Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Cruelty Squad was made in Godot. It looks and sounds like...something, but given this was done by someone who had a background in art and not game development, the end result is still very impressive.

 

Something most of the community has been ignoring so far is that Unity says they're going to give a rebate on install costs to people using their ad platform. It's the equivalent of small print at the bottom of their announcement. In the case of mobile this is huge because that can still leave most mobile games viable. However, there's a tradeoff:

This is Unitys way of attempting to expand their ad platform by pulling developers from other platforms. I have to admit I'm a bit underinformed on ad revenue like this as I'm mostly a VR dev, not a mobile dev. But my understanding was that each ad platform essentially gives you some sort of incentive to use them. I see on Google right now that using Adsense gives Google Play developers 51% of the ad revenue. Which is that's accurate is already priced into the model of low ARPU games. Unity essentially offering the equivalent of 12.5 cents per installation instead needs to be weighed against that 51% value (or whatever value developers are using) to see which is the most cost effective, but no matter what developers go with there's now going to be an additional cost on each of those games.

This seems to me like a really aggressive way to try and lock devs into an unpopular platform.

 

You made a game with a completely different business model in mind, under completely different TOS, and you published it. All of the sudden you have to pay this nonsensical additional "tax".

It is retroactive, it's ridiculous, and it's a stab in the back. No matter how their PR-team try to hide it between the lines.

Judging by their responses, they think that the only problem here is communication. "We should've explain it better". It's really sad.

 

I think there is some kind of "bug" in this approach.

In fact my question is:

If I make a game with the Plus license and then switch to Pro, for example, what are the thresholds and fees?
Are they those of the license with which the game was made (Plus) or those of the new license (Pro)?

In the first case: how can Unity trace information on the original license type at the time the game was created?
Do they add some flags that are automatically sent during installation? And is the GDPR still respected?

In the second case: if this were the case, after publishing my game, I could completely unregister from Unity, and therefore without any license there are no thresholds and costs...

There must be "something" wrong with all this...

 

The idea being, if install count is the basis of the pricing model, and WebGL is streamed with zero installs, just make games that never need to be installed and there's no fees.

Obviously Unity would counterpunch and close this loophole if money could be made, if it's in the habit of making sweeping changes to the pricing and ToS on a whim. That bad faith is the bigger problem here.

 

they need to revert this pricing policy.. and:

1- make revenue cut from devs.. i don't mind start paying 1% from first month revenue without any threshold requirement.. just to buy peace of mind.

2- make new terms to gain devs trust.. that any drastic changes to policies they would take an effect after minimum 2 years.. and shouldn't doesn't apply to ongoing current projects in market.. because they are made using old business model..

 

Wait, if WebGL games aren't affected by the new pricing fees. What if everyone build their game as WebGL, does that mean we all can avoid Unity fees?

 

Yes. They are all installs that you pay for.

 

I would been very curious to see Epic if unity and steam+gog did not exist. I am 100% sure the business practices will be very different(and not in a good way) .
We need competition. and we need competition between commercial engines also. unreal vs open souce engine is not real competition
So I pray Unity will not fall because it will be very bad for all of us, BUT they HAVE to change!!! The pricing model is a joke and the whole company policy. JR made very bad changes to the company direction and it's hurting the engine and the people using it!

 

Sure they can. Why would even bothering with downloading/installing something, when you just can come up with random number?

 

It's on the second million and beyond. The first million is free.

 

https://godotengine.org/showcase/

Also, Rocket Bot Royale was made with Godot, and the whole networking system they used was open source i think.

This is a concern. But, at least they have addressed that and claimed they will get accurate numbers. I have not seen anything from them about excluding their own employees' installs from the fee.

 

Bullshit, many companies operate games profitably in the 5 cent to 50 cent ARPU Range. How? Millions of installs. Casual games. OEM preinstalls. When you get half or all of that taken away, you can immediately close shop.

I reckon, by number of users and actual installs, these games make up 80 to 90% of the profitable Unity install base.

 

great...

so physical copies are literally a land mine that can't be removed...

 

Microsoft: Hey J K Rowling!

J K Rowling: Oh hey

Microsoft: You know all those books you wrote and published? Well because you used Microsoft Word, from January 2024 onwards, for each one you sell, you're gonna pay us a cut now umkay thanks bye.

