Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Agreed. Also someone just pointed out that I was not accounting for the margins - things like advertising fees and payments for other services like hosting fees and such don't get accounted for in a "gross revenue" number, so the situation is much worse in that respect as well.

 

I created some graphs for better visualisation these new pricing plans per one Pro/Enterprice seat and Free monthly. So we see now how these installTiersLevels look silly and in most cases are unpracticable. I tried conver most cases when the Install of the game are above 10k and below 100 mln.

So if u wanna earn some money you dont wanna be bellow the blue line , therefore in most scenarios Unity force developers to buy an pay subscription, add more ads and add more microtransaction from game to achieve more revenue per Install.

 

I dream of option 3:
3. Ton Roosendaal becomes the owner of Unity.

 

Most companies rely heavily on advertising to get installs. The game quickly brings in over a million dollars, but the ad spend is also usually extremely high, e.g. 90% of the revenue that comes in and 10% is the real profit. But with so many users, providers like Azure/Playfab also incur extremely high fees. And don't forget, a game still needs to be maintained - there are hundreds of support requests etc. Not much is left most of the time, and Unity then wants thousands of dollars for the installs on top.
And you can't turn off ad spend now either - you're already over a million in sales for the year.

 

That appears true. Good thing about this is it's predictable and you have some degree of control over. Unlike the proposed Unity's runtime fee calculator that seems to collect data and Unity believes gives a good estimate of the actual installs (that they sometimes call downloads).

 

yeah, not reading anything, you simply dont get it.

 

If you are not a game company and earn > 1mil USD revenue you are forced to take this instead of using Pro as of coming 3 October. (so, renew your Pro licenses for one more year if you need to!)

 

Let's fight together !

 

Probably better to consult it with lawyers. You should not rely on the opinion from Unity... they would say whatever is good for them at the moment.

 

No, you only need Unity to decide its 200,000 downloads and 200,000 in revenue. They dont actually know your install count or revenue, but if they overestimate, tough, you're going to get charged anyway. And before you say 'appeals procedure' or somesuch, consider how long that's likely to take. You're okay with them holding on to your money until they decide if they made a mistake or not, right?
And you'll be able to 100% trust a company who retrospectively changed the TOS that said they'd never retrospectively change the TOS?

 

I think everyone's concern should be that the calculation method is not transparent, and we cannot know the specific data. It is like a black box, which is very worrying. It's a bad option.
Raising the selling price of the Pro version is better than these. To be honest, if you have a revenue of $200000, you can definitely spend around $2500 to purchase the Pro version.
Raising the unit price of subscription fees is more acceptable than simply charging runtime fees.
Maintain a fee threshold of $200000 for the personal version at the same time.
Perhaps a vote can be taken to decide whether to use a 5% commission or subscription method.

 

AI.... They love AI and even will put some (did I read 50%?) of the money they earn through this new pricing system into "The AI tools we all love (according to them)"

 

There is no silver lining in this situation. The corporation that develops the tool we pay for to do our work, unilaterally decided they wanted a bigger slice of the pie. They then proceeded to bushwhack us with this nonsense.

This situation is simple:

-Unity wants revshare? Fine, no licensing costs then.

-They want licensing money? Fine, no revshare.

The one thing that cannot happen? Them having it both ways.

 

Nightmare for a mobile FTP game with 100 million downloads and a revenue of only 3 cents per user. FTP apocalypses

 

I've started using unity this year, and i've learned so much in a short period of time, and 2 months ago, i started creating an ambitious game in unity, but now , with what they have done, i'm exiting the platform

 

Exactly why this is completely not feasible for ANY mobile developer at this point. Too much risk and uncertainty. Completely unpredictable liability/costs.

There will also be worse case scenarios where people owe Unity millions of dollars they don't have because they are getting massive installs but no one is buying in app purchases. Those examples you gave would be amazing success stories and yet they vary dramatically in % owing. In bad situations, you could be permanently buried.

It is suicidal for small developers. And big developers will rather just use their own systems or fork open source systems to avoid the risk as well. Basically they are going to drive away everyone except console developers who don't heavily use Unity to begin with.

 

I agree with you I was talking about supporting old abandoned games.

