Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

No offense to those that are stuck with Unity for the time or those that work at Unity itself but I'm beyond that point now. I had my bags packed a while ago. I'm just sipping a nice cup of coffee and while I stand on the lawn and watch the house burn down then I'll take my leave.

 

Sorry for asking something so basic at this point, but I can't find where Unity explains how its metrics system works to measure individual installations, how they differentiate if they belong to piracy. Nor does anyone explain what will happen with free games without advertising. Can someone clarify that? I think that no one from Unity is responding because they understand that it is a shame to come out and defend such a dirty anti-industry, improvised and extortionate move like this.

 

I came to post this in support of all developers. Unity... you are stuffing up. This is a terrible path to take.

 

Yes I am. I have this game here you see: https://store.steampowered.com/app/337320/Paint_the_Town_Red/

And it consistently sells over 250,000 copies a year these days. Yes, we're very fortunate, yay. Lets just round down to 250,000. Every month is less than 100,000 sales which means every one costs me $0.15 and lets just assume it's 1 install per sale (hahaha) then that's:

250,000 x $0.15 = $37,500

And that's a sales lowball and before all the additional installs per user are accounted for.

Oh and we're about to release our VR version of this game early next year that we expect to do well and now we'll be paying Unity a bunch of money we hadn't accounted for for that one too.

Maybe stop posting if you're just going to be the way you are. If you are not affected that's great, but stop trying to tell the people that are that they are not and that everything is fine or better than it was before.

 

We can't clarify because they can't clarify because they can't differentiate.

 

They dont. They say number and you send the $

 

Yeah you can't find it because they are refusing to say lol

 

We've been told that we won't be told the exact way they calculate installs.

 

Let me see if I understand, according to what I read on the Unity website, I will need to log in online every 3 days? What? I live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, where there are connection problems, how is my case, Unity?


I really like Unity, but all of this only makes me think about one thing: Disappointment! That they reverse this and take appropriate actions to readjust everything and save what little trust remains. There's still time to cover the leaks before the boat sinks.

 

Its proprietary method of "trust me, bro" measurement.

 

Just purchased on steam game looks great don't worry wont try it never will install to support another dev : )

 

Oh man Milkshape! Those were the days! Forget blender, that was the best $30 I'd ever spent back then hahaha!

 

Jason, I love this guy

 

if i sell a game for 15 and it sells 20.000 copies, i made 300.000 so i own unity 20.000... lets say steam charges 30%
i keep 196,000... (even steam is taking more than unity xD)

 

From the employee response on Twitter and FAQ yesterday (before being edited), it is basically "Trust me, Bro. I don't know how to implement it but we will figure it out in 3 months."

 

Sales != installations.

 

I think the major point that people like Impheris, and Unity itself, is not understanding is the unpredictability of this. The language has been clear as mud from the start, with abject contradictions being repeated both ways several times now.
There is no clarity at all around who actually will get this randomly generated invoice from unity. It is completely unknown whether this will be the developer or the distributor. They have repeatedly emphatically stated both mutually exclusive options as the truth.

The important central point in all of this is: studio budgets cannot accommodate this. Period. You cannot build a budget around a number that could be literally any number, based on a "proprietary data model" that you are not allowed to know about or verify. It doesnt matter if small game devs would get a better deal out of this than they would unreal, I have no doubt thats true most of the time. But an accounting department cannot just accept a possibly random, unverifiable and essentially incontestable invoice. It is fundamentally incompatible with the way businesses work. Its a ludicrous financial liability because if the number is drastically incorrect, or punitive for piracy which you cannot control, and Unity decides it doesnt care, you have to hand over a huge amount of money, or spend a huge amount of money and time in court to sort it out. Even if 99% of the time this doesnt happen, its a lottery that a business will never play.
Its astounding that the execs at Unity think this will fly. The number of court cases will be astronomical unless they tie installs directly to sales which... would just be a revenue share with extra steps.

