Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I wish I could go back in time and never join this sinking ship.
I wish I could just quit... But my day job still require me to use Unity. it make me feel like i'm wasting my time every second I have to learn something new in this dying Engine.

 

Unity thinks she's the first on the market?
And they never lose to the epics?
But what about competitive conditions to lure developers?
Or has Unity recruited developers into the ecosystem for 10 years and decided to F*** them up?

 

Does this run time fee apply to all versions of Unity? Even very old ones? I've got a Unity 5 game still present on Steam and Android for example, as well as currently still developing with Unity 2018.

 

You might be onto something here, but I see it from another viewpoint.

Essentially I feel that over the years Unity couldn't guarantee that users would correctly ( ignoring being honest or not ) switch to the correct version of Unity, maybe avoid mixing licenses in a company etc and this approach is there answer to that.

So now instead of a system of 'trust' from the user to Unity, its inverted, where a user has to trust that Unity has correct numbers on there installs, but moreover, its now in the users best interest to move up the subscription plans as their game makes money, otherwise they are hit with potentially punitive fees per an install.

It still sucks and forces a stupid amount of management on single or indie teams, but it does kind of make sense looking at it from this viewpoint.

 

For games that are streamed from GeForceNow, XCloud, or other streaming platform, how are you counting those users? We have no control over how those platforms install the product on their VMs.

 

It just means "the company should use their own products and services". It's been an industry term for around 40 years at this point.

 

We could see a lot of games disappearing from the various app stores in the future. And then there are innumerable games made with Unity webGL on various web game portals. If every play session is -0.20$ for the dev...

 

https://x.com/PierreTerdiman/status/1701635847315943862

 

Yes, most likely for all versions.
Otherwise, the community will operate a borderline version that is not covered by these conditions

 

No, they don't. Any license above Personal have the ability to turn off analytics. This probably will have to change if they want to track EVERY install.

 

Really sad to see how one incompetent person's chain of decisions could lead to such a disaster. I used to love Unity. Maybe it's time to move forward. Well. Unreal Engine, you said?

 

What does this actually mean? Who is supposed to pay the fee? The Distributor (Valve), the Publisher or the Developer? This doesn't make any sense

 

IMHO the biggest and scariest risk here is piracy... can easily imagine a nightmare scenario where developers start getting bills for pirated copies of their games. Either way, it's simply too much risk - it's insane to be in a situation where it's nearly impossible to know what size bill you'll get! Any serious indie dev should immediately plan to move to Godot or Unreal unless they walk this back in a big way.

 

how does this change comply with CCPA and GDPR rules for user consent?

If the tracking of installation happens over the wire and there is no consent to this then you're in violation of the law.

 

I am so disappointed in Unity right now. How fkn tone deaf can a company be?

 

I hope this thread isn't just a method to contain all the outrage you knew you'd get.
Please, listen to your users.

This change is very convincing to driving me away... It's yet another massive break of trust with zero value-add. It's incredibly confusing for no reason. This needs to be reverted. A straight revenue-share model would have worked FAR better...

Please, listen to your users.
This is incredibly short sighted.

You might make some money from this, but you are going to shed users like no tomorrow.
And the cost of enforcement will go up. And users of the actual games won't enjoy all the tracking and telemetry.
There are so many problems.

Listen to your users.

 

This is absurd. I have 1,000,000 downloads on the App Store with ~$200,000 in revenue. With this new plan, after Apple's cut ($60,000), I'd end up owing Unity $160,00...which is higher than the revenue I'd be left with.

I'd be losing $20,000 for having a game with one million users. What a joke!

 

Pretty much we also need to do that in many situation, so not having that option anymore remove another large case of user case.

 

It's a pretty common term and it just means using your own product as a customer. It's another word for playtesting, but for non-game software.

 

Have you ever heard about CPI? This subscription model is totally unapplicable - especially for free mobile games gathering revenue over Ads. Beyond the fact that install number is irrelevant with revenue amount, you must not even present a model based on any percentage over revenue. Do you think that play store or app store bring that user (over whom you plan to earn) without any cost for the company? We are paying for install and not earning from each install. Do you also want to share the costs for CPI just like the revenue? I suggest you to do research a bit about mobile game monetization.

 

I'm 39, and I've NEVER heard that term until recently

 

As a mobile dev this will completely destroy our revenue model, we are over the numbers so we will be charged and even with $0.02 per install we're lucky to make that from a user, not including all the unauthorised downloads we get in places like China. We are potentially in a position where we will be charged more than we are making and even if we're not it will be so close that it simply wont be worth it for us to continue using Unity.

