Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Charging for every download isn't enough. You have to charge *per install*, which isn't actually possible.

 

Just the altering of the TOS every now and then where they state that you are bound to the latest TOS and that the previous are void is enough.

 

Maybe that's why they went about it this way, as to not contradict themselves on the royalty free claim? a fee for unity runtime is not a royalty...

 

They did it, they removed Unity PLUS, so now you have to buy PRO for $1,800, but why not also add a fee for each installation to that?

 

In the thread are people fantasizing about Apple buying unity and open sourcing the engine. Silly Apple fans... if Apple bought Unity over this then they would make the pro licenses like $5000 per seat, and make it an iOS and MacOS exclusive tool. Maybe sell add-on licenses for Windows, Android, or consoles for $5000 per seat per platform per year. You can afford a 5k macbook so why not 5k licenses lol!

 

to make stockholders happier id probably remove threshold...just fee every install from 1

 

Why choose 1 when you can have both

https://github.com/rand0m-cloud/bevy_godot

 

THis wont happen, after the fallout from this outcry...ppl will still use this engine. Believe me ppl are masochists

 

They don't have to do either of those. You're assuming they're trying to precision check installs in some sort of verifiable way. They aren't.

What they've said they're doing is, basically, guessing the amount using a "proprietary data model that they're confident with". Their new terms say the install figures are to be determined by Unity and is in their sole discretion.

Literally "trust me, bro" with no ability to actually fight it since at the end of the day, it's their sole discretion. At the end of the day If they say you owe for 1 million installs, then you owe for 1 million installs.

The only thing you could do is tell unity "But my sales figures only show x sales" and they can, legally, shrug their shoulders at you and tell you to pay up or get liquidated.

 

erm... Impheris?

I'm a linux gamer. Multiple installs are normal for me, because it takes multiple tries to get some games to work. It's not a problem if there's no install fee (doesn't bother the developer any, and I'm happy to do it in pursuit of a good game), but this change would mean I'd be really screwing over the dev.

 

I call this:
"The Trust me Bro system":+
1. Create a new Unity account or use one where you never got any payments method.
2. Download a version of Unity Personal that work offline.
3. Create a super game that will go over the threshold
4. Tell Unity "No, I'm not over the threshold, just Trust me Bro"
5. Godot some new games.

 

I think there is way to much focus on details like revenue/install thresholds, fee height break even points and all that. None of this touches real core of the issue which is:

- Developers are financially on hook for the metric that they have absolutely zero control off - number of installs. Which can be anything from 0 to x. Its almost like Unity doesn't understand modern game market with things existing like multiple per user devices, hardware and os changes, game sharing, key-sites, key trading, etc.
- That metric that Unity wants to base it's fee on is also only very lousily coupled to developer revenue because of things from previous point and various market characteristics, monetization schemes and other things like deep sales, giveaways, bundles, charity, piracy/
- Metric that is also wildly unpredictable, due to many external and internal forces like patches, seasonal platform holder events, media and influence coverage, competition, and real world events.
- Metric that is incredibly hard or even impossible to track accurately, is also unnecessary complex and is ripe with potential for abuse by someone determined.

Basically Unity asks/requires developers to base their financial stability and potential success on a metric that is unpredictable, wildly variable, hard to estimate, impossible to control, hard to track, and has potential to be abused.

And only assurance they are giving said developers is "trust in us, and in our black-box solution for all of this, we will definitely figure something out and will do our best to make it fair."

And cherry on top is that at the same time Unity is breaching trust of said developers yet another time changing their TOS (which had capsule specifically protecting its users from such changes) and applying the changes retroactively. So basically trust us but here is why you absolutely should not trust us.

Everything else honestly it's just noise and minuscule details. And each of this points would be bad in void but all of them together ar completely disastrous and I'm not sure how anyone would be willing to put their financial success and trust in hands of such company unless no other choice was possible

 

Forbes: The Entire Gaming Industry Unites Against Unity’s Baffling Pricing Change

​

 

Honestly this is a great time to acquire some Unity stocks, bad news is when accumulation happening.

 

well, i don't think an average unity/unreal customer makes 20mil sales and forgetting about f2p doesn't make sense. AND, if the 5% revenue share would make unity more income and devs like it a lot more, why not adapt that? there must be a reason....

 

This is what makes me think it's not legally possible to enforce this... They are billing you for non-existent things. You must have a legal right to an itemised list which of course they can't produce. You must have a legal right to refuse to pay what can't be demonstrated you owe

 

Made a Naive Cost Calculator,
Duplicate this sheet to your own google sheets, and play with the variables.

