Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

This forum is starting to drift off-topic, and I admit my part in contributing to this situation. To recenter our discussion and ensure that we obtain valuable answers, I'd like to emphasize that some of us are working under production schedules with unalterable deadlines. Therefore, it's imperative that we receive prompt and clear answers to our inquiries.

1. Has anyone deciphered the meaning of the 200 run-time hours limitation in the free version of Unity?
   
   
2. Has there been any exploration into whether it's permissible to port art assets from the Unity Asset Store to other game engines based on Unity's Terms of Service?
   
   
3. For platforms like PC, Mac, video game consoles, and VR, where we may have limited options to opt out of Unity's changes, are there any feasible alternatives or solutions available?
   
   
4. Could Unity consider implementing a maximum percentage change that does not exceed a certain threshold? The prospect of negative changes is disconcerting.
   
   
5. Can we establish an agreement regarding a grace period for already published titles, especially those approaching the 90-day mark leading up to the holiday season? This is crucial for those of us with production dates we cannot alter.
   
   
6. Regarding downloadable content added to a game, is this considered a new installation, or can it be counted as a separate title with its own usage statistics?
   
   
7. Once these issues are addressed and resolved, can Unity provide a commitment regarding the stability of its licensing terms for a defined period, such as one year, two years, or more?
   

By focusing on these concise questions and emphasizing the urgency of our need for answers due to production constraints, we hope to facilitate a more productive and on-topic discussion while seeking the clarity necessary to meet our deadlines.

 

The largest market for games is mobile - a little over 50% of gaming revenue.
For most of us small developers, it's way more than that. It's likely our only market.

According to Statista, 94% of IOS and 97% of Android games are F2P.

F2P is the largest chunk of game revenue. And this horrible policy screws that model.

 

Installs are estimated. They are not tracking or counting how many installs there actually were. They're running a "proprietary data model" to guess at how many installs they think your program should have based on information they won't disclose because "proprietary"/trade secret.

It's why they can say "you won't be charged for pirates/reinstalls" - because they're not basing their numbers on actual numbers, so technically you won't be charged for those (or emulators) at all. You'll be charged based on a guesstimate.

It's, quite literally, "Trust me, bro.".

 

They also "increase" price. I have Unity+ and will have to get the Pro to remove the splash screen. The only reason I use unity is for cross platform utility. I hope Godot will have something equivalent soon with W4 so I can move from this S*** show.

 

Can you provide a quote or a link? I didn't see anything of the sort in the announcement.

 

do you think the battle against apple was for free? XD

 

Unlike other developers who will simply walk away, I'm giving Unity one off-ramp to keep me using the engine. My condition is not just walking back and retracting this plan, not just apologizing to the community.

My condition is the termination for cause of Mister Riccitiello. Not a resignation. A termination for cause.

The reasonability of this ask is not up for debate. This is more generosity I'm giving to Unity than most developers will.

 

I can try and help
And for note we have a community full of devs mostly working on Steam related projects but happy to see you join and we can help you further

anyway
It will be easier your second go around a lot of the things you learned getting stuck into Unity is transferable to other engines. In particular Godot C# is quite easy to port existing Unity code into

For us we chose Unreal (UE) its less like Unity so has some structural learning curve to it but if you have been working in game dev for a bit this wont be a giant hill to climb definitely much easier than your first time.
UE was selected because its far more mature ... Godot and similar are cute but underbaked for our needs so we went with a more tried-and true engine

Some will be put off from UE due to C++ but frankly, 99.99% of what the average indie is going to do can be done in UE with zero code ... I personally hate blueprints and am forcing myself to learn them but it's going very quickly converting my coded solutions from our Unity project to UE blueprints and its a great way to learn the "UE Way" to do it which is why I am doing this way.

Next and still on that C++ point if you want or need to drop to C++ code again UE is MUCH more mature and stable and has more out of the box so the code you will be doing will be notably less and liter weight than what you might have had to code in Unity. We are a tools developer for Unity we love to code for it ... but ya you need to code a lot to make Unity go
UE is much more capable "out of the box"

So even if you do choose to stay with Unity I would suggest you give a run into a few different engines UE is the main one frankly. Godot and O3DE are a couple other common suggestions and there are countless others many of which advertise as being an alternative to Unity so have docs and community and paths for converting


Edit ... link to that community I mentioned
https://discord.gg/6X3xrRc

 

DOesnt UE 5 have floating point now ?

