Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I'm not pissed off at you, I'm tired of people flinging around "shill" when they have, again, no idea what or who they're talking about.

 

I still remember when Unreal was more expensive and very unfriendly to indie devs. That's why I chose Unity over Unreal back then. Yes, every company can change. If Unity dies completely, Unreal could change too.

 

Joke's on you, murgilod is always pissed off

 

Sure... hey, no judging here.

 

> Unity isn't profitable

Not with this vultures

 

This isn't my first rodeo. I've migrated to new programming languages, frameworks, and engines before in the past and I have no problems dropping this engine when it only takes me a few weeks to become comfortable with a new one. Unreal is in my sights because that's the most likely source of contracts out of the alternatives.

 

That waiving the fee is probably only for big companies using AppLovin who swap to Unity's ad network. Anyone else might get a discount, but the need to contact them probably points to a deal based on how much it is worth to them to offer you anything.

Unrelated, there is a free book bundle for International Day of the Programmer that includes a Godot book. Either the timing is perfect for everything Godot has done, or it is just normal for them to be in the news, but we haven't heard here. https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/international-day-of-the-programmer-2023-free-giveaway

 

Wish i would be so fluent in learning these things, but entry into Flaxengine is done.

 

It just boggles my mind how people in positions of power can make such stupid decisions. Unity will lose a lot more than gain with this. The whole ecosystem loses: Unity, Unity employees, developers, asset store creators.

It's fine for Unity to want to increase revenue. But it would be so simple to just use a revenue share system like Unreal does. Using installs as an arbritrary number that Unity itself controls with no transparency is just utterly stupid. It creates SO MANY problems.

I'm fortunate enough to be in kind of beginning stages of my project, and I'm probably going to be moving over to another engine. Even if they "revert" or "fix" those changes, Unity has shown that it can pull things like this anytime. It's unreliable.

 

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.

is not 0.05% and even if it was is still better than nothing if unity goes bankrupt

I care

 

Oh okay Mr know it all. If you're so great on this subject maybe you can answer us -

How are you going to track the number of installs of your game post release?

Ignore the thresholds for a second, and Think. Say you got 200k in revenue - which really isn't a lot, and then some bots spammed installs. Which WILL happen. You can not trust anyone in software development. There needs to documented standards and tools to protect us. Not proprietary models and corporate generic responses with a help line.

So big guy, answer that one question.

 

Flax is tempting from a purely personal project perspective for C# 11 and .NET 7.

Are we referring to the same thing? I'm talking about John R selling $80,000 worth of shares out of $145,000,000.

 

Woah.. what's the deal with Flax? Looks awesome - never heard of it!!

 

Buddy, If you think your company is gonna survive without a 100% backtracking of this entire thing, you're F***ing delusional. Even IF you said "we're sorry, we're not doing it," you're still damaged MASSIVELY.

If you're saying "we're not quite gonna backtrack on it," its over. You're toast. Collect your salary until the inevitable layoff/closure. You're DONE.

 

I agree. Taking down the TOS git repo shows this has been a plan a year or more in the making.

In past controversies when Unity realized they made a mistake, they were quite open and communicative. This is different. They are staying silent this time. I think one of two things is happening:

1 - They are just hoping this controversy calms down and blows over
2 - The executives just simply don't care about your little people concerns

So I don't expect a retraction. They will likely smooth out a few of the rough edges next week, but the core problems will remain. If they do make a retraction it will only be to slap a new coat of paint on the same plan and announce it as a way better system while essentially unchanged.

 

I usually don't use forums, but i just should say something:
To those people, who are saying that Unity somehow have to make money, or really in any stage of acceptance or negotiation - sorry, but are you completely out of your mind?

A lot of us, if not most, decided to use Unity specifically for the lack of any fees. This was their decision, their business practice to make us pay just for the license. NO ONE MADE IT FOR THEM, no one forced them to it, no. They've made this decision a long time ago and it was for us to accept it or search for different options.

