Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

not going to happen lurking ninja also unity had to close offices cause people are trying to kill employees now and for good reason thanks to unity's greed

 

Epic: that is so unreal

 

The linux kernel says hi.

 

If you took half a second to read my previous posts, you would have found out that I'm an advocate for MIT-licensed engines with no royalty model. Take a minute to cool off your head and direct your hatred to anywhere other than FOSS advocates. I'm only going to ask this nicely once.

 

Sadly I don't think I can afford to just scrap all the time and money I invested into my little project. I'm no quick learner, so migrating it to another engine may cost much time. So as this sh*t goes on I have to continue using Unity to finish it, fml.
Maybe I can get rid of unity in my next one. wish me luck guys

 

Not about his whole customer base but of people who have the opportunity to monetize and do not.
Also c'mon that was clearly joking. Better someone who doesn't have "their tongue in check" than someone who makes secret plots.

 

And if you took the time to read my posts, you'd see I'm on the same side.

You posted a bad take and I dragged you for it. And I'll do it again next time.

 

Unity just followed Unreal charging with a different way, there is nothing that Unreal did not do first, take a whole 5% of your earnings if are very successful.

Plus Unity in some cases can end up taking millions less, so is still better.

In some marginal cases where games absolutely have to be paid for less than $0.02 then indeed can be a problem, but i am sure they will have handled that somehow by January

 

The linux kernel is not a game engine and basically a piece of cake compared to such a beast like Unity. The main issue is that you will need some strong leader otherwise everyone tries to drive it into different directions.

 

They have raised the sub cost several times now, now they're asking money per install. There's no reason to believe these costs won't raise in the future. Even if they are not bankrupting most people right now, they could in the future and it'll apply retroactively. And a lot of indie mobile studios can't even survive this initial change.

 

The biggest relatively recent premium/desktop games I can think of that used Unity are KSP2, Cities Skylines 2, and BBI’s Homeworld prequel Deserts of Kharak.

And speaking of, I wonder how deflated the mood has gotten at Colossal Order, whose sequel comes out next month, and Intercept, since KSP2 is in early access and thus already racking up install volume daily (since early access doesn’t qualify for the theoretical demo exemption). I also wonder how BBI feels about having a Unity game that’s likely to see a bump in sales and reinstalls to new computers once Homeworld 3 (made in Unreal) launches early next year, since they almost certainly stopped paying a Pro subscription years ago.

 

For a small scale project, it might be worth spending at least a few hours talking to the Godot community and experimenting with GPT4 to see how good it is at porting your code over. No promises, but it might be easier than you think.

 

There is no good reason to wanting to kill employee

About the death threat, it was made by an Unity's employee on social media, while being far from the threatened place, so it was basically a no actions that got blown-up of proportion to divert attention away from the real issues.

 

Dear Mr. James Arndt,

Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

Unity has a responsibility to maximize shareholder value, but it also has ethical and contractual obligations to its developers. The company retains the right to change its pricing structure for future contracts, but it should not retroactively alter existing agreements without developer consent. Doing so would constitute a breach of contract and undermine trust.

Many developers are understandably upset, as this behavior raises questions about Unity's reliability as a business partner. The leadership team should consider the long-term impact on developer relationships when prioritizing short-term profits. The choices made today will have lasting consequences for the company's reputation.

 

I do not care which side you are on. You strawmanned me and lied worse than a dog. I will happily drag dogs any time. You will only get treated nicely once. Remember that.

 

Ouch, feeling bad for the CS2 devs. Weeks before your big release and your entire business model needs to be revalidated.

 

On a whim, to be in place in a few months, and applied to games developed on the old TOS

For all the developers they are offering to waive 80-100% of the fee to join levelplay - for how long? Until they have you settled, then they are letting you off the hook for millions every year. You have no negotiating ground - you are at Unity's mercy

try another platform for UA? Thats a million less we will waive next year. Reduced your spend with us because it wasn't hitting ROAS? HMM i think we'll make that up from your pockets as our shareholders were expecting that money. We will now only waive 50% of the fee

Not making any ad revenue on our crap levelplay solution? Dont even consider testing another mediation or the fees apply. WE OWN YOU NOW YA HEAR. You are locked in across the board. It kills innovation and growth because now you rely on them for everything and they control what you owe and what you get paid.

What the actual F*** are they thinking

 

Good news is that it's just a matter of copy/paste for John now (from his ea days message: https://www.ea.com/news/from-john)

My decision to leave EA is really all about my accountability for the shortcomings in our financial results this year. It currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued to the Street, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago. And for that, I am 100 percent accountable.
​

Just replace EA by Unity, thanks.

 

I have a bad idea which probably counts as accepting Unity's new terms but I'm going to post it anyway because daydreaming of malicious compliance is fun. Here's an email template:
---------
Unity,

Due to recent changes in your billing structure, my studio <studio> needs to review existing installations to identify which ones were legitimate..

Please send an itemized list of every install of my project <insert project name> with enough identifying information to cross-reference my own records.

As this needs to be done by the first of the year, and my game was published on <publish date>, I will need the records immediately.