 

I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to make games using this license. It's designed for companies selling industry software like CAD. Those will usually not get even remotely close to 200k installs anyway.

 

Well I am building a mobile game so technically I work in the mobile industry... but yeah my game is unfinished and not F2P so I know very little about how rare situations like that are. I also realize that as you and @levelappstudios pointed out, I wasn't accounting for the fact that revenue per install might be large, but total profit per install can be very tiny due to advertising overheads and other fees, hosting services, etc.

So it can be much easier to hit that "gross revenue" number of $1 million and still have a large number of installs that bring in little profit per install.

 

Thanks for the great example - exactly the same applies to us and that's why we would be directly bankrupt in the shortest possible time, we would owe Unity so much money that we will never have. Even though I would have liked to support Unity in the past, but as an insolvent company we can't even buy our pro licenses anymore.

 

The only escape from the Unity Collectors will be death. (Or another engine.)

 

Honestly, the way Unity proposes that they calculate installs at this point is "Trust us". Even the infamous Denuvo couldn't kill pirates, how would Unity even compete in that category?
At this point, your revenue is all that counts, you will be notified with handsome bill with "Install" counts after you hit that revenue mark. Forget "Install" threshold, you don't get a say or get to read how the data is made, you just get an invoice at some point after you hit the revenue threshold.
Sold 10k games for $20 each? you just hit 200k threshold, but for some reason Unity sends you an invoice for 1mil installs? Well, pay up because they say so.

 

It's simpler than that, they just don't know how to charge the new fee for B2B users, and industry is not their focus for this new pricing model, B2B / industry clients are a too small userbase and with extremely lower install count (and well more complicated to manage behind corporate networks, firewalls and rules about calling home) than indie and AAA devs. To small and risky to bother, just keep them paying Pro/Industry monthly, safer and easier.

 

It is not just mobile games. Often time Steam games get bundled and you may only make 0.10-0.25 per sale. Not only that a $14.99 steam game often gets most of it sales during discount periods say 75% off. You make less then $2.5 per sale in that case after steam fees and Taxes.

 

I'm in a similar situation and can't let my startup go bankrupt because I don't have enough money to switch to another game engine.
I will be determined to protect my project, wish us luck.

 

That's incorrect. Let's discuss:
You have Pro plan. You've sold 1kk copies and earn 1kk$ in Jan - no fee (as limit is 1kkInstalls\1kk$).

Then in Feb you got 100k new installs. You'll pay for them 0.15$ per install - 15000$
(now remember you have 1.1kk installs for last 12 months).

Then in March you have another 300k installs - you still pay 0.15$ per install for them as new price will be when you'll reach 500k+ installs above your current plan limit (1kk for Pro we pinned in the beggining of this example) you'll pay - 45 000$ for these new 300k installs.
(now remember you have 1.4kk installs for last 12 months)

Then in April you have 200k of new installs. Now you've reached second grade of installs for your plan - 500k+ above current plan limit (1kk for Pro we pinned in the beggining of this example). Lets look at this closer. You reach limit of 500k+ BUT you have 200k installs in this month but limit reached after 100k installs this months. Then you'll pay for them 0.15$ per install for first 100k installs (below second grade) and 0.075$ per install for another 100k above second grade limit - in total you'll pay this month - 15000$ + 7500$ = 22500$
(now remember you have 1.6kk installs for last 12 months).

Then in May you have 100k of new installs. You will pay 0.075$ for these new installs untill you reach third grade (1kk installs above 1kk install limit for Pro plan) - 7500$
(now remember you have 1.7kk installs for last 12 months).

etc.

 

None of the calculations really matter to me at this point. Neither the optimistic nor the pessimistic ones. The whole system is a convoluted mess with a huge breach of trust. That is the thing that matters.

It's over complicated and difficult to calculate and predict and it simply is a business model I cannot support in any good conscience any more. That really is all there is to it. The only amount of backpedaling I could accept at this point would be an complete rollback with a guaranteed contract that this will never happen again in the future. And for more than one reason I cannot see this happening.

 

So basically the lower rates are not based on lifetime, but reset with every single month. You start at 0.15 again once a new month starts.

