Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Apart from my previous posts did anyone at unity think about:
- publishing deals - did they think that this move would increase the chances of the devs finding publishing with unity on their back? Would this be beneficial?
- game pass / similar services - do they assume that anyone will happily pay from their cut with the game on unity that is published? Would that increase the chance of getting such a deal for games made with unity?
- asset store publishers - will they have any reason to be here?

That's surely a dev-oriented approach. Yeah, thanks for that also.

 

The only way this could work is if they excluded all F2P apps/games from pay per install payments. So it would only apply to products which you need to buy to play/use. The 0.2 USD per install would have minimal impact on any premium game/app.

 

Seriously Unity, just charge a flat 5% revenue fee above a certain revenue threshold. This install based revenue model makes costs far too unpredictable. Since most game devs really have no idea how many times their app is installed (we know sales, but not average installs per sale), there is no way to plan around this. Unity creates costs which are unpredictable, so that means significant risk. You say 90% will be unaffected based on your data, but you're not sharing that data. No one using Unity knows where in that data they currently land with any certainty.

Even worse, applying this fee retroactively had people like me freaking out over their steam game they set to free years ago and moved on from. How many installs has it had over the years I've almost forgotten about it? I thought I was doing a nice thing by switching the price from $5 to $0, but now am I screwed? What is the next retroactive revenue change Unity is going to drop on us? This is not how you maintain trust with your customers.

A flat 5% revenue fee would change that, costs would become extremely predictable and never risk bankrupting the developer unexpectedly. Seriously Unity

 

That's what I've been doing for the past 8 years or so. Custom UI system, custom IK system, custom render pipeline, custom physics, pretty much custom everything sitting on top of the bare basics (and even the bare basics break from time to time).

Chances are if you're at the beginning of your journey this may seem like a problem, but having half-assed features that trick you into using them and then crumble to a pile of crap right in front of you is worse (eg. potentially wastes more time) than having to write them yourself. At least you have 100% control over the stuff and can modify/fix it to your heart's content.

Either give me a robust, full-featured, battle-tested solution or leave it to me.

 

That makes it harder to speak up, not easier. And Luc Barthelet, an EA vet, is CTO now.

 

And I'm not disagree with anything you describe, but I pointed to guy spreading incorrect things with proofs of his incorrect things and statements, not about overall Unity decision issues, right?

 

The conversation moves pretty fast so someone might have pointed this out already, but the free/plus calculator seems to have an error where it shows 0 until you have at least 300001 installs on free/plus(so 1 more than you have in the screenshot). Other than that the calculations seem to work just fine, and match what I get by calculating myself.

Edit: Well, for the free and plus tier, it seems there were more errors in the other ones.

 

And cancel the subscription fees then.

 

If we got 1 millions download in jan month and paid 46500 and got another 300k next month (month of feb) will I be charged 0.01 per download or I have to pay 0.15 dollars again for the 1st 100k download. (Will unity count downloads each month from the start..?
they will reset the count every month..? )
Answer would be really appreciated thank you

 

He has an emotional reaction to the total F*** up from Unity, which is totally understandable. That is why I will not run around asking for moderators to shut him up, right?

 

The mobile market (specifically F2P) is different from standalone in terms of monetization. It must be taken into account that in the mobile market to obtain an income of $1 you need to invest $0.95, the margins are tiny, so to obtain profits you need a lot of download volume.

Hence, the number of downloads does not directly correspond to benefits, it depends a lot on the "quality" of each download.

 

It resets to 0.15 each month.

 

Someone has to to do this
Petition to fire the CEO
https://chng.it/hc4GWYvdb6

 

You're full of trust. Unfortunately, life taught me otherwise, especially when dealing with predatory billion-dollar companies, especially the ones changing retroactively TOS after promising the contrary...

 

Not really, because piracy would count as installations. A pirated game is precisely pirated so that it's considered original. And if Unity could detect that a game is pirated, instead of blocking the installation count, they should block the game's execution for knowing it's pirated, take Denuvo's job, and focus on security, laughs.

This is without getting into issues like Proton or that the future points to mobility and multi-device (like Steam on mobiles, Steam Deck, PC, GeForce Now, etc).

This model is actually not realistic in absolutely any scenario.

