Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Yes, it’s painfully obvious that they have no clue what they are doing.

 

The plot thickens.

 

No. It's just been buried alive and will take some time to suffocate.



Then it will reemerged and roam among the living as a zombie looking for MONEY to eat, for a few years until another engine blows it's head off.

 

I've been a Unity developer since Unity 3.x My livelihood was Unity development from 2009 to now. I'm done. This trash all started with the forced subscription model, the invasive and aggressive enforcement of Plus membership. If you haven't had the pleasure of going through this S***show of an experience before, let me tell you Unity's CS has been awful for years and there's no way they're going to be reasonable when trying to enforce an install fee.

It's clear the route of treating customers like garbage is the way Unity is going to move forward at this point. I'm done. Moving on to a new career. Cheers.

 

What confuses me is the constant switching between the terms "downloads" and "installs".

So if I distribute my game physically (no downloads) and it runs directly from the device (so no install), I have to pay no fees, right?

Back to old school

 

Ya saw this and my first thought was ...yep
Create a massive problem, then ship the solution to the problem you created

Only we don't use any such service so ... you have not created a solution to the problem you created

 

Only if you assume they care about developers.
I'm leaning towards this.

 

Hey guys I think I just found something really interesting.

As you know or may not know the CEO sold his stockshare of Unity 1 week prior to release of this price plan. This is called insider Trading because he is part of the company and has inside information that the public not has acces to.

Here is the part that is interesting in this case:

Insider trading is deemed illegal when the material information is still non-public and comes with harsh consequences, including potential fines and jail time. Material non-public information is defined as any information that could substantially impact that company's stock price.

And I think a price change is something that can substantially impact a company's stock price. So if someone can get a lawyer to file a lawsuit against him we can get rid of this CEO

 

Its automated, many many people have automated sells setup.

 

Cant confirm but rumor is they will wave all install fees if you switch to there ad service if this is true this is 100% about the top unity ftp games using other ad services as they pay more to the devs.

 

This is where the anti-competition departments need to step in. Unity has a massive domination of the mobile market and they are clearly trying to abuse it. There's not enough competition for free-market to work and regulation is required.

 

Can people stop posting this? It's showing how uneducated we are as a group that anyone thinks this is even remotely in the realm of possibility or a viable option moving forward. We need to focus on the issue not pie-in-the-sky fantasy about insider trading from people who don't know anything about operations of publicly traded companies. And no one here is suing and getting the CEO removed. Come on. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

When the C-levels at Unity read stuff like this it just gives them more fuel to pour on us that we are coming up with this nonsense. They can all look at us and laugh and point and think that we have no chance to contest what is happening here because we look dumb.

 

despite not earning nor intending to, ive also spent actually plenty of money on the asset store as i am not a modeler, and couldnt even draw a stick man if needed to save my life. So, ive bought (admittedly a synty are a weakeness) but ive bought a good few things, odin, and such so, like you, im sure unity has had money from me directly i have paid. just not specifically unity fees. i arguably also dont object to paying towards unity, if they had left plus available and said no more free unity, id have paid for plus.. its cheaper than my house insurance.. in fact my house insurance just went up by the amount for plus (almost)!!

while i appreciate for many this is potentially a business breaker, and if it had not been installs but say sale based so, ~20c on a sale or such.. then... maybe... people wouldnt have quite gotten so mad, because at least they were making > 20c most likely gross, but then all the IAPs if they had to pay ~20c per IAP that would sink some even quicker than installs.. While unity have been quiet and frankly if I was an employee id probably not want to post for fear of lynching, Im not sure they honestly expected it to start the fire it has. But its the fact theres a level of backdating, so while one of the posts from unity (might have been on twitter) basically said even if you have 1.5M in $ and downloads, come jan you only would pay for the installs from jan..not the 500k ones backdated for this year.. so, thats a small relief but, still each install come jan is now costing them money they originally hadnt budgeted for, so what does it mean, everyones now going to charge more per game/IAP? just so they can afford their unity fees

 

They think we have no other choice. They don't realize that all the devs jumping ship will build up all the alternative free platforms very rapidly.

Look at Blender. #1 3D rendering program and totally free.

The only reason alternatives like Stride/Godot/Bevy/Flax are "small" now is because Unity was so reasonable there was no need to move to them. There is no doubt Unity is going down in flames after this.

The feature gaps those other systems have could be patched in months if people worked hard enough at it. The interest in them is going to explode. People will volunteer their time to improve those systems so they don't feel like they are being held ransom by the crazy people at Unity.

You can't develop games in peace for the future with a guillotine hanging over your head and a crazy person holding the rope.

 

We handed Unity the lifeline, all they had to do was walk it back and go to a rev share that scales, easy, done.

Now I think it's too late, looking at the Godot discord the unity refugees are flooding the introduction channel. May many of them were small time devs that would never break the threshold or buy pro, but they likely bought from the asset store.

I assume unreal and other engines are similar with the refugee crisis.

