Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I am guessing they are just random stupid investors that have no idea how game development works or think "Ah these game devs are just whining, they will pay eventually."

There may also be the expectation that even if this causes a death spiral, January-June, 2024 revenue will be higher as they will be milking all the big mobile cash cows that are currently already released, and it will take those companies at least 6-12 months to port their games to new engines and jump ship.

Bleeding the animal dry.

 

Still it will take a lot of courage, time and money to move to UE / Godot any other engine after years of investing in Unity.

Same as now, ppl will try UE / Godot but in the end they will probably go back to Unity, since they are used to working with it...learning new stuff requires a lot of motivation and stuff

I mean at this point I hope majority will move on to other engines, but reality is...they will stay and still do business with Unity.

 

@impheris

This means absolutely nothing. Again, its a black box - "Trust me, bro". How can you trust a corporation that its in their best interest to charge us as much as they can get away with? We cannot see how they count the installs.

 

Holly no. We'll be the ones dealing with Microsoft bs if Unity ends up like Zenimax and Activision

 

Generally, it looks like an opportunity to cleanup flooded mobile market.

 

Sure, but after that they will go down and it will be almost impossible to get up again.
That's the "beauty" of this price model. It will go up a little, and then crashing into oblivion.

 

see? this is a big problem right here, i have 1 steam account and 2 pcs... if i do that. i'm pretty sure millions also do that, that means unity will f with my money, i'm also pretty sure unity is not capable of determine fraudulent installations, thay can say whatever they want, it has been proved for years YOU CAN NOT WIN AGAINST HACKERS... i really need this to work but this guys don't really care

 

Not realistically, no. Companies can shamble on for a very long time after making a fatal mistake, at a certain scale. This particular mistake is one that won't immediately kill them. It will be a slow bleed if it does kill them. There are too many trapped developers who can't just leave right now, and there will still be attempts to scrape off of the 15 years of back catalogue games that can keep them running. Meanwhile there is no way the larger companies with existing live services titles will switch in the short term. They'll happily pay.

The real slow death will be in the lack of *new* projects, and the realization that only the largest of gacha companies will keep using Unity. The job market for unity engineers and developers will evaporate long before the company itself does.

 

Nah, they are trying to capitalize on Unity pseudo monopoly on mobile development and trying to reel everyone into their system (UGS / Levelshare).
And yeah, they'll be storing F***ton of data, like everyone else does.

 

This is why installs is a non-starter and unacceptable as a model for basing fees on. It just isn't going to work. No one here is going to go along with it no matter how many times they clarify or double/triple down on it.

I am not going to continue using Unity if they are basing my cost on a metric that has no correlation to the revenue I've earned from a project.

 

I'm waiting for official Microsoft statement regarding this absolute disaster.
I was planning to make and release games on Xbox. For me, this decision is "neutral" as I do not have anything substantial yet to not to change decision regarding engine. Unity WAS nearly perfect for such scenario.
Now things are getting complicated more than needed.

 

They will not go bankrupt next quarter, but if they don't fix this by next quarter, it might be too late for them to ever recover.
I didn't mean that post to be taken literally
That's actually the real problem they don't realize. They can be dead pretty soon, but they will not see it until many months/years after.

 

So they're literally just making this up as they go.

 

Those answers are contradictory.

 

Lets have Microsoft charge unity for every visual studio install through their editor

Edit: And every c# script created

 

This list needs to add VR. Though It might be possible to bolt on VR on top of stride or flax. Unreal in VR has some issues on my setup.

 

start creating a system to make the gamers pay for the game for every new hardware, we get our money then we can pay your fee and BTW it needs to be a free system... either way your are literally stealling because you know we were agreed to another TOS very different and even when i tried to calm thigs here a bit you know this is unfair for us (yeah we are not f idiots.... sorry to tell you pal)

 

Ign is following this situation closely.

 

And what if unity decides to make the threshold at $100k instead? They can’t guarantee that they’ll stick with their current TOS.

 

unigine has VR support

 

That's what probably scares me the most. They have this pricing model from some time and nobody thought of the issues with it?! It's not that hard!
Not they are changing and rechanging it. First all installs and reinstalls count, then only the first install etc etc...
They don't know what they are doing at this point,

My guess is that the bought iron whatever for this purpose (at least partially) and it will be a huge loss for them to revert now. and try to make stuff as they go.

 

I'm sorry, but this is a blatant and direct LIE. No pleasantries, it is not true and multiple people wrote that the idea was that multiple installs are multiple charges.

Why are you guys lying? The "Sorry, we F***ed up this too" would be just suffice.

 

So... I am seeing people talking about changes having no impact on Devs with numbers bellow the cap for the install fee and saying that "This is being blown out of proportion - it really won't affect many devs.".

It might be true that the majority of Unity's clients won't be dealing with the "per install fee". But this is not about how many people will be affected. This is about trusting a company and believing it will be fair when it comes to dealing with OUR product being marketed. They must profit along side our businesses, but not as they want and impose using the final product.