 

Can you point to where this statement comes from? If the company has revenue from other sources different from the app, this won't count towards the threshold?

 

Dominus Galaxia is pure C# at this point--just uses Unity for input and output. Should probably just switch to MonoGame.

 

A bit of a different weight don't you think, someone in the board and regular dude that has to implement stupid tracking of installs?

 

Cool, I'm going to remove all of my asset store packages from your marketplace. As an asset store publisher, you already take 30% of my revenue. You've gone too far with this BS. Count me in as another previously dedicated unity developer abandoning ship until you reverse this heinous decision.

 

Right, "Your game must meet both revenue AND install thresholds for the fee to apply."

 

I'm missing nothing. Read carefully. I've specifically pointed specific guy to his specific incorrect statements and calculation. There is NO "main point" discussion im message you've citated.

Literally in forum signature, literally released another game yesterday. Stop living in your own world where everyone is paid actors. And start reading. All my messages was abot spreading incorrect things from specific guy. Not protecting or raging on Unity decisions. It was pure facts operationing.

 

This change will certainly tarnish Unity's reputation, not just among developers but also among all users and gamers who value their privacy. When they open a game, the first thing they see is "Made with Unity," and they might wonder if this is spyware attempting to collect their personal information for some shady purpose. Consequently, many will uninstall the game without even trying to play it. Therefore, if you are a serious developer, you might eventually find it worthwhile to invest in a Pro license worth $2,000 per year to remove that annoying splash screen.

It appears to be a well-thought-out yet desperate strategy by Unity's executives, aimed at increasing their revenue by harming their product's reputation!!!

 

Let's assume that Unity wants to stick with subscriptions but would consider introducing revenue sharing. Any ideas on how to sensibly combine a subscription model with a revenue-sharing model? I've posted one idea in my previous post. However, I haven't thought about it for long, so I don't know if it makes sense when it comes to details and various scenarios.

 

People don't like pay-per-install which is broken from the beginning. Is there any "not thinking and reading properly" here? Your defense sounds like "Trust Unity Bro. It won't bankrupt you". Which is pretty meaningless.

Unity makes releasing a game just like yoloing uncovered options. People want certainty which should be written in the agreement (not "please contact customer support, we will help you figure it out")

 

but Unity contacted you to increase their income.
now I doubt they will contact you because they would decrease income.

in general - current pricing looks like a trap - you can easily fall behind limit and be forced to pay for "virtual installations" which numbers can be enormous, because it includes pirated installations and also installations of games for which was refund (for cheap and small and short games I suppose refund rate on steam is over 50%)

 

You do not need to buy new games after Windows updates. You may need to pay Unity again after your user does updates.

You have been quoting them heavily regarding the 1 time charge for installation and their recent comments about not charging for reinstalls. And the problem here is that you are putting a lot of faith in that.

The initial announcement by Unity said that they couldn't do this because they were only able to collect aggregated data, not specific user and device statistics. Most people who thought about it agreed this made sense, because to be GDPR compliant, not to mention other data privacy laws this would have to be the case.

As of their 9/13 update, they stated they won't be charging for reinstalls. There are several problems here though. Given the above, and the fact that no company (much less game company) has ever been able to accurately track their own installs, the technology to do this just doesn't exist. Unity acquired a company which will let them get a more accurate number here, but it still won't actually be accurate. It's more along the lines of, assuming good faith from users, can you estimate reinstalls?

Data from other users are pointing out that statements from Unity are defining a new installation by the creation/change of a application.dataPath value. This would mean that changing a games directory is a new installation, this is common with DLC, however it is also common with mods, it is common with games run from USB's, it is common with cloud drives, and in many cases is even common with major version updates to existing games. And this is just for PC, mobile games have a whole other set of cases which create new paths such as iOS's feature to archive rather than uninstall apps as a way to save storage space. All of these things will trigger install charges due to how it seems an installation is defined.

There is another major issue here which is the claim Unity is making that they can exempt pirated installations, bundled installations, and charity installations. They can't. All three of these are the exact same game, making the same calls. Unity does not have special access into all the various stores out there to get this information, and they will not be getting that access. What they can do, is ask developers to submit the number of steam keys (or other keys) sold on a platform during a charity or bundle that qualify at whatever the special price is. Then using that developer submitted data, they can give you a waiver for that amount. There is no possible way for them to make this an automated process.

