Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Trust_me_bro.exe

 

How would they know first install? are they keeping user data?

 

Yes. Yes they are.

 

You seem to be thinking exactly like the execs behind this idea, so let me break it down for you.

Sane and mature people that make a living with a game engine do NOT think in a static manner, e.g. "I have X downloads and X revenue so I'm safe". That's exactly (one of) the (many) mistake Unity made here: thinking that their "It only affects 10% of our users" means that the other 90% won't care.

Most of the other 90% do hope to make it big. You don't throw thousands of hours of hard work and thousands of $ in assets just for the sake of it. You hope that one day, you'll release something fantastic. Or, at the very least, you think about your growth, your perspective. You put hope in it, because you're a human being and because you've put in a substantial investment.

And when you do these projections, thinking about your future, the last thing you want is to feel that, perhaps, the fruits of all your and your team's hard work can vanish in an instant. That you may be strong armed into an unhealthy business relationship by an almighty partner that can act as they please.

Yet, this is exactly what most people see here. A CEO with a track record of screwing users over. A company that has eaten its word about TOS being version-based. A company that has announced a ridiculously convoluted and unclear business model, combined with quite possibly the worst communication I have ever seen. In other words, a business partner that is not trustworthy.

They seem to have thought that their users would be so invested in their engine that they would not dare to leave it. Ironically, that's exactly why so many of us will go.

 

One more time:
Installs != sales
revenue != earned money

one sale can generate 0 or tens of installs
revenue is before you deduct costs of game development cycle and support like assets, workforce, marketing and TAXES

 

And another morning by unity still holding on to his insane idea. Isn't it clear that with every minute that unity doesn't row back, the whole thing makes wider waves and the reputation and trust is irreparably destroyed? When pretty much every developer there is decisively opposes it, it really is madness to continue to hold on to it. Unity used to be a very fair and democratic company, welcome to North Korea now. But the worst of all is that even the assetstore developers decide to oppose it, if unity loses this the engine is worthless!

 

Holy S***. I didn't even think of that. Dirty companies in competition are going to nuke one another. Someone could run a bot farm out of China or India or Pakistan or Russia to do this and you would be totally F***ed.

Some random person in Thailand or any other place on earth could clone your game, then nuke you with fake downloads until you pull it from market and release their own version instead to replace you. What are you going to do about it? Sue them across international borders?

This is so F***ing crazy from top to bottom.

 

There's a Charity Bundle Carve Out in the Terms of Service.

No fees for installations of Games sold as part of a Charity Bundling.

Surely, come January 1st 2024, with these new Terms of Service in place, all Unity Devs become worthy of banding together as a Charity of Selves, and could then collectively bundle all their games as a collective contributory scheme to the livelihoods of Unity devs?

 

Except he wouldn't PAY NOTHING with a pro license because his project is over the lifetime install and revenue threshold. Please stop posting.

 

hmmm, I have read an updated blog post and FAQ and what I see now:
- no more reinstall fee, so my cool idea of using this as a revenge towards developers who I don't like won't work anymore. Although, I can still punish a developer for about 0.2$ If I install to another devise
- If install is happening outside of the list of "rich" first world countries fee is actually 0.02$
For all the scenarios I have for my stuff it doesn't seem like a problem and it is still lightyears cheaper than 5% revenue share of Unreal.
But those whose monetization model built around high volumes with 0.05 0.1 earnings from each install are the only ones who's seems to be in a jeopardy.

if you sell 20 000 copies you will still owe nothing to unity at all, even if each customer will install a game on 4 devices.
Only when your game will reach 200 001 installs you will start to owe 0.2$ for this one extra install. However if it will happen in India - you owe 0.02$

 

Um maybe that 2 days ago I wasn't going to be paying that and when I chose to use Unity and when I released my game this wasn't in the terms of service? Now they're saying my existing game I released years ago owes them unknowns large amounts of money every month because they need cash? And this amount will be based on phantom numbers they'll deduce.

Are you a serious person? Why am I even posting on here.

Edit: Oh and $5M proft? Haha, you're absolutely clueless how anything works. If we had $5M profit a year I'd hire someone to post here for me so I didn't have to see your posts.

