Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I am zen now. A night of panicking and now I am at peace. Been watching some Monogame videos. Gonna go install that and Stride as they are both dot-net and C# heavy which I like as it will hopefully let me reuse a lot of my scripts directly. Xamarin/Maui forms can replace UI Toolkit hypothetically. Video Player and other missing things can be tacked on from C# libaries.

Might end up being faster than Unity while accomplishing the same thing. I was already a bit nervous with Unity. There is nothing like finding a game crippling bug, writing a pristine bug report, submitting it and then having them tell you it is "not a priority to fix" or it's a "duplicate report" and maybe they will fix it one day if enough people vote.

Once you're open source everything is within possibility. If you can't fix something, you can always find someone who can and pay them. You are not sitting around for the Gods of Unity to deign your problem important enough.

"Don't worry ... about a thing"
"Cuz every little thing... is gonna be alright"

Sunshine and better days ahead. i can feel it.

We will make it to the promised land. Just over the horizon. Do you feel it? I can feel it.

 

What I real seriously don't get, why this whole monkeying around with the number of installs brainless bullshit?
Why don't just say, hey, peasants, no Plus, use Personal, above $100k, use Pro. STFU. I really don't get it. Around a million sales, everyone will sit down and negotiate special treatment anyway.

 

Yes, but they won't execute the "switch" part if they think the community will accept the "bait".

 

It really shows that Unity is focused on small/mid size developers who don't run theirs own infrastructure and can be forced into using second rate Unity solutions.

 

Well, now that you put it like that. Its literally what they said, including the STFU part

Doesn't sound that different...
I guess it was for the soft landing?

 

Possibly, but they really screwed the pooch on this if that was their intention. In the past 48 hours they have burned all the remaining trust with the dev community. At this point, if they backtracked a lot of us would still jump ship. I know I did.

I started using Godot yesterday. This weekend I'm going to download any assets/models from my library I deem worthy to save. For instance, Synty Studio assets convert pretty easily. Also, i've already bought 3 courses on Udemy to help ease into Godot.

At this point if I stayed with Unity it would like returning to an abusive relationship to continue the cycle.

 

Is it not time for us to all start buying unity shares? There is well over a billion dollars / pounds worth of shares in this company owned by financial investors such as Vanguard and Black Rock. These are investors that buy shares in any and every indexed company and try control the market. They buy and sell shares like fashion, destroy lives, companies, and any thing in their way. Unity is a great engine, I would hate to see it burn, why don't we all just buy loads of shares when they are eventually worth nothing and make it what it should of been, a platform for developers and beginners alike with a vast amount of assets and resources for development. This is the lie we all bought when we saw the flimsy cardboard packaging. Lets watch em burn our money and then when the stocks are low lets frigging buy unity as a collective and make it better

 

DISCLAIMER: I am not a Unity employee, nor I have any interest of taking the part of Unity Tech , BUT...

I think you guys are completely missing the point here, and I think some clarity is needed:

1) First, It's an AND condition, which means you need to make 200k installs, AND, if you get to that point, then if you also made 200k gross revenue (in the previous 12 months) they will start applying the fee, starting from the following installs (and not the past installs!).
Which also means: you need to make 200k in your first year, or there is no chance to get to that figure in the future (this is what game sales stats tell us), and also assuming that you get 200k installs by that time anyway (i.e. very low game price).
Which also means: you need to be VERY lucky, topping the 95 percentile of games out there.

2) If you are really sure your game is so amazing that you will reach those figures (and you will feel that before release, given wishlists numbers and global recognition), you are always in time to get a PRO license and switch to that before publishing. At that point thresholds raise to way higher figures (1 million). Unreachable for any Indie game dev, sorry.

3) Last but not least: nowadays, I would be more worried about reaching those 200k figures, rather than be worried about how to pay the game engine. That comes only after you make that money out of your game, and I can guarantee it's not easy at all.

