Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

You know, I went through a similar thing this time last year with a game company that made a game I enjoyed playing. I had to come to terms with the fact that they no longer cared about making a game. It was simply a mechanism through which they could make souless sales of useless digital crap. I saw the writing long before it ever got that bad but it took a long time for it to really sink in. Eventually all of my suspicions and predictions came true so i'm glad I stopped when I did.

The reality is that this is much much worse. This isn't mere entertainment but our actual livelihood at stake. Luckily I learned from that previous experience to see the signs earlier and plan accordingly. I didn't plan nearly fast enough but at least Unity didn't drag me out for a long ride this time. They made it very easy with one big dramatic bang that snapped me out of their spell.

It really is amazing how the small-time developers are really being treated as the source of income rather than the vehicle through which greater success can be achieved. Not very different from the players of games that get treated not as paying customers but as assets to be sold to investors.

 

Exactly, I'm looking to see if anyone has commented on this.
How can a company track its expenses in this way?
Every company should have a breakdown of payroll, taxes, and other expenses printed out.
How can something as dynamic as this be managed, where one month you can have +50,000 launches, and the next month +300,000?

For games that rely on advertisements, this budget is incredibly important to them because today there's something called an AD BLOCKER.

If a person downloads a free game and has an ad blocker on, it only adds to the company's expenses and doesn't generate any revenue.

I understand that there is also a revenue cap, but it's not impossible to surpass that limit to enter the area of charging for every installation.

 

https://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/1702103874927292774

 

Then I will move on again - I am not going to be a slave.

Hopefully, I will have a good 10 year run with Epic as well. I should be able to work another 10 years from then, so 3 engines (Unity, Unreal, ?) for a 30 year dev time, not bad actually. Let's just accept the fact that there is no real need to stay. It really scares me too, and the loss is brutal, I will be set back months, possibly a year or more. But hey, life was always like this.

 

Godot is the only way.

 

Thanks mate.

 

This is sad, now I can loose my job as unity developer, cos my company will use Unreal. Nice

 

I will lose hope in humanity. if, after this event, people will still use Unity. they openly try to rob you.
Stop complain, just change a game engine, bro!

 

I've got bad news for you: the damage is already irreparable. Unity can revert. Unity can harden the TOS (again). Doesn't matter. Trust in the current regime is destroyed and will never return. Doing business with Unity is a liability.

The only way to cure the situation involves sacking Riccitiello, and that's to put it bluntly, extremely unlikely.

 

Awesome! Thank you!

 

It’s hilarious to me how you keep taking the thresholds at face value as if they will be forever const. buTThAtsAllWeHAVetoGOon. No, we know they’re only going to get worse, never better. Your and everybody else’s calculations are irrelevant because what’s safe today will not be safe the next time JR needs a new yacht. Get that through your naive skull.

 

This is not so simple, we lost our jobs, our money, our startups, it was really painful.

 

It's not that i think Unreal is better. I avoided it this long exactly because i don't think it is. But I do need a solution now and for what I need it might be the only real option.

You likely missed one of my other posts but I suggested that it was time to diversify my skillset. Unreal is just one such tool and I am investigating others just so I don't miss out on some potentially better options. But for what I want to do there are some serious limits to what engines will make the cut. Future projects will certainly look brighter though. Thankfully I was only a couple months in and still mostly figuring out how I was going to make use of the tech. Others are definitely not so lucky and might have much much harder limits of what they can realistically turn to, if they can turn to anything else at all.

You're are correct though. Unreal is not the be-all-end-all. They want nothing more than to see all of this happen.

 

It's a funny coincidence that they launched the godot development fund on the same day as unity announced their runtime fee?
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/

 

I've been dipping in and out of Unreal, Godot and making my own engine. This was the push I needed, it sucks this has happened but now that unity have made the move, there is absolutely no regaining this trust. Not after the last 5 years of mismanagement and bad decision after bad decision.

