Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Exactly. It's like getting to the end of a degree and the university are like "Hey, by the way, we're going to be billing you for each day you work, forever. No big deal".

This idea can only be seen as reasonable by a load of people who have been sat in a board room discussing potential options to make money for so long that they have lost sight of reality and convinced themselves this is not ridiculous.

 

This situation is sad enough without trolls.

 

They estimate.

If they're wrong, its up to you to prove it, by determining unique installs. Good luck with that.

 

Loud minorities of people complaining about privacy has done absolutely nothing to stop invasive spying. People will forgive nearly any amount of rapaciousness if they want to use the end product, in enough numbers that the complainers won't matter in the end.

 

We get this Mail from Unity today :

In my eyes, that already says a lot...

 

And yet this dude (and others like him) comes in here telling everyone to calm down look at my calculations that don’t apply to you in the first place and will be invalid based on the whims of Unity. Anyone who can come to that conclusion clearly won’t make a game that will be successful, which is why they are perfectly fine with this change and what Unity is doing.

 

To Unity's executives,
You still have time to change things. Listen to the people who made this engine great, listen to the developers. Unity would be nothing without its community. Don't destroy one of the most prolific communities among all the engines that exist. If you want to make money, there are smarter ways than this. Listen to your people, don't be foolish.

 

I don't really understand this:

Let's say I made a game for a guy who is good in UA marketing but don't know anything about Unity3d. He just wants a game to publish in googleplay and ios, he does never know if game made by unity or not. He worked a lot of UA and his gross revenue is 200k$ and got 1m users. In FAQ, it says runtime should be paid by distributers. So how unity will contact to that guy and regulate a bill for him? The distributers mean googleplay and appstore? who is it?

 

It's at least as good as the guess of how many times your last game was installed. Uhhhm, I'm gonna say it was elevntynty-quadillion times. So please pay %20 of whatever that number is by the 1st.

 

They tried making it with the Editor, but couldn’t get input to work. /s

 

Here are some other tough, important questions:

How are you going to know if a game has made over $200k? I can see how you could use the runtime to spy on download information, but you should in no way have access to a developers sales numbers.

So, how will you know if the game was sold at full price? Half price? 90% off / $1 only discount sale? Without asking the developer, frankly, you shouldn't have access to that information so have no way of knowing. What if it was a free give away? How are you going to base the decisions of, "That game has earned over $200k?"

Are you going to check the price of every game that you believe has earned over $200k? Or just make an assumption and charge the developer, and if you're wrong, leave it up to them to ask for a refund / complain? Even if you check their games price, you won't know at what price each copy was sold, or if it was given away (press key, free giveaway event, etc), without asking the developer, assuming it was even sold and not a pirate copy or malicious reinstall with a VM.

Also, this $200k, how is that number worked out? Is it before or after the stores fees (on average 30%) fees? What about international taxes like VAT and GST - is it worked out before, or after that?

I cannot see any way this $200k figure is fairly worked out without the developer personally reporting it. And as far as working out the other stuff about installs with demoes etc... well I've said about that elsewhere.

 

The ceo of unity doesn't care about developers or gamers, he cares about money and only money.

 

They estimate.

If they're wrong, its up to you to prove it. Good luck with that.

 

Why would anyone start developing a new game in Unity from now on?

 

I assume that with the cost savings they'll realize by firing half their staff once they "right size" to accomodate their smaller userbase, they'll re-staff with an army of auditors who reach out to investigate compliance.

 

Yeah, they even invented a term for devs like that... what was it they called them again? Oh yes.

F***ing Idiots.

Ah, but no. Nevermind. They didn't invent that term did they?

 

How are they going to make this not retroactive? Will games sold in 2023 and reinstalled on new machines or mobile phones after January 1st count?

 

Sorry for my absence, I started to download all of my graphical assets from the Asset Store before their horrible EULAs kick in etc. It is not likely that they would walk back on this, so I will move over to another engine not touching this train wreck ever again.
I was the idiot that I paid for the license (Plus) meanwhile I didn't have to. Apparently it doesn't matter, they just don't give a flying F***.

You shouldn't either.

 

Going by history, they’d make it part of Xcode for free, but anyone needing just desktop development tools now need to download a 50GB package with Xcode, iOS simulators and Unity.

 

It is you they will be contacting. Forever.

 

I did it, let's do it every hour.

 

It should read: "The price increase is very targeted. In fact, more than 90% of our customers will not be affected by this change ^because they've all moved on to a different engine."

