Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Selling games at low prices for charity, such as HumbleBundle, will undoubtedly bankrupt indie developers because of Unity.

 

At what right is Unity charging for installs now? This is a joke. You're officially holding thousands of developers at the gun point.

 

This is astonishingly stupid. I'm a longtime Unity user since Unity 3. I've paid you tens of thousands of dollars.Transitioned from perpetual licenses to the subscription model. Earned you tens(hundreds?) of thousands through ads. I pay for a Pro subscription. And you want more!?

Fine, let's accept you need to make more money, whatever - is this really the best you could come up with!?

There are hundreds of teams out there working on mobile / f2p titles right now and you've just f**king ruined them. You should be ashamed.

 

I've been with Unity for over 12 years and promoting it where I could. That's over.

Never have I ever seen a company spit in the face of its clients like this. The absolute hatred and contempt higher management must have for Unity's users makes no sense at all.

Unless you're trying to tank the stock price to sell and exit with a fat bonus, and if so I hope the SEC roasts you over a fire.

 

Nope, if ever month you get 1M new users then the first month would be free (0-1M tier), second month would be $60K (1M-2M tier) and all months after that would be $20K a month so $260K for the first year and then $240K for all years after that

 

So I will have to pay €1,877 just to get rid of the Unity Slide at the beginning of the game (not that this is the biggest problem with this new, terrible pricing plan) ?
A big well deserved S***storm is taking place. If you guys don't react in the next few days, I have to consider using unreal engine instead. Don't destroy yourselve completely.

 

I still would like to know why I need to pay 4x to maintain what I have today when I currently use Plus?

 

No this is incorrect. Not per SALE but per INSTALLED copies. User have 3 PC, bought it once in steam - installed 3 times, devs owe unity 60 cents.

 

Not quite, at 1m downloads/month you'd be at the $0.02/install tier by the time you got the $1m revenue (tier cutoffs based on lifetime installs not rolling 12 months). It would still be a S***ty $20k/month = $240k/year = 40% of the $600k.

 

Since Unity went public, everything has gone for the worse. This is just one more step in a downward spiral towards an unviable product.

 

This system doesn't seem to consider operating costs or any other losses if revenue is the only threshold.

Please clarify.

 

I don't like this direction at all, it doesn't take into account any of the developers expenses (electric, network, artists, development time, etc.) that have to go into the project. This structure could be used maliciously to bankrupt a developer, just get a bot network and do installs.

 

A massive punch in my face for my project that's currently in development...

This is an overly complicated, bad business decision. It is a breach of trust.
We're all telling you, right here, right now. This is a bad decision.
The majority of Unity users are business owners as well who want the engine to do well.
Unity is powerful because of its userbase and resources.

See how confused, angry, and dissatisfied we are.
Please respect us and what we are telling you.

 

Hi , Won't there be $0.20 per download for free mobile games? Am I understanding this correctly? Or will there be a payment of $0.20 per download for free mobile games? Or if I have less than $200,000 annual income, I won't pay $0.20 per download, right?

 

With the removal of Unity Plus, would that mean if developers want to remove Unity splash screen branding logo, they need to subscribe for Unity Pro ($2040/year)?

 

Assuming that $150k is gross, not net. If it's net, there's a very good chance that they're above the $200k threshold considering platform fees. This pricing model also makes the cost absurdly unpredictable. If you have a popular, but low-margin game, there's a very good chance that this fee structure would bankrupt developers.

 

Are you sure, what about lifetime installs?

 

The funny thing is if they do backtrack, it won't be because of posts here. I imagine every large mobile publisher and Dev will be trying to contact them about this.

I've done my bit and and asked Zuck on Threads to buy the company

 

Why make it such a complicated system that will inevitably fail and make everyone move to another engine when you could just do a simple % of revenue like Unreal Engine?

This is ridiculous.

 

Poorly thought out change Unity, hoping for a runback but as it stands right now this will be my last game using Unity, no confidence with this leadership if this the changes they want to make.

also John Riccitiello, we see you selling 2000 of your shares before this change. Hope you get a visit from SEC.

 

@Mike-Geig Can you see what you are typing yourself? It's a huge difference between PROFIT vs REVENUE you are insulting every mobile developer here by saying stuff you apparently know nothing about. In one sentence (in other post) you talk about revenue in another "profitable game".

Me and my team have been developing games since Unity 3 and today, for the first time, we discussed moving to Unreal. Yes, that's a decade of knowledge, trust and money we are discussing to throw away.

 

The most impressive part of all this is that an entity as massive as Unity Technologies can't properly communicate a change in pricing in a way that's concise, logical & readable without creating a massive S***-storm everywhere. What do you even have all your marketing employees for? Even if you end up backpedaling or "clarifying" the changes in a way that will make people happy, or pull a "we didn't mean X, we actually meant Y so don't worry" at this point it's just making you all look not like clowns, but the entire circus. There should've been at least some examples of how this will calculate at the 200k and 1 mil $ marks. A bigger blog post should've been attached explaining the changes in-depth. You can write those for your fancy AI tools nobody will use, but can't for something that's essential to everyone picking your tool over another for their job?

