Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

show us your $15 game or stop trolling im calling it now closes as you have to a game is some pre purchased assets.

 

This seems more pay-upfront-to-play friendly than f2p. Which is strange because mobile f2p is Unity's main market...

 

How would Unity accurately count the installation?
Even the game developers themselves have difficulty in ascertaining the exact number.
(I don't think even the platforms responsible for sales can track the complete count.)

 

Thanks. Are you talking about this vague statement from the blog post? Because it doesn't put me at rest or clarify the financial viability of free-to-play mobile games

"Fee reduction for use of Unity services
Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games. This program enables deeper partnership with Unity to succeed across the entire game lifecycle. Please reach out to your account manager to learn more."

 

And if you are not "selling" the game but rather in app services, ad displays, transactions, or subscriptions you will have MASSIVELY more installs than sales.

How much more? DON'T KNOW! Cross your fingers and hope for the best. Thanks Unity!

 

Thanks tom, I can't find that news

 

ehm, nop i'm not being force to pay aything, it is the same for me, also, 3 days ago unity was not free of fees or royalties, there was plus, pro, and the other guy i do not remember the name

read the first post again

 

I still feel unfair when you created a game as freelancer sell the game. After that if the client made the game hit the threshold. I have to pay for the fees?

 

Dude, it's a problem with your character not to understand the pain that the people here have to face.

 

I'd argue that since they're just content and not separate executables, they wouldn't count as installs. But then again, not sure whether they've said something specific regarding this.

 

Incorrect installs do not reset they are culminative live time.

 

If you believe the guy who stated he was a Unity employee but wasn't properly tagged by the forum, they can't accurately measure installations AND they haven't developed tools or a pipeline to measure installations.

 

The storefronts have no obligation to do anything of the sort though. Unless Unity pays them a cut or provides some other inducement, why would they? Collaborating with Unity is a PR risk and increases liability. Not to mention, if they do agree to pay Unity and take that out of developer income, what happens when Unity charges a developer more than they have made for that period of time? It's just a giant hassle that the storefronts will want to stay out of unless Unity goes out of their way to cut them in somehow to an extent that outweighs the many downsides.

 

Here is an suggestion unity team - fire the CEO, revert this utter BS, and maybe, just MAYBE you can have a chance to survive as company.

 

And? What don't you understand? If you have a game even published years ago on Android, and a YouTuber plays it and makes it go viral in 2024, and a lot of people start downloading and playing it, but buy little or nothing within the game, you suddenly ruin your life when you should be jumping for joy for having had good luck!

 

Are you a troll?
Of course there are cases where the margin is different, there are no two software houses alike.
Do you think you are safe now with your little game, now? I'm happy for you, I'm pretty sure you really would like big companies that make F2P fail but in that companies there are people working just like you, with a family and so on. My numbers just show you that there are a lot of expenses. If you work in your parents house, with NO expenses you of couse will not EVER have problems with any crazyness Unity will do.
BUT, what if next month unity will ask you 1$ for every install? 2$? Why you defend this madness is beyond my comprehension.
Anyway. I'm done.
Farewall to all, good luck.

 

Exactly, how are they even determining it's the same machine? What if I change my GPU?

What about Proton installations? Proton creates a different "machine" for each installation which makes reinstalls a thing again and the Deck is getting more popular by the day.

Unity has no F***ing clue what they are doing!

 

I am pretty sure they can't. the only way i can think of is a check per invoice similar with the one they have for unity asset store. but this means steam, MS, sony etc to implement this which is impossible
and yes companies like MS practically dropped the fight against piracy for windows OS (and many others) and a company with much less power etc can do that?! let's be serious!

 

i guess unity need to say something about f2p games, remember this is not something that is happening right now, lets see what how this evolve

 

Good example. I can't get over how bizarre this is. And Unity's own definitions seem internally inconsistent to me.

Here are two scenarios I'm hoping someone can clear up:

Scenario A) A developer creates a free demo of a mobile game they intend to charge for. Let's say the demo has 10% of the game's content in it. They release this demo on an app store for $0. According to Unity's information, installations of this demo will not count toward "lifetime installs" (in the context of the fee structure), since it's a demo. Let's say 1 million people download this demo. Then the developer creates a premium app with a one-time cost, that contains the extra 90% of the game's content. All revenue and installs of this would count toward lifetime installs. And then let's say it's $2, and 100,000 users purchase it, for a total of $200,000. Since the installs are under 200,000, the dev pays $0 in install fees to Unity.

Scenario B) That same developer creates the same game, but hides that 90% of the content behind a single in-app purchase. So users can still download the game for free, and play 10% of it; and then pay a $2 IAP to unlock the extra 90%. And let's say the same number of users unlock the rest of the content as in case A. With this model, since it's not a demo (by Unity's definition), they are over the download and revenue thresholds. And the dev would be on the hook for install fees for 800,000 installations. In the best case with Pro, those fees are $24K. In the worst case with Personal, those fees are $160K. And you're opened up to the risk of install bombing, or just a continued increase in legit users that download but do not convert.