 

I suddenly regret every asset i bought in the asset store. I'm moving over to godot/unreal. Unity is trash now. No amount of PR or improvements will recover the trust lost in this game engine.

 

I had been using plus until around the time they hiked the price up massively. The $150 some a year was absolutely fine but when it was going up and I was struggling due to no work during the whole covid lockdown thing that just wasn't working out. Glad I never bothered to go back to Plus now.

 

i hope so, but i don't think that's possible. if they revert it all now, they will leave devs to wait for another move they will of course do in the near future. and while they have already digested possible future revenues, the next move won't be any less effective to devs. so, they can stick with this as well. it's a bit lose-lose thing at the moment i think...

 

Honestly I don't see the assets I bought as such a big loss. They saved me a ton of time and energy that I would never had recouped had I done the work myself. The massive codebase I developed over the years is going to be hard though. Some parts are fairly agnostic but a lot of stuff was specially designed around the inspector (the ability to create and edit inspectors was the absolute best part of unity for me!) really hurts though. It was a lot of time and effort and was all very specially built exactly to help me save time at every opportunity. Losing all of that hurts way more.

 

Companies pitching new games will not be using unity, too high of risk at this point. Just wait until that 20 cents is 1$

 

Very few big companies want to be a normal software company selling products anymore. They are looking for ways to build an automated money making machine milking money from everyone else with every transaction. That's pretty much what this is about. And to be fair many if not most game companies want the same. It's just that the whole thing with changing the terms on the fly and tracking installs and 0.20$ even for f2p is extremely off-putting.

 

Many people said that in this topic, but it's actually wrong.

For a $20 game, when you take into account taxes & the Steam fee and that most sales come during a sale, the average income per game is close to $10 for the dev (not counting sales from "emerging" countries).

If there are 2.5 installs per sale, a conservative number, then 5% of the developer income goes away. A sound business aims for a 5~10% benefit margin. So 5% represents between 50 & 100% of the developer benefit.

Of course, it's way less bad than for the FTP model, but it's still a major issue, which means that this fee is unacceptable for Steam devs like myself. (although I still didn't make big enough to worry about it right now, it may change in the future, especially if Unity "tunes" their numbers every year )

 

142 pages and still the big boys upstairs are hiding. Unity brass you are a utter embarrassment. Hope all that shady stock nonsense you pulled comes back to bite you.

 

https://twitter.com/fronkongames/status/1702277729410785688

 

> Will it cost you a lot of time to migrate? Will it be difficult? How much longer will your game take to finish?

Blocky Ball is live on Steam. We are currently estimating 3 months to migrate because Unity has not given us a choice. They said 3 months so we have 3 months. Necessity requires us to so we will. That or we have to pull the game while we continue our migration. We took care to be as decoupled from Unity as possible so we will get to see how good we actually did.

> Horrible to think that this pricing would cause a lot of difficulty to devs. Would you return if unity scape-goated who/whatever was responsible for the pricing?

Firing the current CEO would be a good start. Anyone different would just be for show and not rebuild any trust.

> Also, is it definately in your best interests to migrate or do you act on principle?

It is in our best interest. Unity removed their TOS GitHub repo. They added sneaky clauses into their existing TOS. And their official response regarding the TOS changes is the most hostile thing I’ve ever read from any of our partners we do business with:

“Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer. ”

https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ackaging-updates.1482750/page-45#post-9297488

Were there other draws to moving to other engines?

We’ve had concerns about being so heavily entrenched with a closed source proprietary engine for a while now. Especially when we encounter bugs and we don’t have access to the source code so we have to wait for Unity to fix. We’ve appreciated their open source packages and we’ve fixed many bugs with those ourselves, but core unity source bugs have been a pain point.

Which one will you go to?

We’ve been talking to both Godot and Bevy. Everyone over there has been EXTEMELY helpful. I will be reaching out to the studios that do console ports of Godot. If all goes well, we will probably go with Godot and / or a mixture of Godot combined with the bevy runtime for our core gameplay loop. We expect our servers to get huge optimization improvements as well so the migration might just pay itself off in the long run! It’s a bummer because we were getting ready to showcase our huge server improvements using Unity’s burst compiler but that ship has sailed.

All in all a crappy situation. We were a few weeks away of being ready to release Blocky Ball X (our cross platform sequel to Blocky Ball. Hence the X). We weren’t necessarily releasing in 3 weeks as we wanted to do some advertising, but the game would have been ready. But an additional 3 months isn’t the end of the world. It will be a bummer if we don’t make the 3 months and have to pull the current Blocky Ball from Steam, but this is the situation we find ourselves in. We ran the numbers. Our free to play pricing model cannot support this install fee combined with our cloud costs no matter which way we roll the dice.