The final piece of software WE as devs create is OUR product to do whatever we want with it. Letting whoever WE want to install, uninstall, distribute or whatever. That is how publishing deals work by the way. The final product's usage should be defined BY WHOEVER OWNS THE PRODUCT. Not Unity.

Unity's role (as a company) in the dev process should be limited as A TOOL PROVIDER and just that. They should not monitor the final product at all. And we can understand that parts may come to an agreement on revenue share or paying some kind of usage plan. But that is the limit.

Imagine that Adobe suddenly starts charging for the amount of views on youtube regarding videos edited on Premiere Pro. This is the relation Unity is trying to impose here. And adobe could define a cap making sure small channels would not have to pay the fee. But would it be fair if adobe started charging youtube channels after an specific amount of views? NO. That piece of media, although exported using their software does not have annything to do with them anymore. The same logic should apply for game builds.

Once exported/built a game should not by any means be related to the tool used to build it. At least not based on contractual mumbo jumbo imposed by the tool provider.

So yeah. This is about understanding that we should NOT make business with a company that thinks they should have power on the products we craft using their tool. This is about not trusting the company and not about being directly financially impacted.

 

Now now hold your horses we don't want to harm any Unity dev with the exeption of Riccitiello

 

ok but again the very simple question we are all asking is HOW! WE NEED TO KNOW HOW YOU GET THESE NUMBERS.

So this is bullshit, If I buy a game on steam and install it on my PC at home, my work PC for downtime, and my laptop for travel ( this is a real situation I've done this with games like FTL) the dev will be hit THREE TIMES! that's asinine

so this wasn't even a thought in Unities head at the time of this new model becoming a thing, you are actively NOW looking into solutions for the very first thing everyone said was going to happen, like it was all of ours first thought was install bombing

you think MS are going to pay the runtime fee????? they're simply going to not allow unity games on their services if that is the case.

 

Unity dead yet?

 

No, but it's not that they aren't trying.

 

I'm gonna start doing two things:
Swap over to Godot 2(?) and implement PowerPC Mac support so I can move from Unity 2.6 to something more up-to-date (And Free!)
Make my own engine that can load up my Unity projects with a translation layer to also run my scripts as is with little to no changes.

 

now your getting it my guy.

 

Thanks for that, yeah

So basically...

if you were at 2020.Y and you upgraded to 2021.Z (bad version > Oct 2022). And you used this version (Oct 2022), you switched between those and the new TOS would get into effect.

But also what if you have downloaded a new version to check it out? But never user it.

I basically had 2019, upped to 2020 a few years ago and then just went with LTS of 2020 till today.

I had a 2021 Version downloaded to check if out, but its worse for me.

Its such a *** shame that we have to act like this. Unity WTF are you doing

 

I found this while searching for nintendo and riccitiello. lol



post : https://twitter.com/MORTREDENJOYER/status/1205374066523361284

 

My mobile games make <0.1 dollars / download, so bye bye.

 

according to lawyer we spoke too if you ever downloaded 2021.X you agreed to new terms of service with all of your unity versions. You cant just download 2020.X and go back to that TOS

 

My biggest issue isn't necessarily the cost. It is the incentives and risk. With software piracy so high on certain platforms, whether this is financially viable or not for many developers depends on how effective Unity is at filtering out pirate installs.

The problem is, the industry has been after piracy for decades with limited success and a lot more money behind trying to solve it than Unity will be investing.

More importantly though, Unity's pay per install approach means the better Unity is at filtering out pirated installs from their data, the less money Unity receives. The worse job Unity does, the more money they receive. It is simply not reasonable to believe, with those incentives, that Unity will invest enough resources into catching pirated installs. It really makes no sense for Unity to do a good job at it. Since Unity won't be sharing their raw data, you have no means of double checking their work either, so you have no method of verifying Unity is living up to their own obligations.

When a company is entrusted with determining its own revenue, and doesn't allow access to scrutinize the data used to determine that revenue, abuse to inflate revenue will eventually occur. It is just a matter of time.

The biggest risk is you don't have any control over installs. If Unity does a bad job of catching pirates, which again Unity has incentivized themselves to do a bad job, you're not going to be able to get your game removed from torrent sites.

 

At least when the Unity company is bankrupt, we can all go back to using it, and for free!

(For legal reasons, this is a joke.)

 

Ah ok I see. So if a user installs a game on their desktop and then installs it on their Steam Deck because they're going on a trip, that counts as multiple installs and the developer gets charged twice. Got it.

 

As a dev - my logic was always - put money initially into some assets whilst using the free version of Unity - then move up to Plus once I had some revenue starting to come in.
And although in this example - i'd be using Free, As I'd also be buying Assets from the Store - Unity would still be getting 30% from that - So Free-Users aren't ALL free-loaders. (plus, by doing it this way, one's supporting all of the amazing devs that provide the assets which in turn equates to more people choosing unity as their platform).

