Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I hate what they did. But you are white knighting the hate part you are doing exactly what you are complaining about just from the opposing side!

 

Your call mate. I am bound to Unity for my past projects, and my heart keeps looking for a way to stay (Look at how many people say 5% royalty is fine now).

But, I tell you, don't make business choices based on your feelings. This is not like forgiving your ex-girlfriend for cheating.
Business is business. The money you have to pay is real cash. And once this clusterfuck fee goes through there won't be people like us around to side with you.

Ultimately its your choice, and I had my moments yesterday, looking to rationalize why I should stick to Unity.

But, talk to your friends, or your parents, or even someone who has zero idea of our industry. Tell them the whole story briefly and ask what you should do. Pretty much 100% will say leave Unity. It is not a difficult choice for the business. Its just difficult for us.

Wish you best mate. Cheers.

 

Didn't Bobby with the things did succeed drop Activision stock and prices to make Microsoft buy in better price ? Why to kick him out? He helped them. If now he does what MC wants it's perfect

 

WTF? They are planning to send you bills based on random made up number. Do you understand that?

 

Microsoft conveniently buying at a lower price thanks to that announcement would be seriously bad news.

 

What I’m complaining about is idiots that don’t have a valid argument. I have no idea what you’re talking about.

 

Unity admitted it doesn't even know how to count 'installs' yet. Pirated copies, demos, legit purchases. How will they separate and count properly while respecting privacy laws? It's a fairy tale, they will just give you a bloated random number and make you pay - "Trust me, bro". And we could prove how many copies we sold in stores. Maybe they could get away screwing small devs, but with so many large studios being affected, it just ain't gonna happen. These people are delusional.

 

Exactly. Microsoft buying after sudden bad news that throws stock prices. Now we have the same story. Investors maybe said we are tired of loosing money we want money sell the unity probably ones under table discussion with mc like 15b for unity so now they Going to drop the price of unity to 15b the legal way.

 

Yes. What seems to be a bit unclear is what happens if you go over 200k/200K and then switch. Its been implied at least once that your threshold change would save you from the Personal-tier fees levels entirely, but that's not necessarily the case and Ive not seen a definitive answer to that.

edit : in fact you could view this as the intended business model; they're looking to drive developers towards Pro, in fear of excessive fees.

 

It is nice for them to not only make tutorials for gamedevelopment:
"How to destroy a company 101"

 

Don't want to and won't in future releases. I'm furious about this news. It's just my game is nearing complete and this could not have happened at a worst time, so weighing options. Thanks for replying.

 

Except many has weirdly sell some portion more than 2000. Especially David Helgason who intentionally selling it out. And just coincidentally, Riccitiello sell the last of his indirect share here. Eventhough he held more direct share

 

Yes, they are pretty much cornering us to use Pro. The deal of Unity Pro is so bad ($2000 per seat) but it looks like the gateway to heaven at the moment due to the new fee.

 

They pretty much said that they will be changing it again in the future, and they won't need you to agree to the new rev share. Imagine signing with a publisher that can change their rev share whenever they see fit.

 

Being a greedy person he would know that the news of the new fee would cause a stir in the stock price, so selling a little would be good for his wallet.
But mentioning stocks at this time makes no sense at all.

 

So company like SYBO who makes subway surfers, assuming they have a pro/enterprise license, could this spell doom for them?

According to sensor tower they get 14M installs a month and 100K in revenue a month. If you assume that is consistent for 12 months that would mean they have 168M installs in a year. If they have an enterprise license that would mean they would own Unity 1.68M, but their revenue would be 1.2M (- 30% App Store fee). That would mean they would own more money then they made. Is this correct? Or am I missing something?

 

He moved 0.1% of his shares. That's a rounding error, not a move to protect his investment!

 

Riccitiello has been selling his stock and being awarded more as time goes by then selling it again. He has been selling stock at every opportunity, there is no conspiracy here.

If you want to make any assumptions you can say that he doesn't believe that the company's stock in general is going to have an uptrend for quite a while (or he really needs a lot of money fast?), but the insider trading allegations are silly.

 

It says month's and and not months'

I wish you are right, but very sure you unfortunately aren't

 

If you are looking for clear answers and "clarification", you obviously don't understand why so many people are angry. Its the very absence of that "clarity" that fuels our fear and this was not a mistake by Unity. They are taking jabs to see how we react, I suppose they will roll back a bit eventually, but ultimately charge us more.

We are the cow, they are the milkers.

 

That's what drives us crazy.
read it
https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ckaging-updates.1482750/page-131#post-9313712

 

Yeah we see that Unity is primarily used for free2install games? Are you willfully ignoring all the posts from studios that are going to be crushed by this or just refuse to acknowledge them? You clearly are active on this thread.

