Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

unity has so much haters... but then unity can help it either, this "hate" is nothing new, we have been too patient

 

I beg to differ. The Unity ecosystem will be affected (negatively) as the pros desert the platform.

 

Overhiring friends and family to extract value out of a company is pretty common practice in tech these days. I bet over half of the people working for Unity are not doing anything meaningful. Unity has twice as many employees as Unreal for no good reason.

 

Honestly, one faces these situations in software. I spent 2 years on a project that used Flash and then Adobe changed how Flash worked and my project was killed. You could pick a smaller Engine and it might go belly-up. Or a large one and then a change of management pulls this S***. Really, we can't be safe unless Governments properly regulate and protect us. We need large companies like Unity and Epic to create the necessary tools, but we also need them to be reigned in from being absolute arses.

 

well at least have fun while it lasts,

 

Almost everyone using unity has a dream to make it big. That their project will be the next valheim. This pricing model caps that dream. Hurting the dream hurts everyone. Not just the big guys.

 

I agree. I mean one is not directly fiscally affected by the uTax. Obviously the entire ecosystem and developer <> engine relationship is screwed for everyone.

 

Yes and No.
Every business is a fight between the costumer who awnts the best product at the lowest price and the company who wants to sell the cheapest (to make) product at the highest price.

And terms are negociable. Not buying a product until the company goes bankrupt is a negociation! Look at Wizards of the Coast.
If they realize they will loose more than the will gain they will back down. Simple as that!

 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeb80ElI2ViFchw3N7Utuh9OKLccoGP-QF-nwCOznNcwhC1lQ/viewform

Link as a response to a question how to join a class action lawsuit against Unity? https://twitter.com/DUSKdev/status/1701732282615116198

 

YES. I was looking for something like that

 

If you're using UE for example, you're subject to this:
If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.

However, if we make changes to this Agreement, you will not be allowed to access certain Epic services or download the Licensed Technology unless you have accepted the amended Agreement. If we make changes, we will provide you with notice, such as by sending an email or giving you notice when you next log into an Epic service.

i.e. You can't download new versions, but you can keep using the version you have.

If you're using Godot, you're only subject to the MIT licence:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so

They're both less hostile to devs than the Unity one (which I've heard is of questionable legality).

 

How do Unity even plan on enforcing the install payment? Storefronts won't remove your game just because Unity asks nicely (not in their interest to remove something that makes money). Unity can't sue every single developer who doesn't pay. Only option is to send Unity gestapo to your house

 

"If you use Unity's mediation solution (Levelplay) they'll waive the fee 100%."

Well isn't that wonderful, I'd like to give Unity a pat on their head... with a baseball bat.

"Among Us by Innersloth has 700m downloads on mobile and Innersloth have paid Unity almost nothing for the game engine helped create this success."

Then maybe should've had a different pricing model. Hmm... maybe a percentage on revenue, something small, like 5%. Now who would do such a thing... YOUR F-ING COMPETITOR!

"Why shouldn't Unity ask that they use their ads solution vs competitors?"

You can ask alright, but not indirectly force studios to use your ad solution. There is a BIG difference between asking and making it so that they potentially go bankrupt if the don't choose your solution.

"Developers who have to pay $0.20 on a $20 steam game are getting a deal, you don't want to be paying 5% royalty on a $20 steam game, the Unity deal is much better in this case."

Most games don't make more than a million, so you are not paying 5% on $20. You are paying Unity tho, .20 per install and like 170 monthly.
With Unreal you don't have to pay at all until $1 mil dollars and from the calculations done a couple of pages earlier, you are only better of with Unity after $1.25+ mil depending on the size of the team. Even if you are paying more, the engine has new shiny tech that might be worth it. So no, Unity is absolutely not a better deal.

"Godot isn't viable because it's open source."

I guess we'll see in a couple of years from now.

If this person is truly an ex-Unity employee, and the rest of the team is like this, no wonder we got were we are now.

 

Are you combing through the thread looking for 'pro Unity' posts from yesterday to try to build the appearance of a consensus? Because that's absolutely fascinating behaviour.

 

Unity has to find some way to pay their CEO's massive salary and the rest of the decision makers on retreat right now. You think that CEO is gonna get paid with us just sitting on our asses?

 

I hear the Pinkertons are looking for work!

 

This is what Forest wrote:

https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1702448286014091754?s=20

Just got off a call with Unity. Thread below but first:

We don't have to settle for a rev share. Unity's involvement in helping you make your game ends with your last release. Unreal's pricing isn't fair, it's just simpler.

Okay, so I wanna respect Unity NDA, so this guy's tweet is really helpful as it's wholly indicative of my impression of Unity's strategy.