TL;DR
It doesn't matter what kind of Unity developer you are, any studio that uses Unity is accepting a financial liability that could be potentially any number, is not knowable ahead of time, and not verifiable once you do know it. Businesses dont work by accepting randomly generated, unverifiable financial liabilities. Its pure fantasy.

 

I mentioned it couple of times here. If u can choose flat expected % (like UE) and uncertanity that u maybe accidentaly succeed with the game and pay different month to month (Imagine being afraid to succeed), u choose first one becaue its stable, u can safely plan around static %.

To have a successful business u also need stability...and atm u cant be sure what they change in future that will also affect ur already released games...ITS TOTAL MADNESS.

 

steam is going to take more and you half to pay taxes for your area plus maybe sales taxes or vats depending on were you sell form. you wont even clear 80k is my guess and not to be rude if you have produced zero games with 1169 post starting in 2009 at this point not really taking you serious other then a unity mole of some sort.

 

Multiply the 20k by 5 if the user decides to install it on all their devices (I don't know, perhaps it's a good game). Now you have 116k while previously you would have 216k. It's such a better deal right?!

You are completely off the hook here, I hope you realize that.

 

----> https://insertcredit.com/opinion/unity/

 

Oh and just to follow up on my own post here, Paint the Town Red is pirated at least 10:1. I can't wait to try and dispute the install numbers every month when Unity won't be able to differentiate between legit installs or not. I do not trust that they can and we all know they won't be able to reliably do so. So I'm on the hook for an unknowable incorrect charge every month.

I have monetary transactions every month with Steam, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Meta, etc, etc and I know exactly what % they will take of revenue and can account for it. This will be the first special mystery charge I get to deal with and I'm so, so excited! So lucky to have released a game 8 years ago in Early Access 100 TOS iterations ago and completed over 2 years ago that now this applies to!

 

if you are afraid of "multiple installs"

Still they need more clarification on this

 

I could use a bot to delete and reinstall it a hundred thousand times and you'd go bankrupt. )

 

No, you have to sell 200k copies before you start paying, or 1 million copies if you buy a Unity Pro license ($2500 per seat)

 

Nice, so you don't pay any taxes and making your game was completely free, and you sell 20.000 copies at full price... what a nice scenario.

Reality for game devs is that most their sales is bundles and steam sales 50% or more.

I'll paste my previous post again:

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.

 

If Unity developers cannot afford the fees accumulated, a Unity representative will come by with a medical team to extract one of your kidneys. Further collections for blood, bone marrow, and possibly your left eye may follow.

Did you not see the updated terms and services? Oops. Don't blame Unity. You will still have one kidney remaining. Until the next update.

 

But can unity pay to devs 20$ every time when unity engine is not response?
If DEVS are responsible for the third party installing YOUR software I think you must be responsible for DEVS struggling using YOUR software

 

God I hope it doesn't end up like the input system and need to be re-written from scratch four times over five years. Or the multiplayer system that was so buggy they abandoned it almost immediately, or the UI system that was depreciated for another UI system that isn't recommended for use.

 

Hi Impheris, I think I have to agree with other people. if you need a calculation, I'll take Genshin Impact as an example since I have 1 installation on my phone and 1 on my desktop. They release the game in multiple platform. I'll just take Google play for calculation. Google play download 50m+ (I just flatten it to 50m). This calculation will assumed that they has Enterprise license.
1m - above: 49 000 000 * 0.01 = 490 000 (correct me if I'm wrong)
Keep in mind that this is on Google play download alone.

 

So you’re paying a $37k fee on a $5 million profit.

Unreal would take a $250,000 royalty.

Or buy a Pro license and…PAY NOTHING

What are you complaining about again?

 

Well folks, it's been a good ride. As soon as I'm done with the assets I'm currently working on I'm jumping ships. I'll keep on supporting my assets for the foreseeable future, but will never develop anything new in Unity.

This kind of corporate out-of-touch wishful thinking that's been sinking Unity for the last few years... well, I thought that up to this point it was just a streak of bad decisions but now it's clear to me this is deep-rooted stuff.