 

And that can also produce the opposite effect. When I open a game and ads are popping up everywhere and it's excessively full of microtransactions, I close it and uninstall it.

So being more aggressive leads to more installations that don't make money but do take it away from you.

 

You use Unity engine == You are their subsidiary.

 

@Zendariel that calculator doesn't look accurate IMO

 

Exactly this. Its mind boggling.

 

Few people will sell more then 100,000 per month so most will pay 0.15 and it does reset each month.

 

Oh don't worry bro, it'll be cool. If they get it wrong you can take them to court and pay a lawyer $100,000 to argue that their imaginary estimated figures are more accurate than your own imaginary estimated figures because no one actually knows how many people installed the game.

And if you live in another country, you can just take out 6 months from your schedule to fly to wherever Unity is officially headquartered at that time to file and deal with the lawsuit. And if they move headquarters to Dubai no worries everyone wants to visit Dubai some time right? It'll be fun bro. Don't worry about it.

 

There's also the problem that is not a calendar month or fiscal month. It is a rolling 12-month period. So if you make $190k in December of 2024 and then another $10k in January of 2025 you trigger the uTax. In fact if you accrue any amount totaling $190 from February of 2024 up to that $10k in January of 2025 you trigger the uTax.

 

sorry if my questions have been asked and answered.

My question is regarding standards and emerging-market rates, as well as physical/digital installs.

My company and its operations are based in an emerging market (Saudi), but I do plan to release my next game globally.
If a game my company did release and met both criteria.

My question is, is it the developer's job to provide the install data locations to Unity? what about if there is a dispute on the figures?

my 2nd question is, regarding the physical copies and 2nd hand-market, does this fee change only affect digital downloads and installed, or are physical copies installed also taken into account?

 

You should switch to Pro plan for 2kk$ 5kk installs and still it will be incorrect because of this:
https://github.com/skidvis/unity-fee-calculator/issues/1

 

If Unity can come up with a solution to "track unique installs while being compliant with GDPR and CCPA and without control the distribution platforms". The solution itself will be worth more than Unity itself.

My feeling is they will end up with [num of "phone home at Runtime" received] x [multiplier]. The multiplier is trained with a fancy "deep learning" model with some totally random features. They can not even label their training data correctly since they are not aware of the ground truth.

Now we can just appreciate this "magic model" to send us bills.

 

They'd probably do the thing large corporations normally do and bully you around. Make your lawsuit fees so high you'd end up in financial ruination even if you won.

 

I'm not sure if it's been said yet but:

Unity is now saying they won't charge for demoes, but if you use the same Unity project to make the full game and the demo, there's no way the run time will be able to distinguish.

They also said it will only be for new installs, not re-installs, 'but' you will be charged if they install on a second device. So if someone malicious decides to use the cloud / VM's or some other form of spoofing to fake a new machine install, it could really screw a developer big time.

I think Unity is forgetting, their price point was one of the biggest reasons so many developers chose Unity over Unreal. Now, I'm actually not sure which is cheaper. This isn't a standard mild price increase of 1%-10%. It's got to be hundreds if not thousands of times bigger.

 

That's it, I'm quitting, I'm not a gamedev anymore I'm going to be memedev now. But please don't download it i have to pay imgflip 0.20$ every time.

 

No, Unity get to decide you've had 200K installs before you start paying, or 1 million installs if you buy a Unity Pro license.

 

It doesn't. Price grade is based on accumulative installs above limit for last 12 months.

 

i did it, i edited the post

 

the "How is the Unity Runtime Fee calculated?" here https://unity.com/pricing-updates#unity-runtime-fee absolutely doesn't state what you said : there's no reference to the month before the previous month, so from what is stated, the install fee resets at each month start.

There's only a global limit to know if you have to pay the fee or not, but it doesn't affect the current fee level.

 

Incorrect it is based on "New installs per month." Only the threshold is cumulative.

 

if... if... if... that's not a real argument....

 

Hehehehe...right back at 'em.

 

Once more. It's NOT about sales, it's about INSTALLS. And that's the problem. Plus that they can change it any time as they wish and in retrospective which renders any business plans useless.

 

For every single game ever made with unity.