But cost isn’t even the biggest issue. We simply don’t trust Unity at all. Trust has been completely shattered.

Typed up on my phone so probably full of typos.

Feel free to ask any other questions and I’ll respond when I can

 

I hope the developers on unity are standing up to this bs. Unity would be in big trouble if their developers went on strike

 

Your game uses Unity Engine = You are a subsidiary of Unity Software Inc.

 

Exactly... How often and by how much does this $0.20 increase? Because of course it isn't IF but WHEN.

It could be $1 in 3 months or 3 years. $8 next Friday or on the CEOs next birthday. Are we all supposed to be willing to invest years of our lives developing a game based on that total lack of security that could determine all our time wasted by any given mornings Unity news?

 

Apparently some have just walked out the door after standing up for some period of time in the past already. They stated that we should expect more to do the same in the coming days. Depending on the Bus factor this really could be a death knell of kinds. There is some seriously bad vibe coming from just beyond the curtain and it raises a lot of concerns about the stability of the company. Bigger and more successful companies have gone under in less time than it has taken for this to develop.

 

EA recovered after he left. There is still hope.

 

Second time for some of us!


Though I know someone who went through the same thing with Director first, *then* Flash.

 

Oh, I absolutely agree the damage is done.

I’m inclined to think that’s more sinister than that.

I’m inclined to think they don’t really care if they kill the engine. They just want short term returns while they run the company into the ground.

 

Unity might, I don't know about us devs.

 

what would happen if you don't pay the fee? Can't login to unity hub? Be sued?

 

Pretty sure its in the terms the assets you purchase on the store can only be used in Unity, no moving those fbx files over to Godot or Unreal without risk of a lawsuit.

 

Who was asking for Flax engine... just decided to test it out

*** JUST FIRST IMPRESSION ***

Tryin the FPS demo is like, download FLAX standalone app ( 2 minutes ), download the engine ( couple more minutes), download the FPS demo project ( another 2 minutes ) and then open it (the quickest demo project open i've ever experienced).

Then you decide to press the play button and start thinking of how long you will wait. And then you think OHHHH i have to blink and while thinking of the thinking of blinking, you're already in play mode and you skip the blinking because you can't believe how fast enters the play mode : DDDDD

I've never tried FLAX engine before, but honestly it feels intuitive, navigation is more UE like... the PBR looks way better than BiRP or URP (don't know about HDRP). No awful wide specular highlights that take half of the screen. It feels more like UE's shading which i really like.

A mix between UE and Unity !
Not that feature rich yet though !

C++ and C# seamless coding ( Coding is so much Unity like )
.NET7 - C# 11 support (edited)
Visual Scripting as well
Visual material editor
GPU Lightmap baking
CPU/GPU particles
PhysX 5.1
Build to many platform
Editor's UI/UX - need some work but still clean and readable.

I can see FLAX suitable for a lot of projects but i doubt it's fine for bigger projects yet, still intuitive and you'll quickly get used to it ! I think i already love it !

 

For those who still don't understand:

This pricing policy change is THE biggest thing ever happened to Unity since the release of Unity v2.4 in 2008

One way or another, it is the end of an era and the beginning of a new one

 

Meh if the company goes under then we only have to strike up a deal with the asset creators themselves. Many would probably be quite reasonable about it. Though to keep all that contact info straight you'd want to pull all of the info from Unity now while you still can...

 

Its just ambiguous enough ( not to mention none of this is legally binding, so doesn't mean anything anyway till we see the licence ) to cause confusion and provide two different ways of looking at it that dramatically change costs to devs.

For example on the Unity Runtime Fee | Unity page it says the following, which could be read as resetting the tier level each month.



It all just adds to the level of incompetence shown throughout this whole debacle. It could have been made clear with a more comprehensive example over several months, but for some reason they decided not to do that!

I've always been in the camp that the install tier doesn't reset each month, but accumulates from the moment you pass the thresholds. The alternative just doesn't make sense as it would be crippling finically.

 

Hmmm C# 7 support is quite nice to see. Stride says it only uses C# 6. Although after years of being stuck with whatever version of C# Unity had I'm honestly happy for anything that isn't a fifteen year old version of Mono.

 

The only assets you can't use in another engine (from a license perspective) are Unity made assets (Enemies, ADAM characters) and potentially some of the few assets that have a custom license (like NatureRenderer), but 99% of those are useless in another engine since they are code assets