J K Rowling: Wat

 

It really doesn't matter.
The tactic is very obvious - if you want to push something unlikely then go all in and do an outrageous amount of unreasonable ideas as a first proposal. then when the S***storm hits backpedal to the place you wanted to reach in the first place. Company gets what they want. Customers feel heard. Happily ever after.

It's a known tactic and pretty much the only way to counter it is to ...
a) ... know that this is a common tactic in these kinds of negotiations
b) ... not give in to anything less than a complete and entire rollback.

 

This point is important because it speaks to how the CEO thinks and why they pushed this new pricing strategy.

They're assuming devs will suck up the costs because they're not in a position to negotiate or switch engines due to having already invested too much time, effort, and money into Unity.

It's more of the same crap here. If people show that they are willing to walk/switch, hopefully sends a strong enough message.

 

Ah! Now I think I got the issue.
Its all about Unity Sentis, the integrated AI in the Unity Runtime.

This comes without extra payment for cloud services, but Unity has to finance this. This is why the need you to pay per install! Its just to compensate the AI Cloud Feature costs for them.
The issue is, that they assume, everybody uses this, or even they don't care about this, its just integrated by default and they need some way to solve the cloud costs.

If they would revert this Sentis-thing out of the Runtime, the fee wouldn't be necessary.

 

Now you're getting it!

You're not even safe from digital installs either. If you removed your game from Steam on January 1st, 2024, it doesn't stop people who own it but haven't installed it yet from installing it on all their devices after that date. Desktop, laptop, Steam Deck, friend's computers...

I don't know about you, but I sure have a lot of games in my Steam library I've never installed, including ones you can no longer buy on Steam.

There's literally no escape from the deal with the devil you didn't know you were signing up for all those years ago.

 

Seems that way for now at least, but take it from someone who spent almost 4 years focused mostly on getting desktop-level games working in WebGL.. getting any project of significant complexity (think 100s of MB up to several GB content for example, lots of shaders, physics, networking etc.) to run smoothly is like forcing a square peg through a round hole, between GC issues of browsers, memory limitations, single threaded environment, having to manage downloading content and network conditions vs just loading and so on. But for anything like mobile games or simple stuff it's amazing.

 

It's armed robbery. "Listen, dude, I don't wanna hurt you. Now hand me your wallet."
Sure, their number will be accurate, accurate to the point you can actually pay and not flee to the competitor.
I've played enough of f2p crap to know where it's going.

 

Speaking of, omg - OEM pre-installs!!!

We had games installed on phones and smart tvs, and set top boxes, and portable consoles. Hundreds of millions of copies.

These are actual installs, even if the user never runs them. (as opposed to buying a bundle and never installing them). A lot of users also run their preinstalls at least once.

 

Guys, this morning law enforcement agencies reported that death threats were sent to some employees working for Unity Technologies. Can we please conduct a peaceful protest instead of a violent and dangerous one? Violence does NOT achieve anything and does NOT solve anything. So I ask you please, whoever is doing this, to stop and publicly apologize, not necessarily by exposing themselves, but by making it clear that these intentions have passed, so that we can conduct our protest peacefully. I don't think it's appropriate for newspapers to pass us game devs off as violent people, also because we know how news reporting works in the world...

 

Can you help me get permission to reply back in this topic? acc: @DungDajHjep

 

There is no official announcement of what constitutes an install. Their original announcement said reinstalls would count because privacy laws prevented them from obtaining the necessary information to prevent that. This was later updated to say reinstalls wouldn't count. The data would be collected via a black box method they will not be elaborating on.

That's the official line right now, and assuming they stick to that, I wouldn't expect them to say what is/isn't an install or how they'll be collecting it. Which also means they can't provide developers with any ability to verify their own numbers.

On Twitter a now former developer had a tweet which has since been deleted that said on a technical level a new install is determined by the creation of a new Application.dataPath value. If that's accurate it should give you some idea of things that would trigger a new install charge such as DLC, directory changes, potentially some patch updates, and of course user actions like moving files around, reformatting, different devices, and so on. Whether or not that's accurate though who knows.

Whatever they're doing though, it's probably safe to assume distributors aren't the data source and that even if they were it wouldn't matter because they couldn't accurately track installs previously either. And that whatever they're doing isn't violating laws like GDPR, because when you're dealing with indvidual games that get 10,000 installs per day, and GDPR would be a 4% of revenue fine for every single one of those, violating that law could cause Unity to lose a years revenue in under one second of operation.