 

It won't! You will need Unity's permission to put your game in a bundle now.

 

thank you, so in my case it would be: 30% (from steam) from 4,480,000 leaves you with 3,136,000 i still own 20.000 to unity xD

 

You have been an absolute legend and asset to the community and have personally helped me through many stressful situations. I appreciate what you've done and the little pink icon you and other use for your user profile isn't lost on me. I look forward to seeing you in other forums in the future. o7

 

But where is democracy in that

 

How can they possibly detect an install from a bundle vs an install from a purchase? This make no sense

 

You sir have an unquenchable thirst for watching the world burn.

 

no phantom number, you all seems to forget that every store has its systems to track for you the downloads and installs and all that (remember unity is not charging for every install)
also, you just need to pay for NEW users starting on 1 jan 2024

 

https://skidvis.github.io/unity-fee-calculator/

 

Haha, this is actually good. I will simply sell my game as a charity bundle of just my single game, the charity is my starving family.

 

just watch me spoof hardware

 

Thank for correcting me, which means after 1st Jan the download would start counting instead of use old record. In this case I think as long as your game do not hit you are safe?

 

I was pretty sanguine about this, as it seemed so utterly ludicrous I figured it would be walked back. Now… I’m not so sure.

so, anyone tried both DOTS and Mass? Any thoughts on the transition? Mass actually looks quite interesting but I’m still working through Blueprints and figuring out the overall domain.

 

I've been using Unity for several years as a hobbyist, so I'm not going to be affected by this install fee thingy. However, the changes in the ToS and the whole deleting the git repo sound incredibly scummy to me and clearly signal the way the company is going to proceed from now on. I like Unity, but I also hate how many times it becomes unresponsive, or how my whole system slows down to a crawl if I make the error of going into hybernation. So this is just the little push I needed to try a different engine. Yesterday I downloaded Godot and I've started going through the docs. I know it's underpowered compared to Unity, but it looks like a lot of people are jumping ship so its future looks very promising.

I have no faith at all in Unity's future, it looks like there is no one with the proper technical knowledge at the helm.

 

What about that:

 

Another Monetisation Idea For Unity: (AM.I.FU)

Runtime Rendering Fees - Per Pixel!
This is imminently fair because we know that the wealth of a player base (those that should be taxed to pay these fees) is directly proportional to the pixel density, frame rate and colour depth of their preferred screens.

In this way, the richest gamers should be billed the most by the developers of their chosen games, and this money passed on to the providers of the Runtime doing all this work: Unity!

Calculated this way:
Pixels Per Frame per Second of Playtime multiplied by Color Depth .

 

So... as a gamer (as well as a hobby game developer) the best way for me to support Game Developers is to not buy/download/install their game if their game uses the Unity engine. Got it... or should it say Godot!

Installing Unreal Engine 5.3.0 and Godot now...

 

Hope this link were used at unity before they made this decision

 

If the fee counter resets every month you are always paying your first million downloads each month at the high rate again. Even if it doesn't reset, you have to somehow survive your first million cumulative downloads without bankrupting.

I am not sure which is the case but both are still major problems.

They are making us now HOPE AND PRAY that we are either so successful and convert a massive percent of our downloads to sales so we can afford their fees or alternatively HOPE AND PRAY no one downloads our games so we don't go bankrupt.

This is not how you encourage people to use your system. It is how you terrorize them away from it.

 

You are wrong. Stores don't count installs. Unity don't look at store sale and install numbers. They have explicitly said they are using their own proprietary non-user-tracking data model to determine installs. Unity employees have said that this is currently not something that exists in a fit to purpose way.

I'm well aware it's "new" users and that's what I accounted for in my earlier calculations to you. I can tell you with far more certainty that Unity's data model will have that I am far more aware of all the terms and conditions currently outlined about this change than you are.

I'm going to stop talking to you now.

 

you don't understand that comment, he is talking about the threshold

 

If I recall correctly @neginfinity checked it out.

 

Trust_me_bro.exe

 

What's amazing is that they are still interchangeably using the terms "downloaded" and "installed" when they are quite obviously different. Who is writing this garbage?

