Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

What if we use an adblocker app like AdAway to block games from sending data to Unity?

 

Your entire career and startup are at risk of being destroyed. If you are likely to become homeless, can you relax?

 

mmm looks like that ramdon app is not working... or maybe the creator is also confused

 

Rate my new business plan
1) make game
2) reach threshold
3) make an insane amount of installs/uninstalls
4) go viral with the bill
5) free game marketing from outrage


I access to a full IPv6 public subnet and could fake around 633825300114114700748351602688 installations. That should result in a guessed bill of: $126.765.060.022.822.940.149.670.320.537,60.

 

CEO's logic i guess
As we all know unity making money not from games but from analitics and ads
So yhey invent "install bombing" by haters
More installs = more ads
More ads = more investors
Profit

 

What if I make a game and decide to pull it off when I'm two shy away from hitting 200k ? Then modify it just a bit in Unity so it becomes a " new game " ? Then upload this version of the " new game " ? Would this count as a new game so I would not be affected by it ? Repeat this process. Infinite money. Unity looses.

 

To be fair they said for platform that you distribute and manage by yourself, you get installed fee billed

But for platform like streaming or free bundle like epic game and geforce now, the platform will got the bill

However, surely those platform will then directed the bill to you in some way, indirectly perhaps, such as decrease your profit if you use unity as game engine

 

you are just creating useless drama here

 

Modern problems require modern solution

 

yes i also can see that too, it will be a logical move

 

Yup, and in all honesty it isn't hard to write that kind of bot at all, you can go with python for high-level automation, you can go with PowerShell if you want it to be faster, there's tons of customization you can do to make sure it's undetectable to unity as multiple installs as well.

And reasons why someone would do that are plentiful, like.. say some devs here would try to defend unity's decision, a group could be formed behind the closed doors that does not like that, the group would dox them and gather all their studio's names as well as game names in one database, track them on when they break the threshold of rev, even years into the future (you only need to setup AI to track that - another day or two to do it) and just fire up the bot automatically as soon as they do to nuke them out of the map to 'teach them a lesson', could be many more scenarios of course but just something that came to my mind on the fly

And all you need to do it is some strong hate towards a person / project and less than a week of your time.

 

How the hell do you get 4.5 million dollars with only 300,000 installs, I said this guy is really stupid.
We are talking about mobile games and low priced games, please stop babbling.

 

Can you download game from Steam without installing it? Does Google store or Apple store allow for something like that? In what meaning is the word "download" used here?

 

OK, it is game revenue, not company revenue. That makes more sense now. But still fee per install is stupid because 1 mln installs of f2p games is different than 1 mln installs of some paid games.

 

Sweet! Another render pipeline that all of the asset sellers would have to support. Even better if it promises feature parity with an already existing one but never delivers while also phasing out the other! You sir are thinking like a true corporate officer now! I see a bright future for you at Unity.



Speaking Unity employees, I always think of how much of a help @superpig has been to me over the years. He'll never know it but that man has been helping me since his days of crawling the GDNet forums in the early 2000s. I hope he moves on from this and I hope he finds a bright future somewhere that deserve him.

 

Unity says trust me bro it wont work like that

 

I have to say again that install tracking is inherently unacceptable, even if I never pay Unity a penny. You're passing YOUR bullshit onto OUR players.

 

it does not work, the guy who made it is also confused...

 

streamed and webgl don't count as installs any more this was confirmed by a unity rep when legal got ahold of the office on were to file paper work for damages by someone they latter posted it on hear also.

 

I have APKs on my phone, I can uninstall the app and reinstall it as many times as I like without downloading it.

Also even on steam, a game can be downloaded without being installed, either in the client or at the very least by using steamCMD.

 

no, you are not -.- OMG you are not paying for the previous 1m that number is just a check to see if you are eligible

 

Or just be the one to target a company with a bot and then demand they pay a ransom or you destroy their company in about 30 days. That's also a viable business plan. Actually, probably way less effort so cost-to-profit ratio could be better?

 

Are you getting a high by being the troll in this? It's not if. A company that sells a game for $3 and sells 70k copies has a revenue of $210k. Minus 30% Steam gets that's 147k in profit. That means Steam gets $63k.

When people start installing it in all of their machines, say 5, that's 350k installs.

So 350,000 * $0.2 = 70k goes to Unity.

What you're left with is $210k - $133k = $77k . That's just insane. You lose about 64% of your income to third parties.

33.3% of that income goes exclusively to Unity! And as the sales number rank up multiple unique installs on different machines make you pay even more.

If you sold 200k copies with 5 unique installs each (don't forget there are family people around the world with potentialy up to 7 or 8 installs) that's:

1,000,000 installs * 0.2 = $250k to Unit ALONE!

200k copies * $3 = $600k revenue so Unity gets 42% of your revenue!

If you comprehend these VERY real numbers, then you'll see why you are the clown in this.

 

There's no way this proposal goes through January 1st, because it's illegal. The lawsuits from the larger studios alone would bankrupt UT. What they should have done is reduce costs on things noone cares like AI and useless billionaire purchases, but the damage is done.

To fix this establish a 5% cap on the NET revenue above 200k / 1M to protect all developers. Either way, scraping their old TOS means the trust is gone. Whoever thought this was a good idea needs help.