 

Waiting for an update from Unity is waiting for godot. Oh!

 

so I guess what Unity / CEO is trying to do is force devs to target high ARPU, which forces certain demographic / business models that Unity will service? Plus the fee is on installs not users, so need to divide whatever ARPU they target by how many times each user will install on different devices etc

 

Microsoft: This is because Microsoft Word installation includes proprietary Wordime technology, that shouldn't just run for free for all those hours you spent producing word combinations. Plus each time someone reads our texts this should be accounted for and appreciated with compensation.

 

The company that invested more heavily in the Godot Engine than Unreal Engine
Couldn’t it be Unity?
lol

 

you give them too much credit, they do business like they do their engine features..
incomplete and incompetently

and the proof is the change on the fly of the pricing, they have no idea what they are doing.

 

I think the question you have to ask is not what type of message you want to send them, but are you better off with or without Unity in your life?

I'm installing UrhoSharp (little known one, a bit dead but still good) tomorrow as it seems to suit what I need and carrying on. If that doesn't work CocosSharp. The rebuild starts tomorrow.

Those of you who try to convince Unity to do better are going to be living a life of terror under their boot forever.

 

You'd have to defend your self/studio in court. It should never come to that.

That's not my point. My point is that they have not addressed the issue of their own employees (of which there are 7000) installing games and causing fees to get passed back to themselves.

 

nice villain music.

 

It hurts casual and hyper casual, it hurts ad financed games, it hurts larger titles that are just not making the money they expected, and it hurts every title at the tail end of their lifetime where the games do free weekends, bundle sales, and even free goodies.

It hurts small (but profitable) developers disproportionately.

 

Of course he did, he's the dead-eyed psychopath that ran EA when it was voted the most hated company in America, two years running. And to shareholders, that's a feature, not a bug.

 

The opposite. They make virtually nothing on high ARPU games under this pricing scheme. It opens developers up to install bombs and such which represent the potential to wipe out years of revenue in the blink of an eye, but what they're after is low ARPU games, because of the clause that if you use their ad platform they're willing to waive some/all of the installation fee.

 

Don't expect an update before Monday everyone was sent home for the weekend.

 

Ok, I thought this joke lasted long enough to launch the real pricing system but it seems they mean it. I'd say it's time to move on. I won't waste any more time here. In these days with Godot I have already brought a lot of stuff, I don't think I will need a year to migrate as I thought and I think I will migrate my ongoing project (unlike what I initially thought it's worth it). I'd say it's time to say goodbye to Unity. To all those who remain good luck, you will need it (still no reason to panic, the tos change and the download count are both illegal, they will not be able to enforce anything, just stay on the personal license so that they cannot charge you anything).

However, I say thank you to Unity, not for today's betrayal but for what led me to become passionate about software development in 2012 with the Unity version 3.5 (and Android/iOS free basic licenses). Although I eventually became a web developer for work, I have always remained a video game developer at heart and the passion with which I do my work was thanks to Unity which allowed me to develop a passion for software development that I did not have before. Unity was an opportunity to appreciate big results with really small and simple scripts (big victories with minimal effort, what a beginner needs). At university this passion only grew, I had a lot of fun implementing different character movement systems with different cameras (first person/third person mouse/keyboard/touchscreen, isometric point and click), as well as menus with multi-language, saving system and cloud saves with http calls to google drive, one drive, mega and dropbox and even a dialogue system with consequences and multiple choices (all done without assets from the store because I enjoyed programming and still enjoy it today ...and the more I learn the more I have fun). When I then had to reimplement the input system to make it possible to code it at runtime (keybinding at runtime which was absolutely not foreseen by Unity's input mapping) the workaround I found was truly brilliant XD so much fun.