Furthermore, their piracy waiver is a big one. Giving Unity all benefit of the doubt here, lets say that they actually can detect piracy. Why have they not made this tool available to developers to go after pirated copies of their games already? Do you know how much money that would be worth to the industry? Steam (and Epic) dropped PC piracy rates from 90% to 35%. Mobile games are pirated at a rate of 95% for Android and 55% for iOS. Being able to seriously reduce that for any developer making their game in Unity would literally revolutionize the gaming industry, far more than any license price changes could. That Unity is not making this available, shows that they cannot detect pirated copies of games because there would be a massive financial incentive to do so. Instead, like the charity and bundle waivers, giving Unity all benefit of the doubt, what they're instead going to do is ask developers to show numbers of their estimates of pirated copies of their game over a time period, and reduce the install count based on that.

This is an incredibly flimsy basis on which to charge developers as the charge is only indirectly related to revenues. Furthermore, this practice is actively detrimental to high download low margin sales which covers most of the mobile market (in which Unity is the leader, by far). But also, is also quite detrimental to low priced steam games where a cheap indie game goes viral, or large discount sales, both of which force Unity devs to sell games at less of a discount than their competitors selling non Unity games. None of this is good for Unity devs.

 

True, but that's entirely down to Unity's communication. They've just sprung this with a "by the way, we're changing everything, here's some scary numbers."
The whole "20 cents per copy over 200,000" is actually a nonsense. At $200,000 revenue you are supposed to have a Pro license*. Change the table to this and it's not as scary:

Now it's only affecting those with $1 million annual turnover and 1 million installs and the indie roots are untouched.
But Unity aren't communicating well, plus Riccitiello is a known arse who's pushed and pushed money driving at EA and now here. Every since floating on the stock market, Unity is all about the shareholders now. Anger here isn't just this move but everything Unity is throwing at devs to make our lives harder and scarier, knowing that we and the gamers are no longer their main concern. As such, people are blindsided by the conclusions they are jumping to, which wouldn't be happening if they instead trusted Unity because Unity had a great relationship with its users, which doesn't exist because Unity isn't operating well at the moment.

*Edit: In fact, $2000 for Pro, $3000 for Enterprise, once you hit $1m turnover get an Enterprise license and halve your fees. The maximum anyone would pay would be $0.125 under 100,000 installs and that middle column can be ditched.

 

Saw the writing on the wall long ago. Glad I bailed on Unity and went to Unreal for my projects. I had a feeling they would pull a stunt like this when got rid of perpetual licenses and started screwing devs in every way they could.

I wonder what David and the original Unity team think of all this.

Unity would be the leader in the game engine world if David and the original team never sold out to investors. Imagine how great Unity would have become if they just stuck around and worked on it. I remember the days they would come and listen to devs on the forum, and work with everyone to make Unity better. Miss those days.

 

Let me see if I understand this, if someone wishes to bankrupt a company all they need to do is setup a bot on a dozen or so computers to uninstall and reinstall a game a couple of million times or more effectively draining more money out of the developer than they made from sales, on top of this developers just have your word that the game was installed so many times?

Are you guys insane!!!
You should not be charging a developer for actions outside of their control.

If you wish to make more money with Unity then catch up with the rest of the industry, your engine is a mess and is lacking compared to the competition and the only good selling point was your current pricing model, you have just killed yourselves doing this.

I will most definitely be moving to Unreal if you stay on this path.

 

I have severe OCD and obsessively install and uninstall games until it feels right. I feel this change unfairly punishes people with mental disorders such as mine. How will unity seek to support people in my scenario?

 

It would be probably a neat business idea just to make the porting tool for unity that will translate it to another runtime. (I can only assume how tremendous of a task it would be, but in this case, it could be profitable for the creator still)

 

Well I'm just speaking based on our experience of working with Unity and other companies like that. Changing TOS and all is definitely S***.

 

Unity claim of no info being sent back simply isn't possible. What they've described is that they're already illicitly wiretapping and tracking data through their runtime. They may have just implicated themselves in a pretty major crime no matter what country you are in.
(Copied from youtube comment).
Is this true?