 

So much this.

No one goes into game dev thinking 'oh I'm gonna just make ~100k per year and that is fine' - there's way too much work and time that making a game takes, sure it's not terrible if you make 100k, but every game dev dreams big, and every game dev needs a stable platform to work with, not some raft in the middle of the ocean that can flip any second.

 

As they can not use their brain

 

wtf dude?

 

Ah, I've get it now. Unity management just wants to cash in on the current culture war and to make 'go woke, go broke' a real scenario. I have to applaud the absolute brilliance of harnessing the 4chan/8chan userbase into generating more revenue by putting sucessful developers, who may have differing opinions against the chan hivemind, into debt. Or really any social media hivemind really, but I'm sure the chan sites will be the first real world case scenario.

Or hey, what if a Unity developer ticks off a famous streamer who can just use their massive cult worshipping army to spam installs on a game that passes the 200K/1Mil threshold? And now I don't want to put on a tinfoil hat but wouldn't Unity want to encourage these sorts of scenarios? That'd get Unity a larger cut of potential profit from developers.

Hope you don't have any opinions that might anger 4chan/8chan/streamers/'any social media mob' once you become successful! And that's before counting any pirated copies.

 

How do they determine a re-install vs an install?

More importantly what F***ing idiot thought they should ever have suggested that in the first place? Insanity.

 

yes...

 

all you half to do is delete the save data file it counts as new device that was a commit from dev that was reposting layers talk she said oh it wont count if game save data will still be there after unistall. so best way to do this make a java script starts a vm install delte vm start vm you get point not that hard maybe 18 lines of java and a google doc

 

Unity has said that the developer will get the bill. Unity also said the distributor will get the bill. Which is it?
Unity has said it will charge per install. It has also said it will charge per download. Which is it?

And no, as far as I'm aware there is no system at all that tracks the number of times each program is installed. They track purchases. I think this has probably been explained to you about 500 times at this point but they are not invoicing for sales, they are invoicing for "installs". Again, theres no concrete definition of what counts as an install, and they have all but admitted they dont actually have a working system for counting them yet. Businesses will not accept Unity telling them they are going to get an invoice, for some amount that they pull out of an algorithm that no one is allowed to see. You cannot build a budget around a number that could be anything. A business is even less likely to continue with Unity when Unity cannot even assure them that they wont be charged for their own video games being stolen. If you are ok with being charged when someone steals your game, good on you. No one else is.

I'm really struggling to understand how you are consistently confusing sales and installs. A purchase happens once, an install may never happen, or may happen a thousands times. Its unknowable.

 

Why do you keep babbling about how many times a game is sold on steam when unity charges based on the number of installs.
If you understand the mobile gaming industry you will understand that your entire career is gone.
We have children and families and too many things to worry about.

 

dude, you need to relax

 

Brackeys knew this sh*t thats why he left

 

Another reason to think about switching to UE/Godot/Nau Engine

 

Which system does itch.io use to track installs again exactly? GoG?

 

Yes. You are thinking on a fundamentally different model, where the game is only installed by paying customers. Your revenue per player is $20 with negligible acquisition costs relative to the price, and so the install cost is relatively low.

Mobile apps when paid are typically a couple dollars, but the most successful model by far is freemium models, where your revenue per user is closer to 30-50 cents, with a cost to acquire users of 20-40 cents. The delta on these games is only 10-30 cents per user. Paying 2 cents to 20 cents on each of these users, even if you give the benefit of the doubt that it's 1 install per user, is an absolutely massive chunk of revenue.

If this plan were aimed at things like Steam/Epic distributed games only it would be fine (but Unity would make almost nothing from it, so for the goal of actually driving revenues for them it would be awufl), for mobile devs though it's absolutely catastrophic.

 

unity acquired malware that tracks installs and invited 3 new members to the unity board of directors from the company that developed it.

LINK: unity acquires ironsource

LINK: ironsource developed installcore

LINK: unity acquires 3 new board members after the deal

 

They are saying that since free games never cross the 200K USD threshold they should not pay, but that is not clear either.