It basically enable u to do the same

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.1/en-US/large-world-coordinates-in-unreal-engine-5/

 

In the past year he's sold a little bit more than 50,000 shares via what looks like a 10b5 plan. At least get your facts straight. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/unity-software-slips-after-ceo-sells-2000-shares

 

yeah agreed, i need some official updates on this mess because i do not want to change the engine for the game i'm working on. For my other projects i started working on Unigine way before this because those "good reasons" at least for me, are beta experimental for live buggy unfixed reasons...

 

They can also freely infringe on your copyrights or just straight up steal your software and assets without any repercussions.

 

He answered that one before, saying that it's untested and in beta. However, it seems to be straightforward and useable.

(2) Life-size Mars in Unreal Engine 5 and Voxel Plugin 2.0 : unrealengine (reddit.com)

 

Hello everyone,

I will only say.

Once, Unity CEO John Riccitiello was fired from AE, for a similar stupid thing before.

Now because he has to ruin another company, in the same way.

It would be too much to ask that John Riccitiello kindly resign and that Unity's leadership be changed by a new CEO, who demonstrates love and commitment to the company and the developers.

---------
Unity grew thanks to independent developers, small and large companies seeing hope in your engine, you had bugs and everything, but somehow you gave us all some freedom to do what we love video games.

Now you fell into the dark ages because of a stupid being. Don't let a being full of greed and without a shred of brain lead you to your ruin.

 

I believe what you’re referring to are the complementary hours of cloud-based CI/CD build time now being provided to free users.

From the reading of the EULA I did, there is no exclusivity clause in where you are allowed to use assets obtained from the asset store. If an asset has a non-standard EULA (which is called out on the asset page), be sure to review it. Also be careful with anything licensed by seat. But otherwise, art should be portable without consequence.

 

There's no way this is legal, holy hell hahaha

 

This fact has been in the FAQ since day one. It was never a secret or hidden. The public just chose not to report on it for some reason...

The FAQ also says Industry licenses are exempt from fees as well

 

You know with a name like Unity, one would think they would also be unionized

Just saying

 

What the hell I didn't even know about #1 and we are on page 160+.

What does this even mean? I have been working on my game for six years and haven't shipped. I am not ready to pay $2,000 a year for a Pro license as I have $0 revenue. I've built the game numerous times for testing purposes on my own machine.

What the F*** is 200 Windows build minutes limitation in Unity Personal? This is outrageous!!

I feel like I am back in 1999 with my nights and weekend minutes on my cell phone.

That is the last time I was nickel and dimed like this. Jesus F***ing christ. Do they want me to finish my game and ship it so they can make money or not? How can I ship if I have 200 build minutes over six years+?

 

For what its worth, Epic seem less prone to leaving things in beta for 5 years and then obsoleting them when compared to other game engine developers.

 

do you have a steam account a pc and a laptop? those are 2 installs from the same guy, so they will charge you 2 but you will be paid just for 1... now, do you want your crossplatform project to be successful?

 

It's Unity's cloud-based build automation service. I'm amazed that there are people not aware of it. It's been around for years under various names... maybe that's the problem.

https://unity.com/solutions/ci-cd

 

Oh ok. Thank you. I thought I was limited to how many minutes I can test my builds or something. Didn't realize it was an offering for one of their bs addons. Lord this is insane.

 

It's one of the ways they were trying to monetize the engine before trying the nuclear option.

 

Given how slow it is to build anything these days, I imagine few people are looking for a solution that lets them pay to wait for a build to finish on someone else’s computer.

 

Does it also inject my build with additional spyware they can use to steal and sell my customers data? That'd be great if they can cram some more in.

Maybe they can steal my code or maybe make an asset flip of my game and release it to compete with me.

They need all the money they can get. I wouldn't be surprised to see it. Nothing will surprise me now.

 

Almost everyone looks for some form of this solution. I've never worked on a project where our delivered builds or even internal test builds were built manually on someone's PC.

 

All things considered I'm moving to UE, even though my game is 80% done and I had a few great assets from Unity Store, I need reliability and stability and not been put in danger by stupid decisions.