 

I am going to assume we still have to pay for the Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise yearly license along with this new tax of each install/reinstall/dual-install/etc. insanity?

So after I meet the $200,000 and 200,000 people threshold, aside from having to pay $40,000 (at least), AFTER the game distributor takes their cut.... and the publishers if you have one... and Photon/Servers/Other exspenses..I will then need to upgrade to your yearly license now too.

Imagine any other business model doing this, taking an unlimited amount of tax from you from something YOU created:

• Audacity (or any other music editor) charging you for every play/download of a song you created using their software.
• AutoDesk/Blender charging tax for everytime your monster model appears in a video game because you used Maya.
• Paying taxes to the stone masons everytime people visit the statue you sculpted.
• Sony or Canon charging you for your pictures because you used one of their cameras.
• Photoshop demanding revenue for every ad that pops up of an image you created.
  

We are already paying for your license, why should we have to keep paying your for something WE created, published and distributed?

 

Free to play mobile games supported by Ads and IAPs

*I just did these with the occasoftware calculator.

Assuming Unity's "installs" figure is accurate relative to your genuine, revenue creating players, which of course it can't possibly be...

Example 1
Number of Lifetime Installs = 100m
Revenue per Install = $0.02
Unity Tier = FREE
Lifetime Revenue = $2m
Unity Lifetime Runtime Fees = $18m (even more if inaccurate)
Unreal Lifetime Royalty Fees = $50k
UNITY WANT 900% OF YOUR REVENUE

Example 2
Number of Lifetime Installs = 100m
Revenue per Install = $0.02
Unity Tier = PRO
Lifetime Revenue = $2m
Unity Lifetime Runtime Fees = $1m (even more if inaccurate)
Unreal Lifetime Royalty Fees = $50k
UNITY WANT 50% OF YOUR REVENUE

Example 3
Number of Lifetime Installs = 10m
Revenue per Install = $0.08
Unity Tier = FREE
Lifetime Revenue = $800k
Unity Lifetime Runtime Fees = $1.5m (even more if inaccurate)
Unreal Lifetime Royalty Fees = $0
UNITY WANT 187.5% OF YOUR REVENUE

Example 4
Number of Lifetime Installs = 10m
Revenue per Install = $0.08
Unity Tier = PRO
Lifetime Revenue = $800k
Unity Lifetime Runtime Fees = $0
Unreal Lifetime Royalty Fees = $0
UNITY WANT 0% OF YOUR REVENUE


This is a totally arbitrary and insane structure.

And why are free-to-play mobile games getting charged the same as console/PC games that have player values of hundreds of times more. If player paid $50 for a game $0.20 is nothing. If player is worth $0.0X then it is in another conversation.

For mobile, just make a fee based on % of revenue and go via app store data! OR YOU WILL KILL YOUR OWN MOBILE REVENUE BECAUSE EVERYONE WILL BAIL FROM UNITY!

 

trust me bro

 

I don’t like splitting this up into paying for the unity editor and the runtime. I feel like it’s opening the door to nickle & diming people. Soon the CFO can add an extra penny here and there retroactively to justify getting a Christmas bonus for himself.

I think whatever metric is used should be something simpler, based on one metric, and only apply to future versions of software. Unity at one time tried to attract the very people who are complaining now. They wanted the people who don’t have a team of accountants able to explain if $.15 a download after 1 mil cumulative downloads at the beginning of each month is worth it for their next tic tac toe game.

I feel like Apple is in their John Skully phase, but they need to fast forward to their Tim Cook phase.

 

No he just made $1.5Million with a mouse click. Now he can buy the same share back at a lower price. That is not called "protecting". Obviously. Its called "Making money easy". His money literally self replicated.

When was the last time you made $1.5 Million with a mouse click?

 

How does WebGL work in unity's wonderfully thought out system?

 

Oy, I'm sorry, really it's month's (not months). Oh, super sad...

 

I never imagine that the Amazon game engine Lumberyard (now o3de) was one good option to migrate from Unity.

 

Who says tho that Unreal's revenue share is better or acceptable? What's wrong with just paying for the license, seriously? It's literally CG industry standard and somehow they can all survive Autodesk, Adobe and such. Audio software companies even charge one time fee for their software and don't demand a cut of your revenues. Why is it supposed to be acceptable in the age of hundreds of open source engines out there and a lot of competition in the industry? It's not 2005 anymore when game engine license costs $400k or even millions, and even back in the day demanding revenue cut wasn't necessarily standard practice. Unity has over a million users, back in the day it would be unthinkable for a game engine to be this popular, it's a niche after all.