So obviously the costs to the dev are very different in those two scenarios. But what is really different about them otherwise? In both cases 1M people played at least 10% of the game. In both cases 100,000 people paid $2 to play 100% of the game. So why are they treated vastly differently by Unity?

 

do you need to buy your games on steam after you changed you CPU?

 

show us your 15 game champ come on im staying up to see this development.

 

I wonder how much additional revenue are they expecting to make with this change? Will it make Unity profitable? Is it really worth the PR disaster and stock slump?

 

It seems the most logical thing, it is likely that any commercial court would find the changes without consultation and without notice arbitrary and extremely unfair. Adding the striking decision of the company's CEO to get rid of his shares before announcing this marketing marvel.

 

Then have a data exchange deal with steam first before notifying us

 

What are you on about this trolling must end

 

Record labels used to be famous for this in the music industry. Not only would they use shady practices like "advancing" the artist millions of dollars up front and then blowing it all on the artist's behalf to line back their own pockets, forcing the artist to pay every penny back to them and make no money off their sales, they were also insanely shady about their sales tracking.

Loads of artists had to take their labels to court just to get the royalties they were due because the labels intentionally tracked sales data wrong and stiffed them out of millions.

But I'm sure we can trust Unity to track our installs using their proprietary magic and never lie or mislead or miscalculate.

Only console developers selling each game for $20-60 a pop can afford this risk, and they aren't using Unity generally anyway to begin with.

Or people who know their games will be a failure and thus don't care.

 

Obviously not, hahaha.

But what if Unity recognized the machine as a different one and then charges you for it?

You didn't reply about Proton, which is a VERY real thing about indie devs. Proton creates a new machine for each installation! How exactly is Unity gonna deal with this?

 

to sue you would half to show damages and at the amount of money unity will spend on layers those damages would half to be pretty large to make it worth even trying.

 

It's not that uncommon for games to make over 500k. 200k/year isn't nearly enough to sustain even a medium-sized team, at least not in my country (Spain).

The problem with Unity for me is that it's spread itself incredibly thin. It has got lots of features for sure, but I can't count the amount of times I've been sorely disappointed with them to the point I had to roll my own version because I just couldn't use their stuff in production. I very much prefer a small, rock solid foundation that I know I can build upon, which is what Unity embodied years ago.

It's kinda like the "Kid: can we stop and get Unity? Mom: we have Unity at home" meme except that Unity at home is way, way better.

 

maybe yeah, but i'm just paying for 1 install

 

this is totally true, in fact, i'm working on unigine way before this mess

 

They can't. I wanted to help people to get back their account if the accidentaly deleted the game or changed phone.
THERE IS NO WAY ON ANDROID TO SAVE DATA THAT WILL BE READ AFTER A RESET.
NADA - NIET- IMPOSSIBLE. Privacy is getting always stronger on every update of iOs and Android.
If they actually know how to do this they must give a precise description of the software used. The device must be always online? What kind of spyware are we installing on users devices? Do we have the right to do so?

 

yeah he's just avoiding it people he's just a troll

 

And this is the money we have to pay, it makes us bankrupt.
You are inhumane for not understanding this pain.

 

You already said you are not paying anything because this does not affect you. Which is it? Unity billing will be in touch for your noncompliance.

 

No, from what said in the post, if you install on your desktop, that counted as 1 install, if you install on your second desktop it counted as 2 install. If you own an internet café you can install to 100 machine and counted as 100 install with only 1 purchase.

 

You don't, you're paying for every unique install on each different machine. That's why it's an install an not a sale.

 

Bro, I've been reading your posts in the last few pages, and I'm asking this sincerely as a friend without any means to be harsh or offensive at all: please, go have a walk, go have a coffee, but stop posting this type of stuff for a while.

You're clearly dealing with this situation from an hobbyist / enthusiast point of view, and while this is completely legit, there is a lot of people which is seeing their careers, studios and current position at complete risk due to this new pricing model.

Dealing with a pricing model is an extremely complicated topic at a professional / corporate level: having to considerate un-predictable costs such as the installs ones introduced by this model - or whatever - is pure nightmare when having to redact business models for investors, plan yearly costs, etc.

 

you guys are trying to explain something to some one that seems to not be able to understand at this point im feeling bad for saying show me your game. Hes not a real developer so he doesnt understand he has a pipe dream and feels all of us with real jobs in gamming are attacking him.

 

@impheris

not you, Unity decides what you're paying for "at their sole discretion" based on their "you appreciate we will not go into detail over" method.

 

if steam does not do it, why unity would do it?

i guess unity needs to say someting about it

 

I don't think it works quite like that. First, such a company would be using the enterprise version. Secondly, the numbers in the first column of the chart are for total new installs for the month. The worst case scenario that is closest to yours would be exactly 500k installs in a month, which would come out to 0.06 per install. Also the worst case would be that 1 million lifetime installs have already been reached.

