Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Ehehe, there is a reason to file a lawsuit against unity for hundreds of millions of dollars if they start charging a tax on pirated copies\reinstalls\spam random machines id on their servers?))

 

On this I agree, the install based approach is nuts.

On the actual effects of the current terms I am not sure. If you approach 200k rev / year then simply upgrade to Pro which costs 2k / year / seat and gives you a 1 million limit / year / game. If you are above that you pay $2 per 1000 installs. Yes, this sucks for mid-sized f2p devs and I don't get why they are going after them so hard.



Though, for most indies these limits (1 mio / game / year) are out of reach anyways and costs are predictable until you reach that 1 mio threshold.

You pay nothing if below $200k / year / game and if you are between 200k and 1 million / year / game you pay 2k per dev seat. Which I think is fair if you make that kind of money.

Problems arise if you are beyond the $ 1 mio / year / game limit.

Frankly I don't understand why they introduced the install limit for that cohort. It does not make much sense unless they have had many devs in that range cheating with their revenue numbers (which I doubt).

All this ofc only applies if I understood the terms correctly

 

Sorry but your company dropped the ball on this one. You knew this was going to create a firestorm. Dropping new charges on people always creates a firestorm. You guys SHOULD have had all your "I" dotted and "T" crossed before going public with this. You people do realize that the gamming community has historically put up a massive fight about having anything tracking them. Now all of a sudden you expect every Game Development studio, Indie, or Professional who creates with Unity force tracking software on their respective Communities. That is something that SHOULD be for each game developer to decide for themselves not forced on them by greedy people who only wants more money.

 

I'm sorry but are you guys just not aware that mobile f2p market exists?

 

devs use methods to steal money from their players but dont like when the same methods used against them

 

Thanks for being active on this thread. Can you explain the logic behind requiring internet connection to open the editor? I'd be fine with "you must have connected to the internet in the last 3 days or connect to the internet within three days.... you said you're about to board a plane... how would you work on the plane?

 

Who came with this stupid idea!!?
I'm sick of these people in charge of Unity, just when you though they can't come with a more stupid move they throw the ball out of the field with another one, like, for real, it's like they do brainstorm sessions on "How to piss the user base and make the engine worse", been using this engine for more than 8 years, the only reason I haven't switch to another engine is cuz my lazy ass don't want to start the learning curve in another engine, but this, this is the push I need, F*** Unity.

 

So, if in year 1, I make $180k and 500k downloads.
Then, year 2, I only make $50k and my total downloads is up to 550k
However, year 3, I see a boom and the game makes $270k, and total downloads are up to 700k.
year 4, back down to $30k revenue, total downloads are 730k
In this scenario, would the fee only apply for year 3, and only for the new downloads in that year?

also, is Pro now the only option for removing the splash screen??

 

This is actually better for us developers, as the pricing goes down with established install counts.
Still, it's backbreaking for free to play and ad financed games, as well as any small team game in the 200k to 1M installs ballpark.

Which is probably 95% of commercially viable Unity games.

 

So if I'm understanding correctly... what's happening is

1. Unity Free users now only need to switch license's after reaching 200K in revenue
2. Free games are still perfectly fine
3. F2P games also only need to worry after reaching 200K in revenue
4. Installs are counted per 12 months, not lifetime

Because if this is true, this was miscommunicated horribly! Yikes

Tracking installs and the splash screen are still pretty big issues though... will the splashscreen be free??

 

I've been a lurker on this forum for a very long time but this forces me to break my silence.

This pricing change all but dooms the F2P mobile game I've been working on for over a year. Now I have to make the decision on whether or not to cancel the project. I'm dying inside right now.

And even if this pricing change gets retracted, the fact that Unity had the audacity to suggest such an unworkable scheme makes me intensely worried to trust anything Unity offers, because I know that the terms might change unfavorably, and without warning.

 

I think that they were clarifying that. And I think they are saying lifetime installs that start being counted from January 1st, 2024. So that count will start ticking then, and won't reset in 2025. When the last year of revenue is used for calculations, lifetime installs from 2024 to 2027 example will count in tandem with that last year of revenue.

 

True story.. Writing is on the wall. Leadership at the executive level doesn't understand basic economics. A 16 year old with a spreadsheet could have foreseen the pitfalls here and developer d a better system.

TO BE CLEAR, NO ONE IS UPSET THAT UNITY WANTS MORE MONEY.

But FFS work out a fair plan that has some semblance of the realities of indie game dev. Saying over and over again this wont impact indies is BS. Every indie works out a monetization plan base don what we know. My studio has been developing for 6+ years in Unity and this craters us. We require a F2P model with monetization.. Millions of clients could be DL'd and if we kickstart or raise funding across the $200K level now all the sudden we have to give 10% of our revenue to Unity?