As an experienced developer with many years of game dev in both Unity and Unreal, I really can't find a way on how this new policy could hurt the majority of game devs using Unity, where only an extremely small amount of them are making those numbers.

I agree on the fact that they explained it the worst way possible, and it could have been way easier to just do something similar to Unreal (and by the way there is now some sort of similarity): just get a "cut" of revenue share above certain thresholds, instead of overcomplicating people understanding with installs and all those different threesholds and figures. Especially because it will be estimated, since there would be NO WAY to exaclty know those numbers from their side (piracy, demos, platform specific, etc).

Relax people, and focus more on how to make that money out of your game, rather.

Roberto

 

nice to see whichever executive in charge of this change is doubling down. For the love of god, scrap this model, and move to a regular revenue sharing model. This isn't going to end well otherwise. I foresee hoards of botnets using VMs to ransom tiny developers

whoever pushed this change needs to be fired immediately, that's the only way unity will regain any face. If you guys haven't noticed, your stock lost 10% or more already since the announcement. That's only going to keep dropping. If I was a shareholder I'd be furious

 

Unity is not a good investment.

 

Then don’t partake in this thread, you didn’t say anything we didn’t know.

 

Na, as we've covered if you get a runaway mobile hit on freemium you could get 50 million downloads, make 1 million dollars from bad sales conversions, celebrate, then panic as you now owe Unity $7-9 million you don't have plus the $1 million.

It does not take that long to learn a new system and the gaps can be filled. No reason to accept this.

I pity anyone who sticks around after this. There is sunnier shores all over.

 

the issue isn't the model itself (though it might be for shovelware F2P devs), it's the fact that bad actors can easily exploit it to damage developers. It's simply just not technologically feasible to do this in a safe and reliable way.

I personally love the idea of paying even 20 cents on a $10 game. That's a steal as far as revenue share goes.

the issues are that 1, it makes literally no sense for F2P games (unity is obviously licking their lips and targeting these developers), and 2, like i already said, security issues. Just wait until you get a ransom email from some random guy threatening to install your game 1 mil times if you don't pay up. I really don't get why Unity can't just use a scaling revenue share.

 

I mean we're running business here, I can be bought. I'm not saying Unity could buy me cheap, but they could if they wanted. I still like the engine and the environment, I don't care about most of the shortcomings others endlessly talking about and I honestly saw some improvement and some great features on the horizon. That's why I'm sad while I'm mass downloading my bought assets and preparing to investigate where to go if Unity doesn't backpedal. (And it looks they won't).

 

Our first game’s best year was its 3rd, so… whatever.

 

One of the things that really got me go to unreal a couple of years back was adding clothes to a character.

So you have a character that is wearing underwear. And you want to add shirts, pants, shoes, make this character wear clothes. Each of the clothing has it own skeleton because it needs to be animated with physics and all.

Asked a dev unity on forum why unity breaks if I add multiple rigs with the same bone names under a main character skeleton? He said is not possible and dismissed my request. Figured out by myself that unity is blindly searching for bone names on the entire hierarchy and breaks everything because it finds multiple bones with the same name.

Asked the dev if is possible to fix the issue by making unity search the bone names only on the skeleton where the animation is present. The bones defined in the avatar editor. He said is not possible.

I've even found a solution to the problem, removing the clothes at runtime, initialize the character then adding the clothes back after unity initialize the main skeleton animation. It worked. Nights lost and me figuring out complex programming and vector math and stuff I knew nothing about. But the hack worked.

It can't be done. Jesus.

I'm moving to unreal at some point to rebuild the game there.

Surprise! There is an option to use how many sub skeletons you want under the main skeleton! Then automatically replicate the animation of the main skeleton on these sub skeletons. What the actual miracle is this? One click. One single node in the blueprint. One f.. node. And here they said "is not possible, what is this nonsense?"

you do know about nanite? it will take your super high level poly stuff and create a low mesh that will look high end. Only rule is to have correct UVs (not being out of the uv area and they should not be overlapping)

Also with lumen you don't need to bake the lighting. Think about that.