It seems like this change will only greatly impact F2P game model with low ARPU.
And is mostly just more nuisance for the rest. (Wrestling with UT to get overcharge refunds, DRM to protect from overcharge and anti piracy, etc)

 

Yes, this is I believe the most significant problem of this whole "pricing" structure. You really don't need to do any calculations, because they don't matter at all. Unity decides.

 

Guys,
What can we do to make it more public? This thread has over 6k responses, but we are still in some sort of an inner circle. A lot of media caught the attention already but I am wondering if there is anything that we could do to raise our voices even more. I am horrified by only thinking that it will eventually burn out and we will be left only with the hope that someone at unity has a working brain cell or two.

 

The problem is more than 90% of the Unity ecosystem is based on the F2P model, meaning that most of the Unity developers expect to generate $1M in revenue over 5M - 6M- 10M downloads.

There is no problem for the remaining 10% to 5% of customers who develop indie Steam games. At least for now, until we see how losing customers and market share will affect Unity and the development of the engine.

 

"Usually."

Unity over here asking their own developers to play a Gacha game every time they open the Unity editor where the booby prize is "you go bankrupt when your successful game nets a lower revenue per install than our fee"

 

Sounds like an easy fix. Just cap the per install fee at 5% of revenue. That way they achieve their goal of offering something more affordable than a constant 5%, and it protects devs who might end up paying significantly more than 5% based on their business models. This approach wouldn't drive certain styles of games out of business needlessly.

 

Actually, reviews stating bad DRM & copy protection in Steam games are often the top-voted ones, so enough people care about it that it goes noticed ; how much it hurts the sales, I don't know though...

 

Even further, who has ever even heard of such a thing before? Charging per install? It wasn't bad enough that some publishers wanted to determine how and when and why the player installed their game. Now we have the technology company they rely on breathing down the their necks practically dictating them to it just to stay in the green?

 

I like how people are thinking past the sale here and just accepting that Unity is totally in their rights to look back in time 15 years and renege on their agreement that you own and can do with the binaries their engine produced whatever you want, in perpetuity, with no fees or royalties, and are now straight to the barganining.

 

That's mostly correct, but not the entire picture. If your game has crossed the $1M threshold, but is making less than $10K in a quarter, you don't pay royalties for that quarter. It's explained in the "Royalties addendum" on their EULA: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal

But there are ways to negotiate lower rates or even zero rates:

• Developer pays for a custom licences (value is negotiated with Epic based on number of platforms, projected sales, etc)
• The game is published by a publisher that has signed a publisher license deal with Epic.

The last point is important, because Epic's prefers to charge publishers rather than the developers at the bottom of the chain, so they have deals with some publishers that cover all Unreal games released by them.

 

Have people gotten the information that John Riccitiello, the CEO sold 2000 units of unity stock just a week ago?

 

If you make $200,000 you would just upgrade to a Unity Pro licence and pay for the licence ($2,000 per dev) and would not have to pay any per-install fees. This was part of the initial announcement.

 

That is not the case anymore, they need to change their business model, the "asking xxxxx per seat" is not working anymore.

This is because:
there are studios with xxxxx count of freelance / remote work employees witch 99% are using unity free AND only the "boss" has unity pro, they're only paying like one or two seats at much.

Again, a royality model with % revenue share is the way to go. And there is a way to measure revenue since they're already doing with the thresholds... they just need to use that information for the revenue share.

 

Charging per install *retroactively* at that.

better watch out, Adobe is going to come knocking for a fee for each psd your design firm produced for a client over the past 30 years, based on how many magazines and websites the published image appeared in

 

For now

 

The real question is what we could do to make Godot, Unreal or even libGDX more popular.

 

Apple greatly impacted Unity's ad business (apparently that was the main profit that drove Unity) with the IDFA changes in iOS, practically killing ad-based games and forcing them into IAP.
So Unity are now returning the favor

 

https://docs.flaxengine.com/manual/get-started/flax-for-unity-devs/index.html

Anyone has info about the Flax Engine? Meaning anything you think i should know before making the jump? Any info is welcome. Thank you.

 

Unity want to make money from F2P games because they make millions while Unity basically earns nothing from them.

Anyone making retail games (non-F2P) with Unity is better off with Unity over Unreal in most scenarios, and 90% of them will never pay an install-based fee unless they are earning millions, and even then it becomes a fraction of what Unreal would charge them via rev share.