Thank you,
<studio>
------------

 

Some clauses are a bit fuzzy, and at this point, I link to my post https://forum.unity.com/threads/changes-to-pricing.1492628/, sorry, I had not seen this discussion, some things would need to be clarified.
Then... well, I disapprove of this bribe.

 

You would owe Unreal nothing if published on the Epic Games Store. Also don't forget to price in the Unity Pro licenses you would need to pay every month per developer.

 

Blender had its teething period too, open source projects get more organised and better run once they hit critical mass and people start volunteering to do the more mundane things. In fact when open source projects get consumed by corporations is when they start to fail, like redhat where people just jump ship and there's no one left to muck in.

 

I have always respected the employees at Unity, they spent a large amount of time helping me become a publisher. They have always been honest and open minded. The ethos of Unity has always me feel good using it. Thank you for all your work and I am sure this painful for everyone, especially the employees. I wish I could be in Amsterdam this year, I have great memories of Austin. At my next meetup group, I will make sure we talk about Unity and what we can do to support each other from little devs to big devs.

 

"lied worse than a dog". No, I called out your theoretical whataboutism (which is even worse than actual whataboutism when you think about it). Beyond that, the whole 'you only get treated nicely once' is very.. internet in the 90's so definitely keep it up, I only foresee good things happening.

 

This is only true if you BELIEVE in their words that their black box AI-supported random number generator actually tells you the truth about the number of installs and your supposed revenue... I wouldn't trust them for a microsecond.

 

Does anyone really only publish in one store ? That would limit the profit exponentially

 

Yep no matter how much riot is going on here, nobody absolutly nobody at unity will really care, ever.
Only once the giant huge players which have the ad services running boycott something might happen, might!

 

They now created a https://fund.godotengine.org/ fund blender style. Its a matter of time when more studios will tap in and sponsor the development

 

Well at least some portion of ur revenue is exempt from the royality share .

 

Wikipedia is another good example of a large scale publicly funded project. The secret seems to be 'having a funding plan from the start (even if its donations)' and 'using some of that money to pay for staff to run the project governance professionally'.

 

The best dev open letter so far in my opinion;

https://twitter.com/dreamfeelx/status/1702640218950525232

 

Basically its impossible to get an invoice from unity with this model.

So, Unity needs to provide YOU as a developer a transparent metric how many installs in which time where made.

At the moment they just say:

We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.


"Estimates of a number of times" .... thats like you would say

Unity: " I estimate you own me 100k $."

You: "no"

Unity: "yes, pay me now"

You:" proof me, how many"

Unity: " We cant, we jsut believe".


Sorry, but in which world we live where people can get charged, when the you cant provide correct numbers.

Thats pure illegal, and on every Court you win this.

Basically you only need to ask Unity when it will comes for accurate numbers, and no aggregation estimation.



Besides this.... just one question:

So you need to reach 200k sold copies liftime, and in the last 12 months 200k .... when both conditions are met devs need to pay.


What is when 12 months are over ... so basically you hit the 13th month (for example you release on january and 13 months later its february next year), the first month will not count anymore and that would mean when you made in 12 months for example 220k

you exceeded the threshold by 20k --> you need to pay unity.

one mont hlater (13 months) they need to exlude the revenue from the first month. (for example you made on release 50k)

Which would mean on the 13th month 220k - 50k = 170k --> you are again under the thrreshold but over the liftime copies sold..... but again BOTH conditions needs to be met.... which would mean you do not need to pay Unity.


I think under the acutally condtions it should be correct.

 

This is indeed a valid concern, more clarity on this would definitely be very welcome.

Also since this is a hard topic, maybe they are still working on the specific and final version of that scheme, so we will see. Also the publisher could dispute their numbers with actual sales easily and i doubt they want to be in the position to be sued for that.

 

sounds like a good part of IT discussion, how business decisions on paper to 1 person look good and to many others can be lunacy

 

LOL stuff like this should be worked out before they made an announcenemnt. They should have ready answers for most obvious questions 3 days ago when they made an announcement....but devs here only got silence for the most part .

 

GO NINJA GO NINJA GO GO!

Code (CSharp):

1. import docker
2.  
3. def install_application(image_name, install_command, iterations):
4.     client = docker.from_env()
5.     for _ in range(iterations):
6.         container = client.containers.run(image=image_name, detach=True, command=install_command)
7.         container.wait()
8.         container.remove()
9.  
10. if __name__ == "__main__":
11.     app_image = "your-app-image:latest"
12.     install_command = "your-install-command"
13.     iterations = 1000
14.     install_application(app_image, install_command, iterations)

 

Yeah for all the explosive stuff in the thread, it being a public forum and all.

I think everyone would agree Unity developers do an outstanding job and this really isn't your fault. I think most would also agree that Unity deserves more too - just absolutely not like this...it's insane.

Just can't fathom how anyone with an ounce of technical experience thinks that mapping installs to a billing cycle makes sense. The wishy-washy farfetched back and forth with the messaging in the first day shows how out of touch it was. Even Troy Kirwin's twitter thread - it screams ignorance on technical implementation. Brought it up before but the Xbox One launch is so similar to this. Everyone had a different idea of how it worked. This obviously is on a grander scale for effective peoples livelihoods.