But Yeah, Limiting Free to a couple of projects, with the cost of Plus being based on number of platforms you want to build to / number projects - wouldn't be too bad. As for the actual big boys - they all get custom deals (at least thats how unreal and most businesses do it).

 

Pretty much my life at Unity lol. I will continue to make assets and I will still love/hate this engine!

 

Most likely somebody will buy them before that.

Maybe that's what they want?!

 

You know how there is a message saying that the post was updated?

Most people haven't revisited the initial post so they weren't aware.

Also @hippocoder is long gone. He became disgruntled with Unity and left a year ago.

 

i needed an official statement

 

say you make a decent indie game in unity, a good example in the survival genre could be The Forest, or Green Hell, which are actually made in Unity, the complexity of these games require dev team sizes between 5 and 10 (if not more) for sure.

considering an average sr game dev salary could pretty much be at least in the 60k/year, we are talking numbers between 300k and 600k a year ONLY in dev employee salaries, not counting all other roles like artists, game designers, HR, marketing, sales etc.

then add to that marketing costs, server costs, goverment taxes, physical office costs, and a large ETC of things to run a game development company.

of course, then add to that 3k per seat of unity Pro licenses (10 devs = 30k/year extra subscription fees gone).

we can farly say that from the first $1M revenue, you have to take out the Steam cut (30%) on top of that, all taxes, payment processor fees and what not.

from your first $1M after all taxes and share cuts from the different intermediaries and govt taxes, you might end up with $500k in the best case scenario.

of those 500k you need to use that to pay all the expenses and salaries mentioned before that could easily add up to $800k each year, you are already in the negatives.

now unity wants you to pay them 15 cents per game sold after the initial bootstrap cost that left you in negative values, even after you already paid them for 10+ Unity pro licenses (effectively 30+k per year which represents at least 3+% of total revenue before expenses of your game).

do you start to see how this scheme can easily be a ruin for an intermediate size indie game company? this only scalates poorly the more devs you have, becaouse you still have to pay upfront 3k/year per each seat, no matter the sales/installs number.

if your game makes 1M a year and you have 20 devs working on your game, thats 60k/year upfront just for the Pro license, that's already 6% of your revenue. contrast that against Unreal's scheme where you pay 5% from sales AFTER your first $1M in revenue.

the amount of examples can continue. give it a thought

 

The latest round of updates do nothing to resolve the core concerns

Here is your only valid solution

1. Switch to or at min add a cap that your fees cannot exceed 5% of the revenue of the app. There is no world where you are entitled to any more than that damn sure no world where you're entitled to 40, 80 or even > 100% of our rev
2. Some binding contract that prevents you from making this sort of mess again. You should not be able to even suggest retroactively applying anything like this ... that is this change shouldn't apply to any game built on any existing version of Unity as this TOS was not in effect at that time. You are literally giving studios 90 days to swallow this change like it or not whether or not they update to the latest ... that should be and will be surprised if its not outright illegal

#2 is why we have halted development on Unity and shifted to UE. This isn't the first time some half-baked idea rolling out of Unity has mangled plans overnight. You have developed a relationship of being the crazy one in the relationship that will out of nowhere NUKE the in-progress plans. Even if you dropped the whole insanity right now ... that damage has been done and without some binding contract to prevent similar in the future, we just can't tolerate the sheer risk of being locked into a business relationship with Unity for the life of a game project.

 

They were probably planing this for a long time. Do you think that they dont know what they are doing...

 

Everything you said it spot on except they want you to pay per INSTALL not per sale. That is the problem.

 

As if the platforms won't pass the fee to the game dev anyway, or make worse offers for Unity games.

 

This engine has not grown in 5 years and now this? How about you go back building the engine and fix bugs?

 

I do think that, yes.

 

stop saying: yeah go Unity 5, Unity 2020, ..... we deserve to use the latest version WE SHOULD NOT ESCAPE TO an OLDER VERSION. new year new technology just look at UE 5.3 every version is better for making games.

I'm currently switching to UE. This is enough I had too many headaches just using UNITY, the process of making games GIVES DOUBLE.

5 years of experience god damn that's f**king hard to leave. also, my game won an event in local events in my county just super hyped to create more and more even STEAM Games.

I made 3 mistakes I could go UE when UE5 came (I used it a couple months). when Unity bought IronSource and left the Gigya game I could also Switch to UE but I tried to stay and Don't lose the Experience. and this time I'm DONE. not only because of the S*** new pricing system but BECAUSE of trust and betrayed to developers and that can happen again and again. Deep down I love C# and love UNITY

 

Yes actually I think they haven't a damn clue
This isn't good for devs, it isn't good for the share holder ... it isn't good at all in anyway.
This was clearly not thought through before they posted they are still responding on critical aspects with "trust us bro" ... so ya I think someone got high and pushed this through ... I honestly think this is the dumbest thing I have seen them do to day and I have been watching it roll on for the better part of 10 years now.