A lot of the damage is already done. I think the only thing the company can do is to vote out most of its leadership, kill this pricing model, and go on an apology tour everywhere. Plenty who are invested in a unity project partially complete would return still, at least for the completion of the last project, but it would buy Unity time to rebuild the community.

 

Tell me you're joking.

Yes, if you as an individual are taking home a million USD per year, that's quite above middle class.

But this isn't take home pay. It's revenue. And it usually applies to multiple people.

 

Cool, it's even better now

Apparently if your game isn't reaching the thresholds fast enough - they'll just bundle it together with whatever they consider 'similar' and count them as a single project

Honestly - I can See Google, Apple & MS putting a release out saying all Unity built games won't be allowed from 1st-Jan. as there's no way they'll be accepting Unity's - we'll randomly bill you. (As surely those 3 companies have enough sense to know the backlash they'll all get if they do accept it).

 

Will the methods and data be shared with developers to see? Or will it be like publisher models before mobile where sales was a "trust me bro"?

What if internal download counts, or Apple/Google counts, differ from Unity counts?

Also running the monetary metric on gross, before platform fees, instead of net is not very nice at all.

 

I just watched their ironSource migration video and saw this:



Guess that last minute buyout offer hit someone hard/the wrong way.

 

Imagine running a $14 billion company and not understanding that you're gonna start billing page impressions as installs. I.e. each time a player plays the game the dev gets billed $0.2 or whatever in the browser. Then flip 180 when the community points it out and just exclude browser fees completely. How incompetent and lazy do you have to be to not even plan this right and how did these people get into such positions (and how do they maintain them).

 

This has already been covered in the thread many times . The pattern of stock sales over time, taken in aggregate, does not seem to constitute insider trading. It seems to be a regularly scheduled trade so that he can have cash to buy some Starbucks coffee and stuff. All of these exec-types that have more stock options than they know what to do with do this every day. The SEC would likely take one look at that pattern of trading and say "nothing to see here".

 

Unity temporarily closes offices amid death threats following contentious pricing changes

https://www.engadget.com/unity-temp...ng-contentious-pricing-changes-163533875.html

 

Yeah, we've talked about this already, there is not much to say anyway. Physical threats are bad.

 

is not about the thresholds... in a perfect case in a perfect world this fees are good for you, but we are not in a perfect world, the problem are installs on other devices, like for example, every f steam user who has 2 pcs or every f genshin inpact user who has a phone and a pc... those are multiple installs, you need to pay for that even if you are not making money for extra installations

 

They need that money to buy other companies to... well I don't know.

 

Stock sales are normal - the key takeaway is basically the entire management teams has been only selling for 12 months, zero buys - and key directors / the CEO themselves hold ZERO stock, any shares they receive they immediately sell. (all based on the previous post of the SEC data in this thread). Meaning they have no skin in the game of their own project. Imagine running a project thats giving you constant ownership rights and you dont want to own a single penny of it.....

 

To track installs and nickel-and-dime their customers to death through iron-fisted spyware tracking to prove that you earned 50 cents so they can send their mafioso attorneys after you to collect.

 

BTW, is this something?
https://gist.github.com/runevision/1c0d6a856dda1461577cf7f84574253a

 

it is a little like abusive relationship, from the outside it can seem so easy to say well leave then.. but there is emotional and mental baggage, and some blood weat and tears. I like you have spent years in unity, im comfortable if i want to do something, i can.. looking at UE, yeah theres some mental conversions such as they use Z as up not Y etc, so im gonna screw that up for a while, but ya know, you dont forget concepts, yes its now a blueprint not a prefab, yes, its c++ not c# if you need it, tbh one kinda thing i never bothered to look up is why if unity is .net based why only c# ...

 

Looks like the best chance so far...

 

Doesn't matter. They won't have this market share for long. Why lock into their system when there are a half dozen viable alternatives for new devs that will cost you $0 to use?

Stride,
Cocos,
Bevy,
Flax,
Godot,
MonoGame

They will milk existing big games for 1-2 years then they better be planning to get their revenue somewhere else as there won't be any new future big mobile games likely launching with this. Too risky.

Better worth your time to spend the extra 3-6 months if you are thinking you might hit the jackpot on learning a new system and porting than give Unity control of your business forever. No intelligent person will do this.

Unity will become a joke. "Why would you use Unity bro? That's stupid, just use ___ and you don't have to pay them forever every time someone installs."

This is going to be the advice EVERYONE gives to any new developer. It is obvious. If a young kid came to you for advice, why would you tell them anything else?

 

I'm terribly disappointed to hear about the physical threats against Unity. It certainly is not the way to make Unity listen to us. These actions harm, rather than help our cause.

The vast majority of us are peaceful, and many of us really just want a couple of key things from this:
1. For Unity to honor their prior covenants regarding the TOS, specifically, with developers being able to stay with the old TOS that they were on until they upgrade to a new major version.
2. A pricing model that does not rely on "just trust us" calculations that expose unnecessary risk.

