers that somehow magically uses ESP mind reading technology to be able to differentiate what constitutes a new install vs an old one in a reliable and trustworthy fashion. I'm pressing X to doubt that too.

 

How and why? this does not have any sense... why? where is unity "hindering" the release of your game and your future plans?

that has nothing to do with jobs

 

Alternatively they could make their game in Godot and never think about it at all.

 

Denial: "no they can't possibly do something so stupid, tomorrow they will rollback and do something right"

Anger: "WHAT THEY ARE DOING STILL WITH THIS NON-SENSE?!?!?"

Bargaining: "maybe they could change something like making us pay a percentage of the revenue. After taxes, after % taken from ios, android maybe there is still a viable way... and I could continue with my projects..."

Depression: "I'm f***ked - there is no way I can pay Unity if anygame is really successful."

Acceptance: "Ok, remove unity from any game on the stores. It will take 1 year at most but then I'll start to live without a sword of Damocles hanging over my head".

I'm still in the Bargaining / Depression state.
I should invoice Unity devs for my mental health. If any of you working for this 'company' is reading. You should fire yourself.

 

People saying it's better than before:

TRUE:
- the limit was 200k revenue for company, now it's per game, so now you can have 200k revenue while game are below that. Game farmer are happy.

BUT
- has a random chance of black swan event in which you get bankrupt, with fuzzy as hell metrics you can't control, which bring fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Many dev has said they don't mind paying more if it's predictable. Especially transitioning to success, without having to be turn on accountant. So unity is LEAVING money on the table by making stuff terrible for everyone, a lose lose situation.

What happen is probably, they run the number, and figure out it wouldn't affect 90% of user, but would shut up that one group of investor who asked "well if you have the bigger install base, why doesn't it translate into money making with your operational deficit"... so Ricci and co had to save face by devising a plan to tell them "see we have per install income, so now shut up and give money please". That's why they played dumb when employee showed them that was dumb, they play another game on the social investor circle.

They didn't expect a bunch of nerds, making spreadsheet for games to be good at math and statistics, because they called them "F***ing idiots". TURNS OUT ACTUAL research show that IQ don't correlate with income on the upper brackets, for one simple reason, after a certain percentile there is phase change, intelligent people stop caring about greed, they care about being mentally stimulated and choose challenging task. So the employee calling up higher up, is statistically more likely to be smarter than the CEO. They were warned, I bet they feel smart now

 

Ok, you're wrong.

Only for developers that make an amount within a very particular narrow band with the changed Unity Free revenue limit could it be better, otherwise it's additional fees that weren't there before. I'm not sure what calculations you and your friend are doing, but I'd suggest you do them again.

They do not need to "lie" about downloads because they are not counting sales/downloads. They are counting "installs". They do not and (legally in most countries) cannot associate an install to a user and they have literally no way of knowing if an install is associated to a purchase. They will count pirated installs because they have no other way to do it.

In theory we could dispute the install quantity every month by pointing at the sales we had that month, but sales does not equal installs so this only gets you so far.

They will have a number that they have come to through a data model and it will be wrong. They might be willing to make some compromise assumption on install counts in relation to sale counts, but I could also propose that 0% of users that purchased the game in the last month actually installed it. Unfortunately their terms say that they give the number through a special method they devise and you have little real recourse but to accept it.

They also will not have access to the sales data of your game on storefronts so the onus on will be on you to provide them every month if you want to dispute a charge if that's a course of action that even bears fruit.

At which point you have to ask yourself if their intention is to only charge once for each user, why not charge once per sale? Oh right, because they have a black box number machine that will beep-boop out a fantastical number and bill each month and they don't need a giant accounting team dealing with every developer/publisher sending them sales stats every month. Because they can't handle that and they won't be able to handle that. Which means good luck disputing fake pirate copy install numbers every month.

 

This.

 

Yes, for most people this is basically a way to “encourage” you into a Pro subscription. For the top 1% of the earners it’s a hard lined way to get them to come to the negotiation table and discuss Unity’s new slice of their billion dollar pie lol

 

i can not see how this is bad on the future... i can see we are confused tho xD

unity needs to clear that, but we do not know for sure what is going to happen on those cases, so... We are here, mad because we are confused...

 

This will make the music industry's excesses look like nothing if people aren't smart enough to pull their games from App Store or Google Play before this hits.

All those "Behind the Music" documentaries where you find out how your favorite musicians went broke because their record label took everything. We are going to get the Unity versions.

I am sorry I can't stop replying because I am in shock at this entire concept.

Even if they backtrack on this now, who can take the chance? They have now demonstrated they are run by insane people. They could bring the fee back again in the future. Or raise it.

Unless you are a big console developer (which is not the majority of Unity developers), you are gambling with your life.

 

We're not really confused as much as angry over the betrayal. We were promised the license agreements we signed were binding going forward and now we find out that suddenly they're no longer happy and it's being thrown out.