It's time to move to open source software whose license can't destroy years of haphazard work (and no, it's not the current license that worries me, it's the change in tos, with open source I can just get a fork or even create a fork and focus on my passion, not making money but create great games). I was already directed towards Godot but this situation anticipated everything by a few years (I don't have to worry about finding work as a game developer, so I can choose what I like best without limitations, like I don't need to go with Unreal...), I wanted to wait for Godot to allow export of games on mobile but it seems that everything will be implemented already by the end of the year/beginning of next year so I see no reason to wait particularly given the situation of Unity (time that I port everything to godot time that they will have fixed a lot of things, in particular now that many will pass to Godot improving it even further). I'm just sorry to have to separate myself from Unity in this way... I was hoping to learn Godot and still maintain something in Unity, after all it's part of my roots (while at school I learned Java and Javascript, in my free time I wrote software in C# in particular on Unity), I hoped to eventually complete my own framework in Unity and pass it on to many people, recommending both Unity and Godot to get started. Until yesterday I hoped it was a joke and I joked about it a bit, I thought you wanted to tighten things up a bit to put in a more aggressive monetization system but one that made sense, making everyone breathe a sigh of relief afterwards a bit of psychological terrorism... but I was wrong, it's a goodbye.

Thanks Unity for the past, but your choices lack respect for many people who have achieved the dream of making game development their job and although I am not part of it (despite still having a good job as a web developer), I have never given up trying and I don't want to stay in the 90% who earn nothing and therefore don't owe you anything voluntarily, it's not my goal. Furthermore, the games I create are mine, I have no intention of sharing my earnings with anyone. Do I need to buy/pay for a development tool/assets? That's ok, but the game I created is mine, no one can claim to control,nobody can know (not even I) who and how many installations of my game are out there it and I don't share a part of my earnings without anything in return (if I publish on Steam, Steam acts as a showcase for me, but if I publish on my site I get 100% of my earnings). I have no intention of sharing ownership of my creations with Unity or Unreal. My creations are mine and no one else's regardless of what I use to create them.

The most absurd thing is that the one who made me dream was Unity, now all they can say is that 90% of those who use the engine will not be affected by this change... but they don't realize that it is that 10% that matters... those who use Unity in most cases want to be part of that 10%. The very fact that they want to kill my dream means that I will have to start dreaming elsewhere. The very fact that they disrespect those who have invested time and energy into making games and succeeded is nauseating.

It's my last post here. Even if you went back, it's too late at this point. You lost me already.
To all users here: see you soon elsewhere.

 

There was follow-up reporting on this and it was actually a remote Unity employee who sent threats on social media. Current morale at Unity must be dire.

 

Correct me if I am wrong but it seem the last reply from official member of unity is acknowledgement from @LeonhardP more than 2 days ago

It seem they deploy silence treatment to us. And ignore all our rage here. Just move on to do anything they want as of now to wait for our fire to die down and desperately accept the plan

 

Even if that were true, let's say you make $0.21 per user, these fees would represent 95% of your income going to Unity. And that's ignoring other fees like platform holder's cut.

 

This video is a joke, right? Have you actually watched it? This has nothing to do with a scam whatsoever.

 

Hope that this is true news, and is not a news to save the "reputation of the agency"

 

yeah so it basically ejects all those usecases (and devs) from Unity's market. unless you have a large ARPU (and need to multiply it by number of installs) you're locked out

Is this the big-brain moment Riccitiello had when forcing this through? trying to understand what kind of deranged logic the management is using here.

 

I would not say nothing 0.15 X 1,000,000 installs is $150,000. It will be a greater amount then they get for license fees.

 

Buy once, pay forever.

 

The actions Unity took (usually the responded pretty fast with a backing down or promise of a reevaluation) tells me they honestly didn't expect this backlash (another proof of how broken from reality they are) and there's probably another issue: they invested a lot in this new pricing model and now they face an impossible choice: keep it and risk loosing a LOT of costumers, or drop it and loose a lot of money and shareholders will be furious (also ironsource that may be bought exactly for this)...
Unity puts itself in an almost impossible situation now and they probably don;t know what to do. And I don't think JR wants to step down, unfortunately.

 

but low ARPU devs will just switch to alternatives and not incur the risk/raping the policy enables, as we are already seeing here. So i mean is that part of their strategy? or in their minds what is the economic value of what they're doing

 

Pretty sure it was posted already if I had to guess, but to reiterate seems its even a weird atttack on applovin... only used on mobile games though so makes even less sense.... Seems more like a bribe by the second.

And seems everyone was blindsided which also explains the staff responses stopping\

Edit: And for everyone running professional mobile games, it should be more than clear you use a service that has the best availability per region. Offering just to the best ad provider in the region... having that fee on top being able to be waved just for using their service no option if you'd need that money per install....not sure what choice they even got at this point, removing the old tos, no hyper casual games earns on just installs. They work on the having a huge install base... and the smallest percentage watching rewarded ads. Let alone using IAPs.