 

You have misinterpreted what he wrote. Is English your first language? He is stating that at the beginning of each month you are reset to paying the highest tier per install. Until your 1,000,001+ download of the month you are paying an elevated rate.

 

I was just talking about simple games on something like itch.io with a 'Pay what you want' model. Pay what you want. Download any time. Install anywhere any time as much as you like.

 

The games do not need to send data to Unity. Unity does not track your revenue (how would they?) nor your installs. Instead they can just make up a number and charge you.

 

How did you come up with that $5M profit? Did you accounts for sales? discounts? bundles? Steam Cut?
Right off the bat steam would take $1.5M That leaves you with $3.5M. Subtract another $1M for discounts or steam sales. Thats 2.5M Gross Revenue and this is being generous. Each team member would need a 2K license. Lets say a team of 5. Thats 10K for Unity Pro. Lets say each user has 2 Installs. So we are talking 74K for installs + 10K for unity pro = 84K to unity

comparing to unreal. First $1M is free. so royalties would be ( $2.5M - $1M)* 0.05 = 75K royalties.

 

yes, he is.

Read what he said again, he is correct - he will be paying higher rate each month if each month he hits 1 mil if the counter resets each month, how did you misunderstood this for first lifetime million in this context is beyond me - time to rest the keyboard perhaps?

 

No, is not

 

Just calculated voodoo revenue using github link & sensor tower data they have have to pay 560K usd per month

 

It works normally for people with normal brains.

 

yeah probably... but i can not sleep right now

 

Looks like they updated the runtime fee faq: https://unity.com/pricing-updates#unity-runtime-fee



Youd think they would learn to be more clear with their business plan and the words they use after this whole ordeal. I guess now we pay once per download instead of once per install. So do you think they mean every time someone downloads your game you pay?

 

Considering steam cut, in reality it's never 30%. Steam auto-collects all needed taxes for countries like USA. Also don't forget refunds, so final steam cut is closer to 40-50%.

 

The install fee pricing model is physically broken, no matter how you adjust the fancy parameters here (unless you cap the cost by % of revenue, but then why not just do revenue share in the first place?)

You only need common sense to understand this. Arguing with people who can not understand is just a waste of life.

 

No, is not...

 

To play devils advocates for a moment, many companies do need to budget for unknowns, a good example is bandwidth usage on a server. You don't know exactly how much you need to pay because it depends on your traffic. If your game is network based your accounting department will most certainly have to budget for those unkown expenses based on a guess of expected usage.

The caveat there of course is that you can get a good guess if that number is realistic using your own server stats.

Of course, you can also set alarms, throttle your bandwidth, or disable the server entirely, which you have control over your billing, unlike users installing your app/game.

 

It works normally for people with normal brains.

 

Subway Surfer Sybo Games might need to pay 27 Mil

 

if you work in mobile market you always have more installs than sales

 

not trying waste life trying help those guys that are spending ton money on assets dont really know code you know its like gambling there in so far they don't know when to stop.

 

If you have 350k installs, that's 150k over the 200k threshold. Which means you pay 150k * 0.2$ = 30k.

And you're left with 210k - 30k = 180k.

Which isn't too bad considering your game sells at $3 dollars/copy. Imho, the problem is not the money but that they don't know how they're going to pull this off on a technical level, and they've announced it anyway. No specifics, no detailed information, just letting us know we're going to have to pay an unspecified amount calculated no one knows how yet... not even them.

 

king dot com can afford unity runtime prices they have good microtransactions earnings

 

Sure, sure...
TAXES: 50% -1.568.000 (some countries are above, like mine)
SERVERS: at least 5000 x month. - 60.000 ?
WAGES: you need a team of at least 10 people to get a game like this working. 4000$ average (you have to pay gross... you know what it means?) -480.000
ADVERTISING: 20k month? -240.000
HARDWARE LICENCES: ? I do not develop on consoles I can't imagine how much they cost.
OFFICES / BUSINESS CONSULTALT: 20k month? -240.000
LICENCES FOR SOFTWARE: a lot if you have 3d stuff...

And if you have multiple projects that need more funding or are in developing stage you have to get more people (like external contractors).

You have really NO IDEA of what a successful developer has to cope with.
And if every users install 2/3 times (and it's perfectly normal) you are screwed.

 

I cant wait for my free mobile games to go viral...

 

As part of history, I’ll leave my 5 cents on this post:

Clearly no one technical was part of this decision, as the 1st rule of any software is “don’t trust the client”.

I can think of many ways I can prevent my Unity project from calling home while being installed on a device. If all we need is to prevent the Unity executable or any of its libraries from accessing the internet, just sandbox the entire application behind a launcher, and you are pretty much done.

If you need to access the internet for analytics or multiplayer, just go through the executable first, as that one has an open path through your sandbox, while blocking any unknown request from the Unity executable and libraries themselves.

At the end of the day, the fact that this is even a thought process I had to go through at all is quite sad.

I’ve been a strong supporter of Unity for my entire career, and pushed back on people telling me to „try new engines”. I’m gonna start porting all my stuff to UE, and hopefully Godot opens a marketplace soon.

The end of an era.

 

but you will only paid for 1 install even if you install the same game 145242 times (official statement)

 

if save game data file is still there bro do you not get this?

 

they know it thats why they use propietary data model and pull it out of their asses at Unitys sole discretion