You can make a an argument that at least Epic is fighting for the little man somewhat, and they're very generous overall giving a lot of quality stuff for free to everyone, but I wouldn't necessarily be all that happy if I won the gamedev lottery and had to give 5% revenue tax to Epic for all eternity. Because I did all the work, and I think everyone who's ever shipped anything knows how hard it is. Engine is not a magic game making button, it's just a tool, one of the many. I fail to see how they are contributing that much more than the programming IDE maker, 3D/2D software or audio DAW.

 

Maybe still posts about inside trading manipulate the market make prices drop even more.

 

What I meant is that Unity need to fund the development of their engine, and I think the best way is models that keep it free for most and takes a cut from only from those actually earning a fair amount of money. My point was that their planned fees is a not the right way to accomplish this, and actually astoundingly dumb. Unity will not survive if they don't back down. If the policies don't change I will abandon the engine and throw away years of experience both professionally and as a hobby.

 

They changed rules about WebGL couple hours ago.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ckaging-updates.1482750/page-131#post-9313784

 

No, you 'obviously dont understand'. Your mindreading act failed, you pretty much interpreted my 'understanding' of people's anger at a 180 to what it is, and you dont get to tell me what I mean.

Awaiting your apology for resorting to fiction.

 

But he can't. He's not allowed to trade on his own company except in specific ways, like timetabling a sale at a pre-determined price at a predetermined time. If he now buys back those shares at a lower price, the SEC will be all over him.

 

It's not really. They have great graphics, but silly setup for AI (I mean game AI, driving NPCs, not the ChatGPT bullshit) or audio. They have these gems and some gems are heavily paid despite that the engine is open source. Also the current audio solution is based on Wwise, which is significantly expensive. If you want to embed Fmod, you can, but you have to code yourself.

 

Sorry bro. And I am not kidding. Wasn't trying to make your day worse. This S***storm is making me more hostile then I ever was. Sincere apologies.

 

Yeah! Or a printer company making you pay every time you use the wrong brand of paper that they don't produce erm, oh. Uh. Hmmm.

 

TIL: Unity's forum software doesn't display page counts beyond 130 very well

 

Urm, they didn't? I would go back and reread the comment you're replying to buddy. Then probably come back and apologies to them yourself

 

Techically, they had mention WebGL is another platform to be accounted

And I think that was easy, whenever the game launch they can check the cache cookie to see if it exist

The best parts is I can bet that when user clear cache, it will be counted as reinstall

But after people has been questioning the webgl counting, they just backstep and blatantly explain that webgl will not counted as installing platform (which means it will be only one free platform)

 

Then I guess he is unfortunately sitting with extra $1.5 Million. I feel sorry for him.

 

That just makes it really confusing understanding who you are replying to!

 

Cheers, that's appreciated.

 

I don't get it either.

They're not investors in my company nor are they on my team producing custom made features responsible for our success.

Unity is quite the oposite, providing the exact same service to all my competitors. They're like a car manufacturer or an internet service provider.

Why would any of these companies be entitled to a share of the success of their clients?

 

No, unfortunately they didnt. Because I wasnt 'looking for clear answers and "clarification"' in my post, I was only saying that something specific wasnt clear. And I definitely do understand why so many people are angry, because Im one of them.
But we've resolved that without you.

No thanks. buddy.

Probably not. The two of us are good, your S***stirring notwithstanding. Bye.

 

I use Pro, but unfortunately probably only 1% of people use it too. I wish they would make Unity at a small price, say 400$ a year for the personal version (let's say free period 3 months) and 2k$ for pro, then it would work, but right now most users have Personal installed, so Unity gets 0 from them.

 

This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard. Charges for installations? Looks like greed is running this company now. Unity is no longer for the indie devs or any devs for that matter. People, we are lucky such plans are not implemented in our daily lives or in the real world. Imagine being charged extra everytime you flushed the toilet. Absolutely ridiculous. Also this system can be weaponized by the wrong actors and cause much problem for the devs. Another Also, there are lot of Unity games that are pirated. How come their so called "trust me bro, we have a fix for piracy" system not working?

Unfortunately for me I am already deep in development for my game. Will leave Unity once I am done with the project. 6+ years of knowledge gone down the drain. Feels like Unity was a long term scam project and now the scam is playing its part after hooking devs to the engine.

Truely the tops in Unity have changed the environment in Unity. No longer is Unity for the devs. No longer is Unity stable for the devs. They are for the greedy greens and for making their shareholder money and their CEO.

This is truely sad times.

K Out!