By saying "Oh it's not as bad as X", they hope we don't care that it's unfair.

By making concessions and discounts over gamepass or reinstalls or doubling down on Unity services, they hope we don't care who remains affected.

Worst of all, latest accounts suggest we don't get to choose unless we were lucky enough to stop updating Unity before last ToS change.

Unreal's rev share is acceptable because you know going in how it could affect your revenue.

The vibe of the meeting was that there will probably be more concessions, but I no longer think Unity is going to back down fully yet so I'm going to set up meetings with platforms after TGS. (lemme know if you're going! )

 

"Among Us by Innersloth has 700m downloads on mobile and Innersloth have paid Unity almost nothing for the game engine helped create this success."

Imagine if Adobe talked about Unity to the press, "Unity has made hundreds and hundreds of million dollars using tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, and they never paid more than the regular monthly subscription to us."

 

persona non grata

 

I have free games and paid games in my account. Will free games be forced to pay because my paid game revenue reaches 200,000?

 

What's fascinating about this take is that it would be almost trivial to recreate Among Us in UE5. Maybe a few days of dev time if you have the assets ready to go. The value is in the game design, not the engine.

 

Unity Managers! This is what you are doing to me!

 

as far as i know its per project.

 

Well if Unreal take that huge 5% make sense to try do something similar.

Plus for games costing more than $0.2 or $0.02 in Enterprise Unity version, this 5% can be millions of $ more than Unity fee.

So the situation so far is half good and half bad.

With few simple adjustements like a cap in what is charged can actually be far better than Unreal

 

The problem now with Unity is the loss of confidence with the company. Even if they step back the damage is already done. At this moment Unity is still changing the rules, by modifying their own words in order to clarify some things, but again with no transparency at all. And with no transparency nobody is going to believe in Unity anymore.

CEO resign would be now one clear step, following the promise of going back to the starting point that was before this madness started. That's the only chance, and every hour they don't do that things are getting worse.

In the end, many people including me has learned the lesson that cannot be confidence and trust Unity anymore. If a quick reverse is not done this is the end of Unity. Not today, not tomorrow, but in a short time. It could live as a terciary tool but nothing more.

 

5% can only ever be 5%. It can't be 'more than your total earnings.'

 

What's the difference in relative cost between LevelPlay and AppLoving?

 

I think every time the prefix is deleted it will look like a new machine anyway, I don't think different proton versions will change anything.

 

Enough is enough.

The fact that I read some Unity Employees shamelessly defending this pricing scheme is enough to see that it's not the CEO's fault. Unity as a whole is full of employees that really don't care about the developers time/money.

- This shouldn't impact you if you aren't making money
Okay - but why should it impact me AT all ? I'm making my money out of my hard work and my game. Unity's already paid for through the damn software.

- This only impacts you if you go above the install threshold
Okay - but why though??? I should NOT have to worry about my own income from something that I spent years in making and it just happened to be successful years ago.

Not to mention there is ABSOLUTELY no way to predict your income because you cannot track installs - but apparently Unity can. And they're going to charge you for it with some 'proprietary model that they BELIEVE is accurate' - Are you kidding me?

This is definitely not just the CEO , I see people in the forums, and even marketing team messing this up big time.

It's a shame. I used to defend unity for over 6-7 years, and started getting the hang of things about 4 years ago and now this happens. It's heart-breaking but - time to move on.

Godot is going to rip unity apart. If not Godot, some other open source engine's going to show up. Or maybe even a better alternative that isn't run by greedy business people.

I used to scoff at people praising Godot and crapping on Unity. But NOW I see the point. Godot literally does things MUCH better than Unity from what I can see in terms of 2D. It's even got a similar C# mono behavior like structure available! Unity gave up on 2D development years ago. I need to face the truth.

Thank you to everyone in the forums that helped me. I am guessing all those people that helped me are either gone, or thinking of leaving. I'd think the latter would be a no-brainer. Can't trust this software/company anymore. You never know what they're going to install in your game after you release it.

What's stopping them from charging you something arbitrarily 5 years after you released your game?

Anyway,

Farewell.

 

They cant go to starting point, they HAVE TO MAKE MONEY...the question is teh way they monetize the engine.

 

Remembering good times BTW good game

 

Innersloth has lot to fear.

Every few years a BIG chunk of the mobile user base replaces their devices. When they register the devices with their google or apple account, the stores downloads all the apps and games the user had on the previous devices.

this means 500millions downloads which means a $60 million fee in the best case scenario.