 

I'm out. Hello Unreal. Simple.

 

They could do this for new users, but never to existing users...

 

Will updates will count toward "install" count? If it does, Unity will be completely untenable for app developers. What about people whose games are pirated? Some games have been pirated millions of times.

How are you planning on tracking installs & revenue? I pride myself on not tracking any user data. How could you even enforce this?

How are free-to-download apps with low revenue but lots of users expected to survive?

This whole thing just...sucks.

 

I'm begging major game publishers (especially companies like miHoYo) to ditch Unity. Just let this engine die. It has survived long enough. 10+yo issues never getting fixed, new features are either useless or unusable, longer & longer editor load times. Even CEO himself sold stocks and jumped ship last week.

People who drafted and approved this policy have obviously zero experience with game development and live in a vacuum. Even a high school student can see what's so wrong about this revenue model. Yet, the reality is Unity's management is full of ignorant people who will continue pushing stupid policies like this while acquiring 100 irrelevant AI/VFX companies to desperately drive revenue & investments. Just f**king pathetic.

 

Are you out of your mind? That is crazy... I hope I can use my hundrets of 3D Assets from the Asset Store in Unreal.

 

Time to learn Godot

 

This is the closest thing to a betrayal of your customers thinking "I'm going to change the plans retroactively so I can literally steal from the games that have already come out and are succeeding, which are my priority target and can not change engine now".... Are we supposed to trust Unity for something after this? Are not you going to change the price when you really want? new unfair conditions? in six months? a year? Because I find it impossible to believe a single word from a company that makes this stab in the back to its customers. You have not said that you do not keep 100% of the profit, who knows why, maybe someone took the idea away from you.

I think that a plan that not even 200 programmers and engineers are able to understand is a bad payment plan. I don't know who is the smart guy who created the plan, but it is clear that he doesn't even know how to communicate.

The person who has raised this lives in a parallel universe, in another plane of reality or something... because the whole system thought from the beginning is a joke. It can't even be real that someone has thought like that. You propose a system

- Where it is impossible to predict how much you will have to pay in the future.
- Where the installed game is a metric
- Where manipulating the system is as easy as having a bot farm doing fake installs (oh, you've invented a new kind of business, congratulations). Which could be done by the CEO of Unity, your competition or just angry players, and everyone would make a profit by falsifying the stats.
- Even your employees don't know what your terms say
- Where the type of game you make is not taken into account.

And in exchange for all this, brutally increasing prices, we get NOTHING. We received years of null improvements in what the users asked for, years where the development seems to be stumbling, of unresolved bugs, no source code,... and a lot of useless tools that the CEO insisted on buying but nobody uses.

In short, you will go from paying as an indie to an enterprise but in exchange you have zero advantages.

As a gift to the competition, especially to Godot, it's incredible.

 

I would expect what would happen would be the thresholds change downward over time. This is the start of a very slippery slope.

 

A month ago my Unity Plus ran out and I didn't automatically renew because I'm not actively shipping any titles and don't exceed the revenue thresholds as a contractor but I'm in the end stages of a client project and I can't even renew Plus if I wanted to. Now I have to explain why I can't build a project without the Unity splash screen anymore because I'm not paying 4x the previous cost for Pro. TOS says clients should cover licensing costs or what ever, but that's not how low budget, short to midterm independent development works. Thanks for the non-existent heads up, I guess?

At this point I'm not even surprised, nor am I angry. I will do my best to switch technologies whenever possible.

 

What he was saying is what if you have a cross platform game that users on phones can play with desktop and consoles users as well then if one user installs that game on his phone, console, and PC then now that one user contributed three installs and we have to pay $.60 for one guy.

 

Considering the abysmal state of the engine, with still a lot of bugs present and never addressed for years, a lot of "packages" that barely and wobbily work when used together, non compatible pipelines, etc., yeah, I'm upset A LOT that Unity wants more money.

Notwithstanding *how* they're egregiously trying to milk their user base.

 

at the same time, godot is porting the editor to android so that you can make games from a tablet - instead of fixing pressing problems
@
pun

 

Some thoughts as it relates to this newest addition of the WTF news. The announcement seemed ill prepared for the obvious crap storm that has come out from it being announced.

I am an asset store developer, and a game developer. I understand Unity wants to make money, I mean crap we ALL want to make money, but leaving out critical information or leaving things ambiguous, only leads to so much fear, worry, anger and so on.