Has anyone reached out to Unreal leadership? I use to have contacts over there and I may still have Tim's email but last time Unity did this Unreal offered a huge, no strings attached grant program to convert your Unity project to Unreal.

Very interested if anyone is talking to Unreal about grasping this opportunity Unity has once again provided us today.

 

Already did while ago

 

As an indie studio founder, guest lecturer at top game development schools/universities, former CTO, Unity consultant, asset store publisher, Unite conference attender, shareholder, one who has sat and had many conversations with Unity employees (virtually, and at your offices), and an indie game dev using Unity since Unity 3, I can no longer, in good faith, recommend Unity as a development platform. Additionally, effective immediately, any new projects my company, or companies I consult with, are intending to publish will use a different platform. Even if this change were completely reverted immediately after this message was published, this announcement has done irreparable harm to my trust in Unity. For a company to continuously decrease the quality of its core product, bloat it with useless features, and then have the audacity to change the deal (and apply it retroactively) in an attempt to nickle and dime us to death is irredeemable. It is irrelevant to me that someone's math worked out that it might be cheaper for some people to use this model instead of a standard rev-share model. We used Unity for the lack of rev-share in the first place, and you somehow managed to make it feel extra predatory.

I, like many others, have been willing to overlook all of the past missteps, but this one is the final nail in the coffin. It was great for a while there, but this is goodbye. It's not me, it's you.

P.S. For anyone looking for a crash course to learn C++ coming from Unity C# stuff, I highly recommend Jackson Dunstan's summaries found here: https://www.jacksondunstan.com/articles/5530.

 

I'm a unity developer since Unity 3.5 (2012). I worked with this engine for more than ten years.
I think Unity team made a terrible mistake and if no action is taken to fix this madness (make pay a % of revenue, not install AT LEAST! give more time) I'll do my best to:
1) move to a new engine
2) discourage anyone from using unity stuff.

What you have done is shameful and demonstrates, once again, the lack of respect you have for the work of developers. Remember, without us you are nothing.

 

@LeonhardP @Mike-Geig

How will you even track revenue per game? Without even getting into GDPR, how are you supposed to know what users are purchasing and what ads they are viewing (if one is not using Unity Ads)?

 

I've been experimenting with Godot and it's awesome. Having fun again with gamedev.

 

Still waiting for any answer about how installs are tracked, piracy, and demos. Also explanation about how a flat fee totally doesn’t hurt developers of cheaper games that hit the threshold.

 

Definitely suspect that your CEO just sold off another 2,000 shares, and who has sold off over 50,000 shares in the last year. Seems like Unity is purposefully tanking itself.

 

Would this be even legal?

 

Not that I know of

 

Question:
We have a WebGL version of our game client that only displays a subset of the game (basically a public world map screen and storefront, the main client is a downloadable Mac and Windows build)

But there is significant overlap and they are both built from the same Unity Project (of course, they live in the same Plastic Repo, use the same packages, same Unity DevOps, same RemoteConfig [if it actually worked with WebGL], etc.)

So... according to the policy, .... would we get charged for the views of that? Would we need to TRACK and report all the views? (it's on our own CDN, as are the client downloadable binaries).

According to the policy, every page view of this WebGL client is also an "install"? Even if people just browse the site it is on?

Completely obtuse and obfuscated policy. We absolutely object and I'll pass this matter to our legal team.

 

This is the FAQ definition of install (which is the metric being evaluated/billed):

Which appears to mean that if I remove the app and re-download it then the developer will get billed again. (because the app would be installed and initialized again) Could you clarify?

Is the Unity runtime doing this accounting in an automated way or is the the developer's responsibility to count and report installs to Unity?

If this is automated, how can the Unity runtime know if this is a re-install? After the Unity runtime starts up are you storing something on the device/on my Apple account? If I get a new phone and download then run the game, how is that not detected as a new install?

As a developer, how do I report my game's revenue to Unity? Is there a portal?

Thanks! The same questions about mobile I have for Steam, console, and manual downloads of a game.
If a user installs the game multiple times then Unity appears to take a bigger cut. (new computer, family sharing, etc.) Why does Unity think this is good?

The same happens in a cloud-based gaming scenario. A service (like Amazon Luna) spins up and down instances of machines and may create thousands of installs without the developer directly making money from each install.

This is also the case for any cloud-based non-game application such as a sensor simulator. There may be no revenue directly tied to the number of installs for industrial usage but I may be "installing" the Unity runtime into docker containers many millions of times to do automated data generation or software in the loop testing. Having a per-install fee here quickly becomes far more expensive than other options like Nvidia Omniverse. (even at the 1 cent discounted rate) Is this intended?

If I build my game and test it on my own hardware - this is not an end-user's device. How does Unity determine which devices are mine vs. the end user?