This is ALL about the F2P market, and those devs should be the angry ones, and my point was those people asking for a 5% rev share are actually asking for Unity to charge most developers MORE.

 

So if I release a game in Unity and for a sake of argument make $100K and have 300K downloads, this is within a year. During that year I work on porting that to Unreal and replace the game with the Unreal version. Then I make $300K of revenue within a year. Unity will come asking for money, so I guess it would be up to me to be able to prove which game version generated that revenue? I mean if most of the revenue came from the Unreal version and Unity installs generated below $200K.

 

Wrong.

Unity tell you that your installs are 5x higher than you have on your end...
You complain.
Yeah they investigated it... and still the same. Pay them.

 

Ya, this seems like the kind of scenario that is the problem....

"My Viral Game": Imagine a game called My Viral Game was downloaded 5 million times in 6 years.

So it's now 'over the threshold' for installs forever. Now you make $1 million more off of it in Jan & Feb, so for the next 10 months, you'll be 'over the threshold' for revenue, too. (Scary music)

Install threshold: Passed
Revenue threshold: Passed

6 months in, you get 3 million more downloads, & your game isn't doing well w/ Unity Ads... they're paying you $.005 per user (Unity Ads will do that, often, without any explanation).

How much will that cost the game developer?

Cost: 3 million new installs at $.02 = -$60,000
Revenue: 3 million new users at $.005 = +$15,000

Hopefully they don't get any more downloads than that. That month cost: -$45,000

And that doesn't factor in marketing costs, taxes, store fees, credit card fees, studio utilities, etc... That's just the engine costs, and it's already in the negative. Sure they made a million dollars a few months ago, but they also had to spend money to make that million, it's not pure profit, and now every month could cost revenue. And this is a very real scenario.

And that could happen again in another month or 2. Or for 11 months.

-----

Games that make at least $1 or $2 and higher will do well with this new structure. But free 2 play games that make money via massive downloads will have to be on the lookout for this all the time.

And then what if Unity decides to change their ToS rectroactively again?

And what if pirates have a good month, and another 2 million copies get charged in your name? You wouldn't have much data to go off of to prove your case, but you could hope Unity works with you to get your money back.

 

Any company that cant figure out how to be profitable with $1.5B in revenue is just being led by "F***ing Morons"..

Right John?

 

People install Facebook and TikTok. They do not care at all. Remember this? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

 

Mostly yes, but not entirely true in my case.
My case is about finishing the current project and never going back to unity. We are too deep into the development to start over. Future projects - there is no doubt that we will ditch unity.

 

I noticed a new change in detail FAQ page.



https://unity.com/pricing-updates

It almost says yes.
It also means we're not ready but we're motivated enough to refine this taxing method.

For the last part:
What if you change your Privacy Policy, like you did with TOS ?

Although I'm not affected by the Runtime Tax (not sure if any Publisher or Distributer will want Unity games that comes with a baggage though) , I don't like the idea that Unity is sneaking into my customer' computer.
I don't like that they're trying to bring a new method to bill their users. Couldn't increase License price every year I guess.
Instead of making a better product, they're trying to introduce a payment system into the gaming industry.

 

Oh, that is easy. We use those engines and contribute to their communities with tutorials, assets, plugins and forks. Kinda like how we have been doing for unity for free

 

THIS! IF THEY TRULY DON'T WANT TO RIP DEVS OFF... PROVE IT WITH CAPS RELATIVE TO REVS

 

How will Unity Technologies collect the data required for the Runtime Fee while staying compliant with market regulations?
How does Unity Technologies plan to rebuild trust with the industry?

The policy will destroy your business and it's frankly stunning the governance even considered it.

 

I don't know, I feel lost of work and desperate, should we tweet more responses, calling for an investigation into Unity?

 

Someone mentioned something earlier that kinda spooked me. Buncha legal stuff that I honestly don't remember because I'm up way past my bedtime.

As yet another alternative someone suggested https://www.stride3d.net/ which looks pretty cool as it's open source, uses C#, and seems to be modeled similar to other popular engines that I used to know.

I'm personally a little intrigued by https://bevyengine.org/ too! I've been meaning to take a stab at Rust. My first language I learned was C using that old DOS compiler Turbo C++ 1.01 and I kinda miss the fun I had back in those days playing with memory like that. Sorta like driving late at night 100 mph with your headlights turned off and no pants on.

 

Unity install tracking won't hold up in court. How did you get the numbers unity? "Trust me bro"

 

Unity can't and won't charge you for games not made in Unity. The whole thing that Unity is doing is charging for distributing their runtime.