 

How about this?
Play 30s ad every time you run play mode in editor?
Why is that you ask?
So developers can rest for 30s make a sip of liquid etc while unity getting their lovely ad money
On top of that make a UNITY battle pass!
Weekly and monthly tasks like:
Watch 100 ads to get dark theme for a 3 days
Watch 200 ads to get new gizmo skins
Make an asset to the assrt store for 1 free cloud build
Ofc you can add premium tier for that only for 0.20$ which gives you all of that but unlock skip ads after 29s instead of full 30s

 

TBH, I have no idea why you are posting this. You are not even addressing any of the problems.
There is no reliable way to track an install, period. That is unacceptable. You should really delete this post. It makes things even worse.

 

They have understanding, they just don't give a flying F***. Guys, let's not pretend that Unity led by a bunch of idiots. They KNOW what they are doing, every bit of it and I'm pretty sure they anticipated it. This makes this whole thing so much worse actually.

 

Lmfao this is the best one yet

 

Props for actually posting something into a community that could charitably be characterised as 'pretty mad'. While what you posted was not particularly helpful, it seems heartfelt and posting anything at all definitely took some guts.

Having said that, I do think whatever you're being paid to be the public face/punching bag of their bad decision making probably isn't enough.

 

Or can be millions of dollars more. So does not look fair either.

I agree the games costing much lower than $0.02 can get in debt, but this is extremely unlikely and hopefully they will address it.

In short if planning to make a game with cost above $0.02 can turn a profit and potentially one that is millions above Unreal

 

Like I said in that person's thread. At $200k, I cannot afford an accountant. If I made $16k last month, and I know a certain percentage of that is going somewhere, I can plan for it in an accounting program.

What I can't plan for is not knowing whether this month I'll have to pay twenty cents, or twenty thousand dollars. That is not a reasonable billing range to have to plan for as a solo dev or small team...

Why can you all at Unity not see this? If you reply saying you do get that, why offer this thread up as an explanation?

I need stability and predictability so there are as few blockers as possible. A wildly unpredictable cost point does not fit into that world anywhere.

 

One person posted out of the small army of 3000 developers the twitter post mentions. Nice.

 

Hey bro, regardless of whether this apocalypse anyone is thinking this is true or not you and the workers are completely unrelated to this.

Unity is a great tool and yall have done a good job.

Hopefully people are smart enough to separate things.

 

We apreciate your response (too bad Unity managers don't find the time) and we are angry because we don't really want to change the engine (but we may be forced to do it in the future, if this install stuff is not reversed). We know is not your fault and we also love the engine and that's why we are here. If we didn't loved Unity, we would not be on this forum right now. The problem is that the changes where very poorly handled, communicated and the messages contradicted themselves (all reinstalls, then only new installs etc). The price per install is weird at best (the problems have been so many times stated here, that i don't see the reason to repeat them).
We understand that Unity needs to make money, but speaking with the community I think we'll be a good start (not me, companies that have already released games). It's really bad to check your mail in an evening and find out the unity pricing changed with 180 degrees. Sure it doesn't affect many of us, by we all dream of making the new big hit and even if we don't, we realize that if many devs leave here Unity has no future. I don't know how many will really live, but it's still very bad.
Again 10x for the response. It means a lot that somebody finally decided to write here after so long

 

I mean, it would at least give me something else to do than stare at the progress bar when the editor randomly decides it needs to take a few minutes to get its life back together before I can do anything with it again… /s

 

Still 5% will never turn into 108%

 

It's some fing gall for Unity to think the success of big games like Among Us is because of them when the core product is so full of bugs and (basic!) unfinished features.

Without the asset store and community devs picking up all the slack and introducing all the new and interesting features themselves for Unity, there would never be a reason to choose it over any other solution.

 

Also F musk. I dont wanna make a twitter account just to read that thread.

Bastard knows what he is doing.

 

Wait til they raise rates again, retroactively.

And then they'll lower the ceiling for when you start paying to $100K, then $50K.

And then they'll reduce the percentage you get from Unity Ads. I can think of many other unique ways they’d charge.

This is all coming. Not any doubt. And of course, however long it takes, it will be retroactively each time.

And don't forget, they could raise the price to remove the 'Made w Unity' splash screen to $2000 per license. Oh wait, dang it, that happened this week, too.

These changes might not affect you now, but they will at some point. Allowing Unity to change past agreements, contract, statements & ToS at will without speaking up is just teaching them what you think is normal behavior. And they'll get away with anything they can to help balance their sheets.

Don't forget, Unity has some new mouths to feed. They have to pay John R.'s salary, and all his stock options, and his upcoming bonuses, and of course his assistants and his travel budget. And they have to pay the rest of the C Suite employees who come up with these innovative solutions. And they also have to pay for Weta tools. Plus there is the massive IPO the Unity founders received. So, a lot of money has to be made.