Another question: Unity appears to take a cut even if the user gets a refund for the game. Instead of being a net zero monetary interaction for a developer, this becomes a net negative because Unity gets their payment but then keeps it after the game is refunded. This is risk because of how review bombing works.

Also, piracy.

If I am a malicious user I could create a script to repeatedly install a game on a VM and automatically change the VM's ID so every time the game is opened it counts as a new install to any automated counter Unity has. How is this being mitigated?

How will you bill Unity personal accounts which have a surprise hit and may not have any funds to be able to pay? Will you sue for compensation? Send out collections agencies, etc.?

Why is the Plus plan being removed? Was it not making Unity enough money top justify its existence?

Is there a particular version of Unity that this takes effect with?

What happens if I cancel my Unity account then the game hits the threshold? How does Unity bill me?

Even better, the way it is worded if you don't have 200K lifetime installs then you still don't pay:

But as others stated, this can be problematic for apps with large numbers of users but low revenue per install.

 

It's absolutely NOT this Ryan.. Read through it again.. They are charging per install. So you sell a game once to a user.. you get a one time revenue. Now, for the entire lifetime of your project, Any time that user re-installs the game.. you get dinged $.20.. So how in the living hell is an indie dev team suppost to forecast for a revenue / monetization model when the biggest variable is that a user could install your game 10 times. A few PCs, an iPad a couple phones... And don't even start thinking about someone maliciously attacking an indie studio but setting up a little VM and a batch file that runs the install over and over and over.. 100 installs day? 1000?

Ya, no it isnt good.

 

20 cents for every install, not every sale. You are only making money once on your game whereas Unity will be making money on it every time someone re-installs your game or app. If you are selling your mobile game for $1, you lose 30 cents to the app store and 20 cents to Unity. If that user uninstalls and re-installs or installs on another device, you lose another 20 cents. 4 installs and you are losing money. This is how it reads, if this isn't actually correct then they need to put out way better messaging soon.

 

Per install? So I can cost a studio $$$ by reinstalling?

Better buy another SSD so I don't bankrupt Ludeon. Ffs

 

Is it for every "sale" or is it for every "install"? Those are not the same thing.

 

If the install tracking mechanism is in the runtime, I will have no choice but to stop using Unity. This is an unacceptable tracking mechanism to force on my users. I have run a strict no-DRM, no-tracking, no-telemetrics policy for my game - I cannot accept being forced to go against this core policy.

If the install tracking happens through collaboration with the platforms (Steam, etc), I might be able to accept this change. The pricing is not unreasonable for the kind of indie development that I do. But any kind of forced telemetry is a hard no.

 

Had a small mistake in there, should be fixed now

 

Install. So if they buy one copy on Steam and install it on desktop, Steam Deck, and their laptop, charged 3 times.

 

If your game is free then if you're not making money, you pay nothing. It only starts if you cross the $200k threshold for the game's revenue...

 

Seems no one at Unity thought about how an “install” is being defined. Good idea to use a non defined term as key metric for future revenue model.

 

That is my understanding too, I think Unity employees should read what their company is communicating before coming here and making things even more muddled.

 

Copied from https://unity.com/runtime-fee.

So streaming the game or just including it in a website is considered to be an "installation"? This is just beyond insane.

 

This is completely ridiculous. Most mobile games are lucky to make $0.05 per user after UA costs, and are based on scale. Getting lots of users means that the small amount of money made per user can still end up making the game profitable, as in 400k MAU (monthly active users) could make $20k per month.

Assuming a successful campaign keeping MAU at 400k, and $0.05 profit per user, this new model would mean that the game studio would now be losing $60k per month assuming they get 400k downloads a month (as most mobile F2P users will only play for a few days to weeks) so to keep MAU high you need to continuously acquire large numbers of users.

Even if we only get 100k downloads to keep us at 400k MAU that would mean we just only break even at exactly $0 in profit that month. If we only get 10k downloads to keep us at 400k MAU that would mean we get $15k in profit each month, literally taking a 25% profit cut from us.

These figures don't even include the cost of development or maintenance for this game either, just pure MAU profit. Factor in developer salaries for development and maintenance as well as LiveOps and this figure even more quickly drops into the negatives.

This will literally destroy any mobile game made with Unity that relies on markets of scale instead of flat purchase prices, not to mention the issue for install farms and pirated copies of the game that dozens of other people have already brought up in this forum post.

Guess its time to start looking into porting our brand new Unity projects into Godot.

Absolutely absurd. And I liked working in Unity too...

 

A unity staff member elsewhere responded to that question saying that they have anti-fraud tech for the unity ads that solves a very similar problem that they hope can achieve the same here. Ignoring their wording (hope implies it's not a solved problem), I can see that it would be relatively easy to detect patterns of usage like that, though I can't imagine it would be infallible or accurate. Those matter when installs are actual dollars from the devs pockets.