Outside of my personal projects, I am the CTO at a successful scale up in London, so I will also make sure that in-office our team also moves away from Unity immediately and transitions as fast as possible.

This is annoying as this will be the 3rd team in a row I have been a part of that has gotten annoyed/shafted by something unity has done and decided to pivot to unreal / a competitor. I should have just started this team on unreal as soon as I got this job, but I really thought that maybe that was behind us and Unity would eventually get their act together....

 

unity tactic at the moment is to provide alternative deals to top developers.

that long phone call can be summarized like this:

"bro, are you kidding? you can ignore that table! that is for the peasants not for you."

do you see any rage tweets from miHoYo the devs behind genshin impact?

nope. nothing, not a single mention of the issue.

because the rules do not apply to them and they know it.

 

I did not interpret his post as a positive thing. I’m pretty sure he’s on our side.

I’m pissed about this too, but let’s not name call each other.

 

The reason they chose "installs" as opposed to "sales" or "revenue" is because installs is a nebulous number that doesn't quite have a clear answer and it's why they also have confusing messaging on what counts as an install and what doesn't.

They want to be able to ..."calculate" how much we owe them by themselves and be "correct", otherwise they would have to ask every publisher and every platform for hard numbers and they don't want to do that, it would be too much work.

 

Microsoft buys unity. Whole internet is going down again with Ryan memes and Activision story number 2

 

Don't forget that Epic waives all of the costs if you publish your game in their Epic Store.

 

More power to you man.

 

Unity share price dropped 7 points over Wednesday morning. Since floating on 18th Sept 2022, share price has basically halved. Unity is not in good hands for even the investors!

 

Nah, I’m done with these white knights. They refuse to acknowledge any rebuttals and stay entrenched in their views which are untenable, kinda like the company that is inflicting this drama on us in the first place.

 

Who cares?

 

Microsoft buying them will be a happy ending.

 

So I take this with the wrong idea?
When they said life time install, what I can understand is the number from the first time people install the game to the current date time.

If this is per-month install so it mean life time install count only just for measurement whether a developer need to start to pay the install fee?

Then, in whatever past months and years of install count you have, the real payment count will start from the current month?

So if a developer got 2 millions install in the past two years and the last 12 months they got 250K USD, so the don't have to pay tor that 1.8 millions installs? They only need to pay the amount of install count start from the month where 200K USD revenue is happened?

If in December 2025, a developer need to pay the install fee (because of 2M installs and passing the 200K USD revenue). And they got 50.000 installs in December 2025, it mean, they only need to pay this 50.000 installs?

Sorry man, I never have any intention to spread false scenario, but Unity never actually explain how it works in detail with this kind of scenario example.
So people like me might have the wrong idea.

EDIT:
Or may be I just an idiot sandwich for not paying attention in the first page update of this thread.
I only waiting the update from the the main page (Unity blog post).

So sorry about this... -_-

 

And the CEO selled before the anounce. I said for joking Microsoft buys unity. But it's not so far from real right now. But please Just imagine what would happened on the funny side

 

So you have a problem with complaints but not robbery?

 

That is my assumption, yes.

 

I agree. The reason why I usually ask forum users to respect each other is to efficiently reach a constructive outcome.

On this thread, the damage has been done, and we are all lined up to be hanged. This is a fight for survival, not a fancy meeting.

I am trying my best to keep my project off of this stupid new runtime fee. And a few games I am already selling on Steam. I have already cancelled two games in mid production, and am going to spend 3 months learning Unreal. I have made up my mind. I couldn't care less if they rolled back.

What I do care, is just damage control for my already shipped games and the one I am shipping at the end of this month.

 

They probably want to hire some of those devs that are leaving Unity right now and they need some quick cash to make it happen before someone else snaps them up!

 

You know changing engines is not that easy right? investment in assets , learning the engine, making tools and the game etc?!