 

I think if revenue share is introduced, there shall be no subscription fee on the editor / core engine use. Editor shall be fully featured for everyone who participates in the revenue share scheme. They can charge subscription money on their extra services, that most people don't need.
And for new projects, you will stand between a fair choise between Unreal / Unity. But with subscription fees in place and 5% revenue share, it is unfairly in favor of Unreal, that has no such fees.

 

You might also see a large number of f2p Unity games getting pulled down from the stores. Once a game stops producing enough revenue, you'll be incentivized to erase it from existence to avoid the risk of it suddenly getting a bunch of installs down the road and costing you a fortune. Unity games might even gain a reputation as something to avoid by players, because the game developers pull them down quickly as soon as revenue drops to keep future costs under control, because just leaving your Unity game up creates too much financial risk.

 

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that this pay-per-install plan shows us how incompetent the whole management and current Unity CEO actually are. I'd definitely sign a petition to fire the CEO and ask for a reorganization, because only a total mad man could come up with this kind of pricing model.

 

Latest news is that reinstalls don't count, only new installs.

But hey, tomorrow they might charge you per pixel rendered, or per physics step. Who knows!

 

R.I.P Unity -My once-beloved game engine ruined by corporate greed (and incompetence by top management).
Time to read up on Unreal Engine guys

 

To everyone so far in the thread it appears they are resetting the fees every month so you are still starting at $0.15 every month. Again for mobile games market with in app purchases, ads, subscriptions, or micro-transactions this is still Russian roulette and no one can take this risk.

 

@LeonhardP can you clarify these vague terms used here:

"sprite of this program", "we have no desire", it sounds like there most certainly will be overcharges happening, and if the developer notices it, unity can just say, well we didnt mean to, look at the TOS:

 

the more i think of consumers behavior the more i see how disastrously this new policy is..

many mmo and free online games, players can find holes in the game eco system.. which allows them to abuse things in the game.. even if you managed to reach threshold.. no one knows if players will keep buying stuff.. or.. in some cases buys accounts or items from other users in grey market.. a revenue that goes to someone else than developer..

these kind of behaviors is unavoidable. And harm developers.. then unity comes now to and add insult to injury..
developers will have to take drastic measures that cost time and money as well as losing consumers.. just to make sure nothing hampers revenue to keep up with installs increase..

 

Btw doesnt this show a big red flag atm? UNITY IS IN DESPERATE NEED OF CASH it seems .

Normally i am not gloom and doom but doesnt that sniff as huge financial problems on Unity part? Aint they -1.3B last year?

 

Someone started such a petition : https://www.change.org/p/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-firing .

 

The ideas I have gotten from this thread so far are Stride, Cocos, Bevy, MonoGame, Godot.

I think it will have to be MonoGame for me based on features needed and preliminary assessment. What a waste of time to recreate everything all over again. But they are not offering any reasonable choice here for mobile developers.

 

To all people try to defend the company, including the employees

As the unity try to convince us. I am not denying the fact that most of the time this plan will cost most company less than Unreal 5% share of revenue. Mostly free of charge like it had been, include me and my little company with so unpopular product

HOWEVER it also undeniable fact that this plan still unfair to some unlucky people that got direct collateral damage from the plan you try to introduce
To be fair, literally BE FAIR. 5% of revenue as of unreal, even it would cost more, still more fair than per install plan. Because you reap from the product that really have revenue

In the same sense that
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere
Like so
Unfairness to anyone is also a threat to everyone

And this is serious. This will be sentiment of our community. You made us fear your plan that will affect our future. And only equivalence of serious measure need to be executed to make us gain our trust back

As for me. Someone who sit on executive chair need to be fired. With a proof that the person was responsible for this atrocious calamity

 

I thought this to at first but. In theory old games getting reinstall should be ok. Because their yearly revenue will be below $1 million. Since revenue is per game not per company. Where you run into problems is old games that sell well for many years.

 

This is also known as a flat fee and is usually worded more like. We will take $0.6 for every sale you make. Easier to understand, easier to track. Easier to prove. Doesn't require F***ing magic and sorcery at the top of some dark tower.

 

Missing information, so it does apply to streamed games?

 

This is disingenuous, since switching to a Pro/Enterprise licence (which could cost as little as $2,000 for a single dev) changes those fees to $0.

 

No but it can still count as a different machine thus a new install.