One thing I am most concerned about, and has been mentioned now countless times, is how is Unity tracking the number of installs:
1) Are they tracking these installs as unique or as something that is triggered as a random int that ticks every single time an install is done.
2) If it's per a unique install, would that be per unique user, regardless of platform, but if say like my kids having a cell and tablet each would be reflect an install for each unique device?
3) How is this supposed install count being done, when you consider multiplayer servers, is it per instance of server? If its an instanced session does that count?
4) What about developers who are simply building out their game, installing said game, and then doing a few changes here and there and do it all over again. Do these normal trial and error testing and benchmarking installations count also against this supposed count?

How you are counting is incredibly important, and as a detail that being left out obviously cause a S*** storm of concern, maybe respond with how you are counting? I want to be successful too, but not having clear expectations only leads to distrust and further issues complicating whatever message you're trying to convey.

We as developers have been begging and pleading for some level of a licensing system, we could have inside our unique games and software, and if I remember correctly, it was said it couldn't be done as it would involve setting some form of agreement with some random user, (to be honest i don't remember the excuse), but if you're willing to be so far into someone's software to know if and when they install, then why can't we also have the licensing model we have asked for , for so long?

Further, as Unity obviously is looking to make more money, which is fine, I get it, you're a company, but as a company your stating you "will" offer 'free' unity ai system, and we have this access and this access, but do I dare ask is the AI feature complete? When would it be as I hear it's not?? How do we as developers of both game and software trust that you wont suddenly (as this does feel sudden FYI) change the rules of the game (no PUN intended) and decide AI wont be free, or what you promised, surprise isnt happening....

Perhaps thsi is a rant, perhaps not a Unity employee will se this and understand, but seriously , not the best news to read this afternoon....

 

So you use "Lifeime installs"..
With this you punish games that exist for a long time but still make their 200k plus revenue.

As time goes by the life time installs increase but dont contribute to the revenue anymore.
As players go and new ones come.

...

 

Is it the wet or the dry stuff? They are v testing tools that most of us won't be able to use

 

We need clarifications on how installs are tracked or will be tracked.

Do the current Unity versions have code that tracks installs regardless of whether analytics are on or off (that maybe activates on a later date...?)

I just want my games to be games that people enjoy, I don't want them to track any kind of data, do I not have that choice any more?

 

lol

 

Devs, need to create tool for converting Unity assets to Unreal assets )

 

It is not true. The blog post clearly writes lifetime installs

 

On a positive note the decision to switch to alternatives is increasingly becoming a more straightforward one for teams to make.

 

Absolutely disgraceful. Does Unity want to kill itself off and indie developers?

Looks like Unreal Engine is the way forward and decision is becoming really easy. I am in development of current project so can’t switch now.

 

Perhaps now we could charge Unity whenever we find a bug, each and every time it happens….

 

One more thing... Is this (dealing with a company's revenue amount or revenue model) the job of a software development platform? The definite decision of the companies will be to avoid Unity at any cost. Because this kind of thinking is against settled free market rules.

 

Anyone that takes this seriously knows that switching engines is not an easy or cheap feat (because time is money), years of developing with an engine are not just easily transferrable (and the other engines have their own issues) but now you have serious Unity users considering switching, not just opinionated forum lurkers, 1 post "users" and hobbyists (like in many previous announcements). That's how serious this is.

Switching engine would be a big blow for me but I'm starting to wonder if losing Plus and tracking every install are tolerable blows or not.

 

I have a question because I don't understand something.

Let's make an assumption.

[Launching a New Hyper Casual Game]
Assumption 1: Every month, there are 1,000,000 new downloads.
Assumption 2: The annual expected revenue is $1,000,000.
Since both conditions exceed the threshold, Unity fees will apply.

[Calculating Unity Pro Fees]
Tier 1: 100,000 * 0.15 = $15,000
Tier 2: 400,000 * 0.075 = $30,000
Tier 3: 500,000 * 0.03 = $15,000

Total for all tiers: $60,000
Total annual fee: $60,000 * 12 months = $720,000
Assuming that 60% remains from the annual revenue of $1,000,000 after Google Store fees and taxes:

The final revenue is $600,000
Amount after paying the Unity fee = $600,000 - Unity fee of $720,000
=> Resulting in a deficit of -$120,000

Is my calculation correct? Is it possible that the fees are higher than the net profit?

 

For stuff like that I am waiting on confirmation on the answer.
Sorry I don't have a firm answer for that kind of thing yet.

I am mainly trying to read over and get clarification about that myself.
There was something I did see after reading it more talking about better terms for situations like that though.

 

Literally no... $150K < $200K in the past 12 months, and you won't be charged for previous installs, only new ones from January 1st 2024 onward and only once per install (not recurring). Your bill would be $0 with the numbers provided