Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

https://unity.com/runtime-fee
I copy from here

 

but what's that? I don't even...
seriously, what is it?

Monopoly Go had over 15M estimated downloads last month, like what are those numbers. Unitys estimated charge per hour from them?

Yeah, Monopoly GO probably had around 100M revenue last month as well but it's a top tier player. And also it could be surprising but they are probably barely profitable right now. Like many many others. All on unity related to mobile knows how this market works and what ua costs are right now.

I don't know what this guy tried to explain. He was probably tried to be like cold blooded analytic, like everybody just being hysterical and he knows what is actually going on.

But this "math", how it's presented is just wrong. Numbers are skewed so it's like "o yeah, 200 bucks from Monopoly GO" and nothing about how much from this revenue spent on UA. And the fact that this person worked on changes. Seriously?

anybody from mobile market see what's unity trying to do, but this model is really badly thought out.

 

This is a never seen before and very weird situtation, I do not discard a possible fraud with the Unity stocks.

 

Thats the problem apologists cant understand that this pricing is FOR NOW. WHat if in 2023 Unity is -2B and 0.02 turns into 1$

 

That is a risk with every company, Unreal could change the 5% at any point as well.

 

That's very good on paper, but the core concept is so fundamentally broken, charging a flat rate on installs, estimated, regardless of the revenue that each install makes, that, if genuine, shows completely incompetence at the top.

This is the same as taxing people based on hours worked, not amount of money they take. It's ludicrous!

If Unity want to offer a broadly lower fee than a revenue share, just ask a smaller revenue share from a broader userbase!

I feel sorry for the staff. I lack your faith. Your CEO's reputation and philosophy is toxic and this smells like his true colours coming through. An honest move would have had more engagement with the devs working towards a new policy, followed by a decent email to every user instead of a blog post, up front with clear communication, and a policy that's not being changed day to day as if no-one knows what's going on.

I hope for everyone at Unity's sake that this resolves amicably, but I doubt anyone will be comforted by your welcome appearance or that observer's Twitter commentary.

 

Hi James, I just want to state my case as a freelancer. I made games for clients and sell the built game for them. Based on Unity new plan pricing, I would need to pay for every install the game reach the threshold which I have no benefit from it. If the game still out there and keep generating revenue for clients I'll be ended up paying for it forever?

 

If this was the TOS i agreed to when I started using this engine then yes. But... I DID NOT AGREE to rev share OR install taxes before PAYING IN GOOD WILL for unity licenses. I agreed to the agreement and now they are retroactively changing it.

I'm leaving.

 

Unity Removed part of my posts here (about staff layoffs) and banned me from posting in this thread. Good Luck people!

hope editing messages works because posting new messages doesn't work.

We know, hope you will not have troubles with the higher ups because of your posts

the current plan is clear as day for us. Questions about how unity can track installs and revenue are purely a curiosity but even if unity will publish a scientific research paper on how they intend to calculate installs and revenue in the end it doesn't matter because the overall plan with fees x install is not ok

 

this pricing fee must be reversed it will be the end of unity

 

Epic is profitable so they have no reason to change that

 

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

this is the updated one. It's the same, just easier to read.

 

There is no such thing as enough profitable in capitalism.

Anything can happen at any time

 

Monopoly Go will not pay a single cent to Unity because hey use the live service operations S***show, which is just a you get out of jail card.

 

This will be the last I contribute to this conversation. Its obvious that unity is not going to change their mind about this. And to think I was telling my professors a decade ago how they should have been using unity instead of pygame and ogre3d. I feel a fool, a bigger one than I already am.

Really, I have to thank unity for the time and experience I had with it, and thanks for doing this before I managed to actually publish anything. I would be stressing, even more than I already am, about what the future of this engine holds. But because the company has shown its true colors, if I ever do publish something, it wont be held by a lock and chain like all these companys want to do.

Im surprised honestly they dont have a clause like the university I went to had, where anything developed on their hardware or in class was property of the university. This does not promote diversity or creativity, it has the opposite effect. But I suspect its where the company is heading towards.

Even if unity would walk everything back now, the damage is done. If money really was the issue, why not just up the fee a bit, I dont think the backlash would have been anything like this. But looking at the shares in the last couple years, I dont think there is much rational, calm, thought happening here.

As brutal as it is, and im not knocking godot, or pygame, or ogre3d. But they just dont have the required fidelity and performance I want.