 

Oh my GOD.... they've awakened the Gamers!

 

I would accept royalty %. Something like 5% or even 10% starting after some amount of revenue allowing me to cover my expenses first, would be perfectly ok for me.

 

LOL? Do you honestly think they had death threats? A company like this they are probably lying to help their narrative and make people look at them with pity... Please.....Don't be gullible.

 

It wouldn't hurt us either, we expect the costs to be minimal if we were made to pay them. Our issue is them insinuating that they can retroactively change our ToS that we agreed to when we started our project; that's an unacceptable way to do business, at least for us.

 

well. My webgl game spends seconds compiling and 18+ minutes "linking" build.js so id get like 10 builds out of it. Yeah not even looking any further

 

Eh, it’s 50-50, I can believe some asshole being an asshole and I can also believe Riccitiello thinking he’s doing 5D chess and lying about it.

In any case, physical threats are bad, hope everyone at Unity is okay, we can stop talking about it.

 

Honestly I don't think top management even cares really. If the ploy fails so what. What ya gonna do? Switch engines? hahahaha! Unity thinks they (and to some point do actually) have developers here over a barrel.

 

they can survive by just increasing to a heigher revenue share model but also by staying on the legal side.

they changed their own TOS by also having a clause that lets consumers stay on older versions of unity and also those TOS rules. now they say that this doesnt count, which just reads pretty wild.

they removed the clause around april 2023 and if people have updated their engine to a newer major version number aftwards, they have accepted the new TOS. otherwise you should still be able to stay with their older editor TOS. but yeah its a bit S***show

 

That's basically what they wanted to do originally, simply very bad exaplined! I can bet they will change it in a few days.

 

I think they're trying to treat it as a specialist software or material goods.

Imagine that you're CEO. Let's say t hat at this very moment there are 1 billion installs of unity software on the planet. But for them... you get nothing. Sure, you got the subscription fees, but with many more people using software, your profit does not increase.

What does t hat mean (using twisted logic)? It means there's a profit opportunity. All that use software should suf... I mean pay for the honor and privilege of using such glorious tool. And the more popular the tool is, the more money you'll get! (insert evil laughter here).

While in reality sane people in this scenario implement royalties.

 

That's basically what they wanted to do originally, simply very bad explained! I can bet they will change it in a few days.

 

It’s not.

 

No, I'm sad to say that you're the one missing the point. The fee structure is riddled with problems, but that's small fries.

The fact that matters is that according to Unity, they can now just as easily charge you $5 per install, or tack on a 90% revenue share, and have this apply retroactively to existing titles, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

All in spite of promising not to do this and supposedly hardening the TOS to protect against this exact scenario in 2019.

Unity will die because no sane person or business can operate under such a sword of Damocles. Unity could harden the TOS (again), but it won't matter. No one trusts them not to try again in the future. The only action that has any chance of restoring trust is the removal of Riccitiello and his confederates.

 

Is not 20 cents per sale it is 20 cents per install. You will get 3-10 installs at least. If pirated maybe hundreds.

 

they've clarified that reinstalls don't count

 

This has to be the LONGEST thread I've ever seen in this forum. Usually the mods try to shut this down. I mainly use Unity for character visualization and model checking, while I love the engine, I don't like the jack of transparency, especially for stuff like this.

They keep chasing the dragon and keep getting burned. Unity needs new leadership to get the ship back on course. If I decide to make a game, I will have to tread carefully

 

They’ve also clarified they will pull the install number out of their ass.

 

I agree. This is a well-planned move, carefully timed to catch us off guard

 

unity create round table with companys/ if they leave what you will do? you have -1 billion per year allready. and if unity bankrupt this will affect every singl hobbyist

 

you wish sadly no.

"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download."

"We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices."

 

The volunteer mods have either left for Unreal and Godot, or agree with us.

The Unity employees all had a flight to catch, or something.