What worries me most is the technical side of this: it's pretty damn near impossible to accurately track legit installs of any software, and pretty damn difficult to predict how a game is going to perform in terms of installs. Building a billing scheme based on it means there's no way to know how much you actually owe until it's time to pay.

To the guy/guys that came up with this idea: you're f****** idiots.

 

I'm thinking this is gonna be the last straw for me and this engine, which I have always found to be a huge messy dumpster fire compared to Unreal, and this company, headed by ... well you guys know all about him.

 

of course i understand that, i'm a dev xD i'm not defending unity here, but i'm trying to clear the useless hate on some points

See? this is one of my point, why you said this?

All the systems out there, incluiding the very basic from google can track that, so, is not just unity... you have the store info.

 

Unity isn't able to determine the difference between a new install, a reinstall, a pirated install, etc, and if they truly cared about unique installs they could have just gone with sales not installs.

 

sale do not equal installs how many times do we half to try and help you hear. I have some games i made back in 1997 that people reinstall and play I can see that they do I pay for a server they log onto I haven't sold that game in years. But you guys really arn't understanding even if this uses the machine ID that changes with a hard drive or unistall or change of hardware. and last i checked they said there using the save game data to see if its a reinstall or not so that means only people that don't clean there registry wont count as new install.

 

It is mobile Free to Play games who are doomed not Pay to Play games where every install was prepaid buy the end user.

There will be no new mobile F2P games made in Unity.

 

All that employee (if they even are one) told us there is that this was a massively unstable company that was skating by on a pint and a prayer. Even less reason to base your future on it if the company is actually at risk of collapsing under it's own weight.

 

again... if.... if ..... if...... is not a real argument

 

In all fairness to Unity, their in-house keyboards are rumoured to have been EA'd into this kind of output:

IN$TALL FEE$

There's only so many times you could see that on your screen before pulling the trigger on proxy taxation of player downloads. Probably seemed so right it couldn't be wrong.

 

>go to sleep
>wake up
>unity still defending guessing the install and revenue

Richard Stallman was right

 

Being more clear also doesn't make sense with mobile games, where if you have 1 million installs and $200k in revenue, you probably won't have any profit, and you owe Unity a huge amount of money.

 

How would it detect humble bundles & other charity install

 

Can't see them controlling that in any way as it stands - if I want to install bomb a project I don't like I can just write a bot that's creating new VM with new mac address and signs to a different proxy if needed as well each time (I est it will take me about a day or two to do that with python), they wouldn't know how to track that and I would still be able to pile up hundred's of dollars at the very least for a developer in a day using just single computer - now if I hired a bot farm to do that for me or simply had a group of likeminded people who also hate that project and shared the idea with them... yeah, this is not gonna fly as long as it remains 'installs', the only way it can ever work is if they change it to sales / rev and it needs to be % based, not a fixed fee.

 

Why are Asset Store Devs getting off scot-free on this?

Shouldn't there be a fee per viewing of an Asset on the Asset Store?

Surely this would encourage Asset Devs to learn call-to-action copyrighting and to better promote and market their products into insta-buy productions.

 

That's assuming every download happens in one month. I believe each month is reset and calculated separately so you still get gouged at a higher rate on the first amount of downloads each month.

Does anyone have any confirmation that the per download fee is calculated based on total downloads over lifetime and not total downloads per month?

It would still be potentially ruinous either way, but if the fee is not reset per month at least if you sign up for enterprise, if you can survive your first million downloads without going completely bankrupt you are then paying $0.01 per after....

 

aah yes of course, sorry i did it wrong, in fact i would make even more revenue
@Ryiah, let me do the maths again, that guy trolled me..

 

And each month you'll need to open a support ticket with Unity providing evidence of revenue vs fake installs that their new 'Proprietary AI' detected incorrectly.

They'll take the money out of your account for these installs, but with the S*** show of all the other support requests from studios in the same boat, it will take 2-3 months to get your money back.

 

Are you pretending or really stupid, if things were as simple as you say everyone here wouldn't be crazy.