This should have gone through at least 3-4 people for evaluation before getting the publish button pressed. We have a minimum of three people who read all posts before going live at my company to make sure we catch all issues and unclarities regarding changes to our products and services, and we're 1/10 the size of Unity to avoid exactly such situations. If we can afford the time and manpower for it, so can Unity. This is shameful for any entity of this size.

Feels like this entire company is a massive titan that's made out of brittle clay. As if you're not even communicating internally on such changes, just drop the forum post and quietly hope for the best. How a company can become that much of an internal mess is always a mystery to me, but then I remember it's run by people who don't really make products with the sort of tools they're trying to sell in the first place.

 

money.

 

Thanks! Time to change to Unreal Engine 5 or even Godot...

 

As a business owner, you have to assess risk of any software/tool/etc you use.

A tool changing their pricing structure like this on a whim, and having it affect everyone - is insanely high risk, as all trust is gone.

They have shown here that there is nothing preventing them from changing it to (for example) $1 per install in the future and retroactively charging you that. Or perhaps, make you pay for every minute the user plays your game, etc.

That might sound extreme, but when a company has already shown you cant trust them - then that trust is lost.

Even if they backtrack on this decision, the trust is gone.

And that's before you get to all the legal implications here...

 

I too am in a bad spot if I can’t hide the Unity splash screen without Pro anymore. It’s the ONLY “Plus” feature I needed.

My app makes no money—yet—time will tell. (It will never hit the numeric limit regardless.) It is a free download with no ads, to which I hope to add an optional tip jar or premium feature unlock.

But big successor no, my users love it, and it’s NOT A GAME, it’s a personal productivity tool. The simplicity and minimalism of the experience is essential, and the Unity logo will not be well-received: it will be like my “ad-free” app suddenly LAUNCHES with an app.

In addition, my App Store privacy policy needs to say No Data Collected. Will that still be possible?

 

Those don't get charged each time, only once and done. The tiers on the blog are lifetime install numbers, once you reach 2M users you will only ever pay $0.02 per user and $0.01 in emerging markets, it will never go down again and won't be a recurring fee

 

Unity, why did you make such a gigantic change, told people to go into your forums to discuss it, had only one person to reply to an absolute avalanche of questions, provided them with absolutely NO answers or support to go even with the most obvious questions that would arrive, and left the place to rot and fester while the only voice from the company had to take a plane right after the announcement.

I don't even have words for this anymore. This isn't even lunacy, there does not exist a word even in German that could explain whatever this is.

I am really glad I learned Unreal so at least I can pivot more easily once my project is done and over.

I'm sorry for being crass, but, what is happening.

 

You speak true words there. For what felt like 5 years I tried to forgive and swallow every misstep Unity made. This time I have no problem with it and will start immediately

 

So the future of Unity is making a game for WegGL or cloud streaming so people can play it without installing and just charge them via web instead????

Did anyone at Unity sit with a developer to check edge cases? Litteraly took me 10min to think of this loophole and many more.

 

You have lost our trust. This is absurd

 

Yes, but if in the last 12 months your revenue was <200K it's free, if above then given the amount of users it would be $0.02 per new install as the rest was already there and won't be retroactively charged

 

Here.

 

Only if you include all of the people who download the editor and never make anything with it.

 

Please Unity, revert this change.
This is a very, very bad decision, in many, many ways.

Also, the fact that Unity is focusing their effort on this scheme rather than... improving the actual product.... is incredibly worrying.

 

A question was answered earlier in the thread about WebGL I almost missed - "as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an install." Obviously there's no actual developers involved in vetting statements like these - it's not possible. Unity somehow thinks it's going to accurately track unique browser "installs" in light of things like refreshes, cleared caches, privacy settings/blockers, multiple people using same system (public browsers like internet cafes, libraries, etc.), IP addresses of lots of people being the same, while dancing around legal restrictions in different markets and us not violating policies ourselves because of what Unity is doing behind the scenes without transparency or opt-in? There's a lot of unknowns and risk of liabilities being introduced here.

As much as I've loved this engine and expected to stick with it until the end of my days, as much as I've defended my choice of it in the past, as much time and money as I've invested towards doing something commercial in the future with it - I'm seriously reconsidering my choice right now. The risk here is just so high.. to some day be successful and Unity could get every cent of profit while you end up owing money and/or going bankrupt. I'll be watching for clarification / backtracking, if not I think it's time to move on, because being forced to piss off players with skeezy monetization schemes and then still could end up earning more debt than profit overall? Wow. I really, truly hope this is miscommunication, that I'm misunderstanding somehow, or that it came about by disgruntled employees hoping to sink the company with fake news.

 

What happens if a developer who has made $200k of revenue with 200k users decides to participate in a game jam and distributes their game jam entry for free? Will they have to pay for every user who plays their game jam entry?

What counts as an install for HTML5? What if users are using incognito mode to visit the webpage repeatedly? Does it count as a new install for every user if I push a new version of the game to the webpage?

What safeguards are in place to prevent malicious users from repeatedly running the game or calling API endpoints to maliciously incur charges through this license? 20 cents per API call could get real expensive real fast.