Ive decided im going to take the plunge, read the ray tracing in one weekend series, read the ray tracing gem series, and hope and pray to god that I can make some sense of what is being talked about to just make a simple game to get my foot in the door.

Unity could get away with upping the fees if they were actually putting effort into the engine, but things are so slow right now. Ray tracing is still incomplete and buggy after 4 or 5 years. HDRP while heading in the right direction, just seems very slow and things dont mesh together very well.

So what is really being paid for here? The engine, or the analytics that unity has invested heavily into.

For people just starting, unity made your choice very easy for you, you have nothing worry about. I really feel for the older people who have established businesses and contracts, this has to be really hard someone being able to just willy nilly mess up your livelyhood. This wont affect the big company's, its gonna obliterate the smaller ones who are operating on the fringes already and anyone trying to get into the space.

I wish I could say this wasnt legal, but I didnt think being poisoned by multi million dollar companies and being denied medical help was legal, but here I am.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

 

Actually, they can't. Their EULA says 'we will never force a new agreement on you, you are just stuck on that version of the engine until you do agree'.

You can have confidence that for the specific version of the engine that you are building for, your funding model is 100% understood going in. And of course, there's always Godot where you can literally fork your own version of the engine at will for $0.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal -- What I like about their EULA in particular is that it doesn't try to force you into arbitration to avoid facing a judge.

What I like about the Godot licence is that its open source and open source tools often become some of the most powerful and reliable tools on the planet.

 

Btw I don't know if I posted the final form of hm "hacking" script here but this is the final perfect version. The Linux host's MachineID changes and you can be sure every reinstall after that counts as a unique install:

Code (CSharp):

1. !# /bin/bash
2.  
3. while true
4. do
5.    rm -f /etc/machine-id
6.    dbus-uuidgen --ensure=/etc/machine-id
7.    steamcmd app_run 123456 &
8.    sleep 3
9.    steamcmd app_stop 123456 force 1
10.    rm -rf ~/.steam/steam/compatdata/123456
11. done

If anyone has any common sense they will ask Unity to do something about this or switch away.

 

They're probably referring to AAA mobile studios. There's no such thing as AAA premium games using Unity.

 

Could; yes. But we know that Unity will.

 

They can always sell your debt to debt collectors, depending on the area you live in can go like this:
- repeated phone calls from the debt collector's office
- if you don't pay up, you get a visit from Igor and Vlad (sorry every real life Igor or Vlad) and they will ask nicely, albeit with a bit towering body posture
- and if you still don't pay up, they may dislocate your knee or something

Or they take you to court. Debt collector companies in those countries where Igor and Vlad are less acceptable, can more easily take you to court. In general.

 

Anybody who blindly believes that no engine maker other than Unity will ever get greedy is not as astute in the corporate world as they think they are.

 

No, I saw the full context. Same opinion. It was a window into his soul that showed how he truly felt about his customer base.

 

nah bro, 5% past 1,000,000USD in revenue is quite a lot of money, i still don't understand why unity just don't copied epic business model lol.

They could even have reduced the threshold to 300.000USD yearly revenue to be paying the 5% and is still miles better than what we actually got

 

I programming in C++ and can migrate easily to Unreal but most of Unity users that dedicate many years to learn C# will be not a easy migration.

 

Oh hey, as if we needed a reminder that the presentation of all of this is back-arsewards.

 

This is Unity's terrible policy. Looks like I'll have to choose another platform for my projects!

 

"Other people might be bad so lets get into bed with this company that is definitely bad."

 

hello godot

 

The tiers reset each month. 100,000 installs is $12,500 that month. Next month is also £12,500.

At least as far as can be gleaned from ambiguous messaging.

 

I guess this shows how easily they can slip in new charges again in no time

 

So when my meter at my house has to be read, they come to my house and read that meter, and then they send me a written bill that tells me exactly what I owe them. I trust my meter guy because he never let me down. If there is a problem, I can easily contact the electric company and they fix it.

Now, Unity is saying they coming into my Unity account, into my game, and if by some miracle our game does well, we suddenly have to pay a fee that has no meaning, it does not help me, does not give back in return, it just is a vague notion of how they will call home to check on us. I hope the bill is itemized with every little thing we do. And that we get a full list of every single install, and I expect after paying this fee that I am protected from weaponized installs and honestly, I do not trust Unity to keep us safe from trolls who harass and pirates who will share the game with everyone. I am lucky to live near NYC where we have a group of lawyers who will help us. Not everyone has that. Sad day for my little team and while this will not impact us most likely, I feel for my developer friends from my NJ Meetup, who already talking about moving on to other engines and my other Florida meetup, very large group who is also concerned. I been the Unity person for a while in both meetups. I do not know how to tell them that Unity is lost.