Frankly, the first is the one that really matters to me, because I won't be around for the second (This situation went beyond the pale for me). But the second one is important for developers who are locked in on their projects and need to be done right by Unity.

 

Oh yeah that only worsen the situation, don't even get me started on how perverse and tyrannic this "per install" thing is, they decide everything unilaterally from a black box in their possession, I don't know how USA can allow this to be a legal move, this should be straight illegal and the solely mention of the original Unity blog post should be enough to trigger penalties. The very fact that they implicitly enforce you to use their other services to reduce their per install costs is also something that in many decent countries is completely illegal, penalized by anti-monopoly laws etc.

People just should boicot Unity, their employees should do a strike, this is just tyrannic and greedy as f*ck.

 

any game that is build with unity means it needs to connect with internet , you want be able to ship games without connecting to unity servers

 

And that is not even addressing downloads in emerging markets. Launching a game in India where the ARPU is much lower? F*** YOU.
Guess games can only launch in America / EU where the ARPU has at least a chance of covering the cost.

 

Also Steam has family sharing where you can let others borrow your games and play them on their devices.

Also, again, the specifics don't really matter, trying to apply this retroactively to existing games is super bad. I have released games and I feel held hostage by the whims of whoever decides these things at Unity, this is not how you do business.

 

Indeed. This is essentially what the level-headed amongst us have been saying since this started. This is what it boils down to.

I am still willing to give this a chance if they come to their senses. But I 100% will switch regardless of the personal time and effort if they do not back off of using installs as a metric for calculation of the cost. I cannot operate a business with an unknown like that hanging over my head, and installs are too far removed from any revenue generating action for it to ever be acceptable to me.

 

Yeah, it's a bad sign if the executive team doesn't have faith in their own company.

 

Just became a Bevy sponsor. I know $5 is not a tiny number, but I hope it's better than nothing. I also hope we can donate 5% of our profit (sorry, can't afford 5% of revenue any time soon) since Jan 2024.

For anyone interested in supporting Bevy:

Supporting Bevy Development (bevyengine.org)

 

I am downgrading to 2022. Thank God it is not released yet.

 

So only LTS version free of this evil fee is 2021LTS and earlier. 2022LTS is still subject to this fee, correct?

 

This is common and a problem when you have companies where parasites take over the management. They will intentionally tear the company to pieces for their own personal profit, spin a narrative in the press about "changing markets," and then move on to the next company to ruin once it is dead and gone.

Look at Disney with Bob Iger. The man could easily reverse their company's slide. Just make some normal movies with normal stories that people want from Disney. Refuses to do it. They own Star Wars, Marvel, and all their old classic IP's yet refuse to make anything anyone wants to see with all of that. Their stock is crashing and they are losing billions on each new embarrassing release but Bob Iger as CEO is still raking in $25 million a year.

These executives will ride Unity right into the dirt as they cash their millions out on the way. In 1-2 years when Unity is dead they will still have their tens of millions to show for it. It does not hurt them any more than Disney bankrupting is hurting Iger.

 

I don't believe not even one bit any threats against unity CEO. They know that any public meeting will be a PR disaster for the same reasons that we seen no one from unity here except one post yesterday.

Do not get fooled by this announcement, they needed an excuse to cancel that event and off course they use the death threats. What did you expect from a person that called his company clients "stupid" and had the idea to force people to pay a fee each time someone else installs software on a device?

Did you think he can come up and say, sorry we know people will ask questions at that event and we don't want to answer so we cancel this?

Ignore this death threat situation, they have the police, they have private security, is not our problem.

 

Another revelation; the install fee is stacked. That means you have fixed costs. These are the best-case Enterprise costs per month up to 2 million installs:



You've worked hard and built up a million users and a million dollars gross. You're hoping to grow your business.

When you hit 100k installs a month, you are being charged $150,000 a year for 1.2 million new users.
At 500k installs, you are charged $438,000 a year for 6,000,000 new users, 7.3c per user
At 1M installs, £558,000 a year for 12 million users, 4.65c per user, and
At 2M installs, £678,000 a year for 24 million users. 2.8c per user.

So the best-case payment is actually 280% higher than the listed 1 cent per user of the table. You need to get into insane numbers to approach 1 cent per install.

The stupidest part really is that the impact depends on how much your game costs. 10 million games at $70, this fee is nothing. 10 million games at $0.50 each, this is crippling. This is like taxing people on hours they work rather than income they get!

 

Main points being:

1. Installs =/= revenue, sometimes they are not even proportional.
2. Dev cannot limit or predict the number of installs.

So having a cost per install would make budget planning super difficult, to a point that the business is too risky to be viable. Especially for f2p games.

It is like a shopping mall charging a shop inside it for each person walks into the shop, even without buy anything.

 

Don't forget #3: Binding legal language prohibiting this from ever happening again. Unity has destroyed any credibility or goodwill they had and the only way I would trust their runtime ever again is if they explicitly and permanently give up the ability to rewrite terms of service for old versions.

 

Over 10 years working with unity engine. Time to say good bye
#ByeByeUnity.