 

Beyond the specifics of the latest model, they've already indicated they're willing to change the ToS to more beneficial ones (for them) at will. No one is going to sign up to develop a 3 year project when they have no certainty on the nature of the commercial relationship by the time they finish.

December 2023: I start development Kickpuncher 99.
June 2025: I announce the upcoming release of Kickpuncher 99 in January 2026.
November 2025: Unity announces that all games developed by then must be exclusively published on their UnityShop where they select their own price for the game, skim fees off the top using an undisclosed formula and just send you a cheque occasionally.
December 2025: I realise I shouldn't have used a platform owned by a company that actually hates video games and now has a history of bad faith changes to the ToS.

 

Yeah, I'll admit, I'm really bad at this wild capitalism. I grew up behind the iron curtain in a cozy, warm socialist country (aside the obvious Soviet influence).

 

Yeah, until we see a press release from law enforcement, this could just as easily be a way of 'managing the narrative' from the same people who brought you 'its cool if we just edit the ToS on GitHub, no one will notice'.

 

The fun fuct is that reading so many posts, it really makes non-industry people think that each and every game dev makes 200k USD with its first game. FALSE. I wish I had to pay Unity, but will not be the case for many of us, unfortunately LOL

 

I understand that you are not an unity employee or anything, so I'll explain you why it's still bad:

200k$ may look a lot for an hobbyist, but that is gross revenue, which mean it's before, VAT tax, Refund, Steam's cut and publisher cut. 200K$ gross can easily translate to 100K$ net, which is barely enough to hire an experienced Developer for 1 years.

You may thing 95% of games out there, but if you are talking serious game studio, then everyone is there, Unity say it only impact 10% of dev, but that because they are counting hobyist and student.

Finally, nothing prevent them from changing these threshold in the future, why would prevent them from changing it in 1 year? they can make any number and any fee they wish
https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ackaging-updates.1482750/page-45#post-9297488


Nothing will protect you, even as a small indie that don't achieve sucess to never be seriously put in danger by unity.

I'm an Indie solo dev and reached number closes to them so no no one is "safe".

But let's take a sucesfull game example sold for 5$
Launch is usualy a massive spike and a slow burn, also money is sent at the end of the next month by Steam
This mean that I have a massive launch with like 5 Millions $ gross revenue with 1M users, taking an average of 3 install by users (this is a number a developer calculated off their player base) this lead to 3M installation.
I am a small solo dev, and have close to no found left, let's say, 15k in bank,
So at the begining of the next month, I have 15k$ in bank, a fee of 100k$ to pay (Unity Pro), and money is not comming for one month, so now I have to either:
1 - close my business
2 - not pay unity, having my editor right revoked and not being able to update the game.

now let's immagine I was a super rich dev and I have a 100k reserve and pay unity
so now I have 2.5Million - 100K $ (2.4M) of revenue.
Unity it taking me 4% of my net revenue.
next month, some user uninstall, install, and a lot of sale is still going on, some user are changing devices, I gain 500K$ gross and arround 1M install.

Now I have to pay the 60k$ install fee, so I am left with 250K - 60K (190K) net revenue.
wow, now unity is taking a bit more than 20% of my revenue this month, but I can still manage

Now I'm one year later, the huge sale boost is much lower now, and I have, let's see, 70k$ gross revenue and arround 500K install (taking into account the changing device, Steam deck, those are realistic numbers)

So it left me with 45k$ fee from unity, but my game now net me 35k$ income, so now everymonth I loss 10K$...
wait, why is my game costing me money every month ?

and as time advance, the number of install continue to drop more slowly than sales, and you get more and more cost.

you could say that it's fine since it's a solo dev and I can simply use the money I got.
but what if you change it by a studio, having multiple salary to pay
and why wouldn't I simply remove the game from steam and cut my loss ?


And I'm not even tackling on the multiple exploit that can be done with the per install basis
And no, saying they have propetiary model to detect fraud is not a transparent or safe way to measure these fraud.