 

they can change threshold from $200000 to $0 any day.

how will you stop people installing your game after that? (Remember that Unity controls what counts as ”install”)

 

Un placer estimado, por lo que veo no parece muy diferente a unity (obviamente es open source y no te extorsionará endeudándote de por vida), posee una lógica orientada a objetos pero por ejemplo no se pueden asignar Multiple scripts a un sólo objeto, sino que cada objeto posee una lógica propia en la escena, recién me estoy aproximando y parece prometedor. Después de haber dedicado muchos años, esfuerzo y dinero a la unidad, me siento traicionado. Pero que eso no nos detenga, somos desarrolladores después de todo, el motor es sólo una herramienta para nuestras ideas. "We will change the loom but we will continue weaving" Bobbin Threadbare (8004-8021)

 

And laso

Yup, the problem is not "The price increase is very targeted. In fact, more than 90% of our customers will not be affected by this change"; the problem is that this decision will damage so much Unity to force developers to use other engines. That 10% of successful developers will end up using other engines with the result of making Unity synonymous with poor-quality games.

And move the cost on publishers for humble bundles and game passes means only that a game made with Unity will no more eligible for those
https://twitter.com/devolverdigital/status/1701685282129539485

 

Yes you are missing the part that indie games are mostly f2p or sold with bundles or steam sales.

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 taxes 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.

 

Three days ago they didn't have to pay anything, and never had to worry or plan ahead to pay Unity anything.
Two days ago they now have to account, worry and plan for maybe paying unity, maybe switching to Pro, maybe, maybe, maybe
Next year they might have to pay something because Unity failed to meet revenue expectations, especially as their target developers stopped using Unity and now they are increasing fees and reducing the thresholds.

The worst thing is if they do change fees and thresholds, you suddenly have to pay them more than you had planned prior to their announcement going forward. Profit is not revenue, so you might be on a knife edge, where that further change now puts you into a loss!

This really isn't hard to understand, how quickly and easily this can turn bad, without any way for you to back out!

 

Yeah, i was thinking that sadly i will have to write and ask the developers of every asset that i bought if they will port their asset to Unreal or something. Using and learning uNITY might be the biggest time loss in my life. Also my Assets collection can turn out to be a big money loss now

 

Me too man. I'm going to need a sleeping pill tonight to get any rest and a therapist tomorrow so I don't hang myself when I wake up.

Part of the problem is we all got so complacent with Unity being so reasonable for so long, that the alternatives are not that well developed by comparison.

In 1-3 years the others will now catch up as everyone jumps ship. But this is the absolute worst time for all of us. All our projects are now going to have to push back 6-12 months minimum and we will have to rethink every piece of logic or design that depended on Unity systems plus learn entire new systems.

Absolutely worst time.

 

Some publishers are already considering potential filters for Unity-based projects going forward. If publishers go that route development houses cease to use the engine and anyone left using the tech has some serious re-skilling to do.

 

yes that is true, but this deal IMO is better at least for new devs...
Also, most of the people here can not see that unreal deals are worse

 

Some of them already did, apparently. More to come later this week.

 

Unity no esta haciendo eso tampoco...

 

Let's assume you are correct. A new developer should never invest time into a product that is just going to be invalid after they're no longer "new".

 

Charging based on "installs" is a total nonstarter as it's untethered from revenue. You can lose money if you have high installs but low revenue per install. It's unbounded, unpredictable, and the accounting is just "trust us you owe us this much."

The more you try to work around this by adding exceptions and caveats the more it becomes a complicated and less-understandable version of revenue sharing. So just do revenue sharing.

People at Unity seem to believe that because the "Unity runtime" is a separate internal unit with it's own budgeting that it makes sense to charge for the "runtime." This is a fundamental misunderstanding - this may be how the business and budget is organized but it's not how the market is organized. Gamers aren't paying for "runtimes" they are buying a video game, and a single copy of a video game can be installed, re-installed, re-downloaded, etc etc.

Developers are paying for tools that allow them to ship that game, aka the editor + runtime. Neither developers or players are thinking in terms of number of "runtimes installed" - that's just a nonsense metric.

If the runtime team needs to make money there are two sane options: a license fee (per seat, one time, per year, whatever) and/or revenue sharing. If for some reason licensing fees count as the Editor Team revenue and not Runtime Team revenue - a distinction nobody outside or Unity cares about! - then use revenue sharing.

There's no good version of an install-based fee. It's just fundamentally the wrong metric. Even if the fee would be on average less than revenue sharing or a license fee it's still bad in that it's so unpredictable and impossible to budget around. It's also incredible confusing - who is the "distributor" of the executable, what counts as an "install", etc etc.

 

man just relax, this forum tends to do that... yo will be fine, just clear your mind and analize again the new deal, you will find that is not bad at all... is in fact better