 

F..... now they are really mad, well we have seen how it has been for them in recent years, i guess someone just snaps

 

Well Id expect it to be released soon as prod ready

 

I'd like to retract everything I've said about Unity condemning themselves to obscurity, and permanently burning bridges with the developer community whom Unity wouldn't exist without.

Furthermore, I think it is extremely ethical of John to blatantly engage in insider trading against Unity and its shareholders, while endlessly dumping stock.

All is forgiven.

(Note: I am currently absolutely up to my F***ing eyeballs in shorts against Unity)

 

Unfortunately the pricing of other CI/CD solutions which exists on the market (GitLab CI, Github Actions, (Jenkins?!)) make the Unity's solution anachronous, you can run thems for free

 

Wait... what?

Edit:

NM, answered elsewhere. Refers to cloud builds.

 

요금 정책 90프로는 영향 안받는게 맞을까요? 그럼 매출잘나오는10프로는 영향받는다는데 그 개발사들이 계속 유니티 쓸까요? 추가요금주느니 그돈으로 다른게임엔진 사용할겁니다 매출 대형 게임사들 줄줄이 유니티 이탈하는건 불보듯 뻔합니다. 그리고 소규모 매출사들은 영향없다? 과연 그럴까요? 소규모 인디들도 개발시작시 난 $200k 달러만 벌거야라고 목표잡고 시작할까요? 대박에 꿈을 안고 시작할겁니다. 그러니 인디들도 유니티로 시작 안하겄죠. 그러니 유니티 이번 정책은 ceo발 리스크 입니다. 유니티가 경쟁사 보다 제 기준에는 성능은 구려도 개발 플로우는 맘에 들썼는데 이번 프로젝 끝나면 유니티에 대햐 신로도 하락으로 다른툴로 이전 할 수 밖에 없습니다. 요금 정책 변경 철회 부탁드립니다

 

this is not a decision you take in 1 or 2 month... just wait until you can make the transaction and then drop the bomb

 

Is it correct that 90% of the fee policy will not be affected? So, the 10% with good sales will be affected. Will those developers continue to use Unity? I would rather use that money to use another game engine than pay an additional fee. It is obvious that large-selling game companies are leaving Unity one after another. And small sales companies are not affected? Is that really the case? Do small indies start with the goal of making only $200k when they start development? I will start with a dream of hitting the jackpot. So why don’t indies start with Unity? So Unity’s current policy is a risk from the CEO. Even though Unity's performance is worse than its competitors by my standards, I liked the development flow, but after this project is over, my credibility with Unity has decreased, so I have no choice but to move to another tool. Please withdraw the fee policy change.

 

If Unity charged a royalty on purchase, or revenue, then it is up to developer to self report. And there would be a lot of non-reporting happening. By charging on install, Unity can come up with a number and send a bill. They become active instead of passive. Counting installs in practice can't work technically, and was rolled out reprehensibly, but there is a logical reason to count that way.

 

I'm doubtful they're that competent to be honest.

 

Maybe in 2025 it will be 50k revenue and 50k install? So, if you are not affected right now nothing guarantees that you won't in the future.

 

hahaha one thing are the suits when you want to make money

 

So? I think we can link plenty of stuff that is forever in preview in Unity.

LWC will be prod ready soon ...sooner that DOTS was for sure .

 

You know what's more cynical than that? Loot boxes! For a small fee you might be able to increase one of the thresholds, receive more time for your cloud builds, or get more cloud storage!

 

1. we don't know that
2. we do now know that unity will drastically change their pricing at any given time, even retroactively

 

Btw EPIC also has a habit of keeping stuff a lot in preview / beta

 

There was a bomb...
https://unity.com/pricing-updates

 

i'm just saying, careful with that... if you want to use it, good for you man... now i think is cute they are making it prod xD

 

We kept getting asked by our community for our thoughts on all of this and I realised I'd only really been posting on here about it so we did the whole Twitter post thing. https://twitter.com/SouthEastGames/status/1702511204894400558

 

They mean 200 build minutes for Unity Cloud build.

So if your game takes 10 minutes to build on Unity Cloud, you can build it 20 times before they start billing you for build minutes.

My game, which is not the biggest took 20 minutes to build for iOS, so I'd literally get 10 builds before I hit that cap, the same build on my PC took 4 minutes for free, so as you can see I won't be using Unity Cloud build!