 

I think this is funny…

https://x.com/sweetpotatoes/status/1702468790829629900?s=46&t=Bv3_c-pn9Z25o1EVJSlQPg

 

Maybe one can paste that new pricing plan into ChatGPT and see how that feels about it? Explain it like I'm 5.

 

Not 0.2 per sale bud
Its 0.2 per install

so F2P screwed
Multi-device screwed
Various forms of Free weekends, free to-install, freemium, etc ... all screwed

Sure for a pay-to-play game with no demo, no free weekend, no way in hell to install the game without paying ... its good ... even great ... but there is no % rev cap ... which would have been a very easy thing to apply but no they didnt'

They started out by saying yes reinstalls count, demos count, bundles count

Then they wheeled that back a bit

then some more

The fact of the matter is this is a half-baked attempt to make not using Unity services feel like a bad idea ... sorta like Epic trying to bait you into the EGS by waving the fee

The big difference is Epics 5% is yes always 5% even when 5% is > 0.2 per unit ... but its NEVER more than 5% even when you have a wide install base of many millions and a total rev of 1 mil ... 5% is always 5% .. Unitys model can and in some uses cases will eat your lunch

They could have easily avoided that with a % rev cap or an even simpler % rev share model ... but they chose to be able to bleed you dry ... trust them they won't do anything to cause ... wait .. cant trust them they have flip-flopped on the terms of this several times over the past 48hrs and this is sprung on you you just have 90 days min we can do o and its retro active ... so have fun with that recently released games and games in dev nearing completion ... we own you

The 2 issues on the table here are simple and easy to address but they simply have avoided it

1. IT should be impossible for Unity to bill for more than X% (5% ideally to be competitive) if they want to say 0.2 per install up to a max of 5% fine have at it ... but at the moment there are cases they have confirmed could be a thing where it could be 10% ... 40% ... 110% ... that is grossly unacceptable and out right preditory
2. This 90 days notice for a life-altering change to the agreement making it retro active and not having any level of transparency on CRITICAL questions before you open your mouth ...
   Ya the trust issue here is I think just irreparable at this point considering the approach they have taken so far

 

They assured somewhere on Twitter that they can't increase percentages and you can stick with EULA of the specific version. Even if this will change someday, at least we get the full source of the engine. Looks more transparent to me.

 

At the same time they made it perfectly clear that this was only meant for reinstalls on the same device!
From the article I linked to before:


Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game, will that count as multiple installs?
A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs.
(Updated, Sep 14)

But that is exactly what was communicated differently before. How they will technically manage to read out the device ID is a mystery to me. Because users sometimes simply reset their devices completely and reinstall everything. However, the following statement is much more important:

Q: Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs?
A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs.
(Updated, Sep 14)

Why? With wich justification? The creator only gets paid once for the game, and if it is ad-supported, the user also only uses it once at a time. Here Unity wants a higher share, although the creator does not earn more.

 

I think the mods all took the day off due to the bomb threat and many are equally probably as pissed as we are so they're taking a "sick day."

I won't be surprised if tomorrow or the next day everyone who posted in this thread is permanently banned. Authoritarians tend to roll like that.

 

I'm surprised to see people accept unity royalties in the first place. It used to be software as a product. You buy the editor, then you can make the game and keep the money it generates. Simple and effective. Unity had to provide valuable updates in order to encourage you to pay for that upgrade.

Imagine if Autodesk suddenly wanted a split of all revenue earned from making assets or rendering out animations, or what about the Foundry expecting a cut from VFX artist who use Nuke? I would rather see Unity go back to its roots as a product.

I have seen some argue that Unity needs the money. Well, if that were true, then do you really want to give them more money when it just goes to the CEO giving himself another 120% pay raise, or billions thrown into "diversifying the portfolio" for investors, which has had little to no benefit so far for actual Unity users? Giving them more just seems to reward bad behavior at this point.

At least with Epic Games, nearly every acquisition they have done goes right back to their user base, be it with megascans, quixel mixer, art station...etc

Food for thought.