EDIT: Actually, if the person in that scenario had the enterprise version, they would not meet the $1 million in 12 months threshold, so the install-fees would total total $0.
The $1 mil in 12 months requirement improves the situation.

However..... I can think of a similar situation where the developer would still lose money. If a particular game makes around $0.17 per install and gets 500k installs per month, they would make $0.17 * 500,000 installs * 12 months --> $1,020,000 per year, causing the game to fall into the category of requiring payment even with an enterprise version.
So in one month this game would make $85k, but pay $100k in fees for a total monthly LOSS of $15k.


I think the math would actually look like this:
$0.06 * 500k --> $30k. So it's a little better, but as you said, it still exceeds the amount of revenue generated per month.

If for the next month, the monthly install increased by 1 to make it 500,001, then the numbers get better. $0.02 * 500,001 --> $10,000.02. So the first month the company would lose $5,000 and the second month they would gain 14999.98.

Now whether or not there are actually games out there that get 500k installs per month and only make $0.05 $0.17 per person... I don't really know. Some games like Candy Crush have 1 billion+ downloads, so the 500k number seems plausible to me. If your hypothetical scenario is accurate... then yeah, a game like that would be royally screwed.

Either way... this exercise shows that the whole thing is a mess. It'll cost Unity a bunch of money to maintain all this goofy phone-home-telemetry, anti-cheating-software, anti-piracy-software, duplicate-install-detection-software, extra server capacity, and sophisticated-billing-software. No doubt more employees will be needed to maintain such a complicated system just like with the IRS and it's convoluted tax code. Maybe some of the fancy software packages, servers, and employees were provided by IronSource in the $4.4 billion acquisition that happened before Unity laid off so many employees? It'll cost developers more because monthly predictions will swing wildly. It'll cost Unity more in lawyer fees because inflation rates will forced them to constantly update the contract (as the fees are absolute instead of percentages). It'll cost Unity a boatload of money because of all the developers that switched to other engines. I'm sure there are several other hidden costs to both Unity and developers that I'm missing.

To be fair, some people here have rightly pointed out that there are situations where Unity's new fees are actually pretty reasonable. However, it's probably reasonable to state that most people would prefer something simple and fair across the board that works for all types of game pricing models. A model like Epic's simple flat rate fee is an overall win-win for all types of developers and also for Epic itself. The old Unity pricing scheme was also pretty fair and reasonable. I suspect that if Unity starts spending its $4.4 billion a little more wisely, this conversation wouldn't be necessary.

 

Yeah, the whole thing is crazy. I was 100% committed to Unity for years but now I don't see how you can trust any of this to work out or make sense. You now must plan your entire game and monetization strategy around Unity's random whims which might again change tomorrow.

This just doesn't add up. You can't plan your entire career and years of your life around crazy people who don't even understand how games work or make money nowadays. We have all already sunk enough years of our lives into this. What else can we do but pull the bandaid off now and start over? How can you trust these people to be reasonable even if they backtrack?

I personally cannot. They could change the terms again in 1 year and you are screwed. It will hurt those of us that need to now rebuild our games in other systems but it is better than releasing and being trapped with unstable lunatics.

 

Steam games are bound to the user account, not the user hardware. Like everyone else, I am begging you to actually think.

 

Steam does not charge based on installs you can install as much as you want after purchase. Unity is the one charging for installs.

 

Sounds like he is just scared to leave and trying to rationalize and defend this to reinforce that decision. I get it, I have a lot of money invested in Unity assets and have been using it since I was a teen. I hope they reverse course for those who stay but I honestly can't get over the fact that they think they can charge people retroactively. That's a step too far and I'm out and moving to unreal or Godot.

I don't post here (last post was 2014) but this behavior is so gross it drew me out just to add to the pile of people saying goodbye.

 

That's not the way it's computed. If you're using Unity personal, you get charged "only" after the 200,000th install, so it is not 350,000 * $0.2 = 70k goes to Unity. but (350,000 - 200,000) * $0.2 = 30k goes to Unity.
You lose 40K less.
Similarly, it would not be 1,000,000 installs * 0.2 = $250k (that should be 200 btw) but (1,000,000 - 200,000) installs * 0.2 = $160k.
In addition, they tried to sweeten the bill by saying that reinstall now no longer count as an install, but that changes nothing to your scenario. The result is they take "only" 26.6% of your revenue.
I think this is not acceptable, but you should understand their model.
Also, with the same numbers, if you use Unity Pro, you get to pay only $2K per year.
So in this case, the new scheme would be to force you to go UnityPro in order to save $158k

Which begs the question: Can you switch from Personal to Pro after the fact in order not to get screwed up?

 

i've never seen someone read in between the lines before to see what they want this hard

there's no convincing someone with their mind made up