Tbh how installs are tracked is the biggest thing here for me. Piracy, demos and platforms like webgl are huge issues. As mentioned, spoofing installs to attack developers. There's also things like early access cycles encouraging multiple installs. If it's just storing a registry entry then people that clean up their PC from time to time would be generating multiple installs per sale. Similarly with device churn for certain platforms, etc. It's a complete mess. It also makes running the numbers incredibly opaque. Who is going to want to invest years of development time without understanding how much they'll be throwing away at the end of it. It should 100% be a revenue cut. If the point is to be cheaper than a revenue cut then make it a lower revenue cut.

All in all this just feels like the decision makers are completely tunnel vision in a world of services - ongoing monetisation and tracking built in. It just doesn't work for a huge subsection of the unity user base.

 

Ok it can be more easily summarized this way, but I can also prepare a sheet if that helps. The specific situation for our studio is:

We are at the finish line about to release our game. Our game is free to play. Our game is multiplayer. We designed our monetization model around being free to play and multiplayer. Users that continue to play our game will likely pay money for cosmetics allowing us to cover server costs.

We did not design our monetization model around charging users to install the game! Users that download our game and only play for a moment don’t hardly cost us anything because they left and no longer take up cloud resources.

If we now have to cover a cost per install, this introduces a risk that we have not accounted for. Unity could end up costing us more money than we make preventing us from being able to cover our cloud and development costs.

Does this make more sense?

We can’t charge players per download. We aren’t AAA with a large following. And even AAA studios don’t charge per install for online games hardly anymore. That’s why we allow our game to be downloaded for free. So users can try it out and if they like it, they will keep playing it, and likely pay us.

This new pricing model Unity is proposing is 100% incompatible with our pricing model.

We are literally a month away from being ready to release. We leverage a lot of Unity’s cutting edge technologies such as the Burst compiler to get hundreds of players (potentially thousands after a few more optimizations) connected to AWS ec2 servers. We’ve been in early access on Steam with good results. We are about to launch on mobile. We were very excited and proud to be using these technologies provided by Unity, but this pricing model literally forces our hand to start porting to an engine with a compatible pricing model.

Fortunately Godot supports C# and Rust. Rust uses the LLVM compiler so that would be our alternative to burst. We should be able to port relatively quickly but would rather put our efforts towards our game instead of porting it. But like I said, this new direction from Unity will literally be forcing our hand if Unity proceeds.

TL;DR;

A new risk has been introduced that we have to account for in our pricing and we simply can’t as an indie studio.

 

Wish they'd just included a preliminary version of the terms of service this stuff will fall under, which should be clarifying a variety of the edge cases people are now worried about, what certain terms used mean, etc. Instead we only get a blog post and a FAQ

 

Wait until you get the first invoice - bam!

 

Unloyal to your customers.

 

Well, I can't help but feel like I've wasted my time and money on working on learning Unity at this point. This is unconscionable to me. Beyond the now-ambiguity of how much telemetry and logging I'd have to include in any product I released to satisfy Unity's install tracking (or worse yet, having Unity bundling in telemetry itself), now I'm left with assets that I can't use, and it makes Unity so, so much worse for anything but live-service games, which are emphatically not what I want to focus my time and energy on. Unity keeps proving that it's not a trustworthy company. Even if this change is scrapped, I can't in good conscience use Unity and trust that I won't have the rug pulled out from under me again.

This isn't even a post to try and change Unity's decision here. This is such a demoralizing, jaw-dropping change that I don't think I can bring myself to continue trying anything with Unity.

 

I'm just here to grab a torch and join the angry mob. The people who came up to this monetization plan must be too high on drugs or have no idea about software or game development. Do you guys at Unity think that we use Unity because we don't have other options? I don't owe you any loyalty.

Raising prices by a reasonable rate? That's going to make people angry, sure, but that's at least kinda fair. You want to track installs? That's raising a whole lot of red flags. It won't just cost you customers, it will cost you the customers of your customers. Because it's not just developers who hate these practises, it's gamers too. And a game developer will now have to think twice before using an engine that aims to be so obtrusive to his own users.

And how do you account for games costing $5 apiece vs games that cost $10? Your idiotic plan to charge a flat fee of 20 cents per install is obviously hurting cheaper games more. Just do a % of revenue fee like Unreal or something. People will hate it at least but it's not borderline spyware. Your board is full of money worshipping morons.

Guess what engine I'm not using for my next projects.

 

(I'm not saying this against you) We are screwed if this is true, we would be paying a random fee that no one can verify and can even put us into debt. Instead of paying given how much we make, we would be at the mercy of a flawed algorithm and Unity's good faith, which is lacking.

 

So uhh what are the chances Unity backtracks on this crap after the massive negative reception?

 

Have they backtracked anything in the past?

 

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