 

Microsoft has a good partnership with unity in addition helped them multiple times, also unity using a lot of Microsoft things plus Microsoft C# , if unity Going to get baught by no independent. Then Microsoft would do it i believe. But please please guys see PS5 meme's And Ryan memes that would Go around just some humour

 

The way I understood it, is you pay for each download once. Not per active user each month or each download each month.

 

Unity,
How can we be sure that pricing won't change in the future?
Will you look at analytics, and just change the thresholds and fees as you fit?

How can we be sure that installs counting is correct?
Will you be fully transparent how the algorithms work, and what data is accumulated?

How can we be sure, that our sales reports, that won't reflect your install count will be taken into account?
That is, how can we be sure that bundles, giveaways, pirated versions, demos are rightfully counted, and WHO is deciding about it?

Finally,
How do you think, serious game company, small or big, would risk diving into this risky and unpredictioble pricing model, when their lives depend on it?

 

Sorry, I know this is really serious for a lot of people but I gotta let off the steam with a good laugh or I'd be pulling what's left of my hair out.

 

Yes, but if you stay, you will lose more, and possibly live in fear and will be spending money and time to fight Unity. My sincere advice is to make the transition, focus on damage control for your past and current project. I mean, its your choice, but once we leave, those who stay will be milked further.

Its hard, but remember there are more businesses that fail than that survives. Move quick, make decisions. Unfortunately, we are not protected by the game-dev-fairy. I wish you luck mate.

 

That was a tiny fraction of shares, 2000 out of 3,000,000, and is done according to a preset timetable. It's called a 10b5-1 Plan. There's no dodging dealings here.

 

Let's say I release a version of Unity, then take its profits and port it to another engine.
So how to prevent Unity from charging for its old or pirated version? It must be said that this method of charging Unity is extremely terrible, nothing can prevent the unreasonable fees made up by Unity.

 

Sorry bro, according to the white knights, your company and the people it employs should just go bankrupt and lose their jobs.

 

Better to complain and get Unity to backtrack. Then we can continue using our engine we have years of expertise in and actually want to use - if people wanted to use another engine, they'd have switched already!

 

There's still hope for Unity. Let's see what they will say in the next few days.
But sure. I already installed Unreal, will buy some books (there's a bundle now ) and wil lstart to look at it when I have time, just in case. But it will take time... I really hope Unity will fix this!

 

But on Blog post it says:

Note that this example shows just the fee for the month in question. Fees will likely vary month to month based on the previous month’s installs, including the potential for months with no charge.

Based on the previous month's (not month). So if it's true, then it's not so sad (its super sad but not so).

 

Yes, it is. But, a lot of board members sold shares right before this news, the amount goes over $30Milion. While it is probably not subject to cross the SEC, surely they knew what they were doing.

 

We have a community that focuses on game dev in general
We focus on Steam as that is our bread and butter but 1500+ devs and a ton of knowledge base articles.

Our current project was in pre-production so perfect time for us to switch engines.
Many in our community are doing that now and many are wrapping up one last project or looking at porting ...
You can join the community there and we would be happy to help in any way we can with whatever you choose to do

We build and will continue to maintain tools and articles aimed at Unity, Godot, and adding UE as that is what we selected internally for our WIP project

Discord is here it has links to the KB (Knowledge Base)
https://discord.gg/6X3xrRc

 

Nah, as much as I like a lot of things Microsoft does lately, they wouldn't fix the situation. Just remember, they are actively leaving Bobby Kotick as CEO of Activision-Blizzard and frankly, he's worse than our Riccitielo (which is quite a feat in on itself).

 

Got a question for you you guys. If you're on the free plan and after releasing your game at month 10 you're over $200K in revenue and at 180,000 installs, can you switch to pro license? Does that mean that your ceiling just went up to $1M and 1M installs?

 

Someone should pin this on the thread;

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-engine-for-unity-developers/

 

I think you misinterpreted their post. They were saying that complaining isn't enough anymore. It's time to pack it up and move on.

 

Yes, afaik you are able to do that. But really, why would you want to send these "people" money?