 

Yes they can but you would be still allowed to use the PREVIOUS version with the old license and with the old conditions. That's 100% sure.

 

Aside from pricing...

5% rev share is more stable than this new model...and stability as i said multiple time in this thread is much more important for ur business than unexpected cost

 

I understand what you're saying, but a companies core values and ethos are only as strong as the executive team running the company make them.

In this case it's quite abundantly clear the executive team do not, at all, in the slightest, believe in those original core values and ethos. When it comes down to it, how the employees value them is irrelevant when the executives aren't on the same page as they are the ones who ultimately make the larger business decisions that either do or don't adhere to said values.

Ed. To be clear, I'm not dismissing your feelings on the subject. Just pointing out an unfortunate reality that both employees and management need to be on the same page for core values to be meaningful.

 

While doing research I noticed many Open source engines that if we developers got together we could help develop to have a managed engine managed by the community and not tarnished by CEO speculators and boards of directors.

We could create a forum or discussion channel for our own Engine.

Who is interested in the idea?

 

Tbf that is C# thing. Not a Unity thing. And once you get burned by that feature in a real, large-scale project you understand why and never allow it again. That's why most modern OO languages simply don't even make it an option. For some companies that use things like C++ is could be considered a firing offense!

 

I'm a bit biased, but I think people should do some experimentation with GPT for code conversion - it might not be as difficult as you imagine.

 

So its time to change my job
Thanks for advice!
So fellow developers, will see you soon (personal hehe)

P.S. its a joke!! Dont fee me with 0.20$ for that pls

 

There have been some trolls and there have been emotions, but thank you for having perspective. We support you. Employees, who have always attempted to do right by me. I have had nothing but positive experiences with the 2D team. Chris, Cai, Su, and others have been amazing to me. And you can't have a conversation with any of them without noticing how short staffed they are. How many projects are on the backburner. How many known issues need to be pushed back to next year.

So I know Unity needs cash. I want Unity to be successful too. I believe in its ethos. Rather, I did believe. If Unity went to a revenue share model tomorrow I'd pay it gladly. Even if we're paying for seats, if you come in under competitors at 3-4% that's still an easy decision to make. I'd pay the 20 cents per sale now if it didn't try to get dystopian with it's tracking. If I could report it myself like any other engine that'd be fine. Audit the bad actors, fine, but not this.

I don't want this. That's all it is in the end. It's that if this happens Unity isn't worth the stress, mixed with the emotions of not wanting to let go.

I hope this gets better for you, and for all of us. Sincerely.

 

Thank you for your message; it's truly heartening to hear from an individual who is a part of Unity. The reason why many of us choose Unity is because we have faith in you, not just the Unity brand or its management and CEO, but in you and the other dedicated employees who empower us to create remarkable games. Personally, I continue to have faith in all of you.I may not be fully aware of the precise circumstances inside Unity, but I have been part of fantastic teams that struggled due to poor management/leadership, and I can completely empathize with that. I remain hopeful that with both internal and external pressure, we can navigate this situation and establish a new pricing model that is more reasonable for everyone.

 

But I hadn't even got to operator overloading.

 

Unity's T&Cs also said that...

 

An engine created and managed by the community... No bad idea!

 

Nope. This whole ordeal should be reversed for starters. And then if Unity needs money (after all buying spree and whatnot), fine, move with a transparent and understandable and more importantly: CONTROLLABLE (by Unity users) plan. Like rev-share or something.

 

This is a absolutely true but so far the biggest differences is that Unity has literally just done it.

 

Then that's just hate which is gonna be disregarded.

 

True, but Unity also forces you into arbitration to prevent you from getting your complaint in front of a judge.

 

I understand, however, you are the closest thing to a diplomat or an emissary that has appeared here in days and thus best positioned to communicate reasonable grievances and demands if presented with such.

 

I don't want to burst that bubble but no. That's not going to work. A "community" project of that size MUST fail.

 

Yes and apparently he meant it, because he is F***ing over all Unity users who don't monetize their games properly enough.

I used to think his comment wasn't that bad, in the light of this move, I changed my mind.