I wonder if dropping personal to some free trial without exports and having plus/pro be the only tiers would help. People are willing to pay for tools at that cost. Plus price is similar to that of Ableton or DAW's/Adobe/whatever movie makers (granted it's a sub but you get rolling updates).

Imagine Ableton asking for money every time your song gets played on a new Spotify account >.<

 

I don't think they care at all. It's obvious to me the executive team at Unity is completely out of touch with the developers and the end-users. Not in a million years would I renege on a business deal and change the terms of the deal without the other party's consent, and do so retroactively, in a way to claw back value from a deal I had already agreed to!

At any point during any of the deliberations on this pricing change did anyone say, "Hey, isn't it wrong for us to change the deal after the fact?"

 

Even if you publish to multiple stores, all sales coming from the Epic Games Store don't count for the 5%. This is definitely a nice bonus. Also Unreal editor is free to use, no monthly fees. So there's basically zero upfront cost when developing using Unreal engine.

 

For those who would like a little summary of the recent news...

 

That's not it either. They won't clarify anything. This is part of the plan, to be the most opaque possible, leaving the more ground to cook up some numbers if needed. And there will be unfortunate developers who either can't think this true or they have no choice to accept it because of various reasons.

After Tuesday I do not give Unity any benefit of a doubt. They have the worst intentions when it comes to business relationships.
(This doesn't apply to engineers and developers, obviously)

 

You speak as if Unity had ever replied to one of your emails. Lucky you! I sent them a sales question 2 weeks ago, and still nothing. they never, ever, answered to my questions sent via the support form during the years I've been using Unity (Plus account).

But I am sure their communication will improve, now that *not responding will make them earn more*.

 

This. Until you make $1,000,000 with that game it's way cheaper than Unity, cause it's free. Even after $1,000,000 it still might be cheaper depending on your team size and how fast you make that $1,000,000 due to Unitys subscription fee alone, not even talking about the new per install bullshit.

 

We gonna see about that... What Unity did was not only proving that you can just step forward out of the blue with most senseless idea but also damaged company and engine image. If you are unlucky, using unity gonna be a badge of game to be avoided by the players (partialy as a semi-meme and partialy due to negative feedback from indie studios that were propagated to many fanbases).
You people act like you are too dumb to understand what the problem is (which may be the case judging by the new policy and your response to criticism). You need money? Fine, you provide product and reguire funding to do so is only just. Hell, I would roll even with twice the rate of unreal engine (but same way of charging it), but why on earth you came with installation fee? This is horrible idea for many reasons that were stated befor* and anyone with brain could easly see it. How ffs can engenering company propose a solution that is not only imprecise but also easy to exploit and which outcome cost is unpredictable. Isn't stability and predictability very important in bussines? Are you not only tech (engineering such faulty pricing mechanics suggest so) but also bussiness illiterates? Damn, that makes thing worse. I mean, one can make a mistake, but to design something so ridiculous is another level (by a huge company with number of experts onboard). How can we trust that Unity has any future with such poor decision making? I'm really speechless (well not really as you see ). :/

For me, the only chance for unity to minimalize damage is to axe higher management or be acquired by some third part, othervise you seem to be loonies, and making bussines with loonies is not something that one would like to do (so you gonna bleed badly).

* reminder of couple of mine:
- payment based on evaluation provided by external entity (Unity) not on factual data - if the system is by design prone to [unintentionally] 'harm' the dev which have to prove his case (so the weight and stress of such scenaio is on the dev);
- cost per user / purchase is impossible to calculate since player can not only reinstall the game but also have a multiple devices (e.g. PC, Steam Deck, notebook);
- cost generating event and income generating event are independent in time - so costs generated by old titles can harm new release income;
- system can in theory generate uncapped cost - c'mon guys are really making bussiness environment less stable something that in your oppinion will be wellcome by [especially] small entities / solo devs (put aside the real cost generated for them; you are just generating stress and uncertainty);
- tracking installation is bad PR (cuz user will asume that their device is / may be tracked) - reason to drop unity to avoid alientaing playerbase;

 

But it is developers that will just not pay, then Unity will take to court, then Unity will loose if their numbers are false.

Unity will be trying to reach developers to pay, not other way around.

I dont think they are naïve enough to go that way.

 

ahahahah!!! Fantastic!

 

Define "theoretical whataboutism". If it means the speaker of said "theoretical whataboutism" is making an implicit endorsement of either party, that would be an admittance that you were, indeed, a liar.

By the way, this corporate cockfight is the stuff that's actually reminiscent of not just the 90s, but also the 80s. This is the Nintendo vs SEGA cockfight in a different coating. Good things happening indeed. (that's a joke, they are both bad companies in case you need it spelt out)

 

Yes, and you will have to pay to your lawyer instead of Unity. Great Success!

 

Well, we can't say that not everyone is milking the situation.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-danger-of-unity-s-attempt-to-charge-the-top-10-percent-