 

In other words, typical f2p games will not be able to earn after the limit of lifetime installs is exhaustes, because fee will take all profit.

 

Hah! It looks like this strategy has been grabbed directly from "Tankie playbook" (How to Tankie).

Set your goal, for instance make a revenue based profit. But you can propose it to your audience, because they'll eat you alive. So you will propose something totally unreal... like for instance, per install profit. Now your audience is mad and they propose revenue based profit! Now you back up and agree

 

We get around1.4 million downloads per week, based on the fees next year we'd pay:

$15,000 for the first 100,000
$30,000 for the next 400,000
$15,000 for the next 500,000
$8,000 for the remaining 400,000

$68,000 for the first week would cost more than we make for that week.

It drops to $28,000 per week for the rest of the the year but this would seriously impact our revenue. I understand there is some sort of benefit to being on LevelPlay but until Unity clarifies exactly what that benefit is and unless its significant enough that the $28,000 becomes a fraction of that then we will likely leave the platform and leave LevelPlay and Unity will lose a decent chunk of revenue it currently makes from us via mediation.

 

This is such a frustrating response. It's $200k gross. Pre-platform fees, pre-expenses. That could still be ramen-profitable, or less for a small company. $200k split between 4 people is $50k. That's not terrible, but also not a lot. Take away the 30% cut for most marketplaces, expenses like payroll tax, the dozens of other subscriptions that every company seems intent on forcing down our throats, and that's a hell of a lot less. Revshare is at least predictable, if nothing else, and gives teams a way to plan for how much margin they'll take home. This ridiculous pricing model means developers have to optimize for lifetime value per player, in a world where game monetization is already a mess, this is, to put it bluntly, awful.

EDIT:
And I do feel like I have to clarify that I do know that it's installs after the threshold, but installs don't necessarily correlate to revenue.

 

It's actually potentially worse for WebGL and cloud as it can be implied (with lack of better communication right now) that every stream will count as an "install." If that's correct, they are essentially charging web apps by the use rather than by the install.

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.”

https://unity.com/runtime-fee

 

Not even joking. This has been reported to the SEC.

https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower

 

Really think you should adjust this to be a % of taxable revenue
The way you have it worded has plenty already doing napkin math and assuming Unity is going to come asking for 1.5 mill for a game that made 201k

e.g. a game that is F2P but has MTX just hardly comes in over the line but has millions of installs ... using a hard price per install is not nice at a glance anyway

 

I leave this image without comment.

 

This is a bizarre statement from Unity. The first line says its the publisher or distributor ( two very different entities), but the second implies that 'creators' ( assume developer) are also liable.

So if you make a game, publish it through a publisher, that publisher must account for the Unity fees in what ever deal they give you the developer. However if the publisher neglects to pay Unity or goes bankrupt or whatever, then Unity can come after you as the developer for the fees? Even though as the developer you either already 'paid' through your contract or were likely never paid yourself if the publisher went bankrupt!

 

Maybe this is too confusing for me but while i see some problems with this, like piracy for example or how they are going to manage offline installs (i do that every time) i can not see any big problem in general with this, it is just a tax or something like that, we will pay for every install and they will make the maths every month, yeah i think they are going to make more money that way but if you are not making more money they won't charge you, that being said...

...This feels more like a move from a guy who wants to charge you to buy more bullets on a fps game when you are empty :/ but ok

There is one thing i really do not like and is the need for online conection to use unity, you can use it offline for 3 days, like the most hated AAA games outhere.. hmm weird (not really) in my opinion, you need to step back on that, Why? well, windows, linux updates

Also, there are too many legit questions here that you need to clarify.
For me, is not exactly a problem because some time ago (for the lack of good updates/features) i decided to change the engine (i'm with Unigine right now) so is not a big problem because i just have 1 project for mobiles, so i just need awnsers on some questions, but i can see why others are afraid of this

 

I have to wonder if there's some internal conflict going on inside their company at the moment. It's not impossible the lack of communication is because their own employees are up in arms over it and don't even want to defend it. It doesn't take a genius to see how this was going to go. They supposedly have 7700 employees as of 2022, I bet the vast majority of them think this is as absurd as we all do.

 

From what I understand you will get charged for each INSTALLATION not per sell or unique user the definition of an installation: "An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.", it's always unclear, what I understand is that if a user have for exemple on steam a family account and install the game on multiple devices, reinstall the game after doing a complete factory reset, after changing pc or just by clearing it's registry you will get charged for each of thoses new installations, eg. your players play on both PC and steamdeck, now imagine on mobile...

Then they claim that they can detect pirate version of your game... HOW?! If they had the ability to do so why they don't provide a tool to avoid players to play on a pirate copy of your game? Because they can't, the industry try to solve this issue for decades without success and Unity which fail miserably on a lot of simple tasks claim they have solve one of the biggest issue of the industry?! So yes you will get charged for each pirate copy installed...

And honneslty, paying a subscription + having fees for each install of the (even if it require to have more than X revenues etc.) it's the worst commercial approach.

 

Time to move to Godot community.