And now they are doing complete reversal of that idea with an excuse of "we're poor, gib money, this wont affect you anyways". NO. Just no way we should even negotiate this.

Even doubling down to "sales fee", like Unreal does, is not an option. Why? Simply because most of us already have projects, especially on previous versions of Unity (2020, 2021 LTS, etc), when license was our only burden.

Making their recent move is not just illegal or unethical, it is straight out evil - hoping that most Unity devs are so deep into their projects, they will just eat it and pay.

This should NOT be an option, or matter of negotiation. They have one and only choice - reverse it completely. Wanna go into the most despicable money-making practice created in the entire history of software development? Okay, sure, it's your choice to ruin your company, but you simply cannot enforce it to an existing versions of the engine. Go ahead, make it "starting from 2023/2024 version, using you are agreeing to these fees" and no one will ever continue to make Unity games after finishing their current projects. But hey, it's you choice.

But we, as a developers, as a community, should not negotiate. And if they wont reverse it?
Give them hell. Crack Unity open, straight out ignore them, destroy everything they believe. But do not negotiate or pay anything.

Just thinking of this "per-install fee" makes me loosing my mind. How, just how anyone could come up with such idea... Tell someone a few years ago that we would have to pay for someone installing our game - you would end up in a psychiatric ward. Now it is a questions - what idea should be created by this greedy corporations next and who will be the one to make it... But hey, we have more urgent matter to deal with.

And to end this on a positive note - to everyone being completely lost right now - don't be. I know, how it feels, i'm just as stuck as you are. But there is no problems in our industry that cannot be solved. Just cool your head, go play some games or walk somewhere, wait for a few days, and if this situation continues - switch the engine. I know, i know, it's not an easy task. But you can do it. Besides, it is always good for your brain to learn something new, you'll just get smarter. It's a win-win anyways. Otherwise finish your project with Unity and never return to this pile of unfinished "engine". But don't let this news harm you, it is not what you deserve.

Keep it going guys,
Ilia Paley.

 

From what I gather, they can't back out. The engine is mainly subsidized by mobile ads and Apple are coming down on that with privacy policy changes. Furthermore, mass layoffs and hiring freezes across the industry means licensing revenue also won't grow and it's never been able to sustain the giant that is Unity. They also think AI will enable smaller teams to create AAA level content, which will also cut into licensing revenue. They're also heavily bleeding money from badly managed growth and unsustainable R&D.

Rolling back is not an option, they need a new business model so they don't go out of business in 2-3 years. Sadly, they went the worst possible way about it.

 

Wise choice, I did the switch too, Flax is great, 64-bit coordinates support is something I always wanted in Unity.

 

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.

is actually around $4.000.000. stop looking at just one day before

 

Just don't pay. I like your style. How do they have enough employees to track down every Unity project and determine if we've met the revenue threshold to even begin paying?

 

Selling of shares as a person involved in the company is extremely tightly regulated. Governments have realized long time how tempting manipulation would be otherwise...

 

Unity does have to make money if you want them to stick around, but part of that is keeping us happy and it seems that they forgot the memo on that.

 

He sold more earlier than that but sales are planned months in advance for executive officers. It's part of what allows them to sell shares in the first place. You can find my links to the SEC rules and regulations a few pages back that go into full detail on that.

You can find the filing for his sale at the link below as well as the shares he currently has after the sale.

https://www.secform4.com/filings/1810806/0001810806-23-000163.htm

 

Pretty much this. People are obsessed with attacking from every angle and unfortunately this is drowning the actual issues.

 

Runtime Tax was planned months ahead too.
It makes it worse if it was only 0.05% of his shares.
A CEO selling shares sends a message. Like a captain asking the crew to get a boat ready for him.
It is not worth giving bad reputation to Unity for this little amount.
But you're right that no one cares.
I know nothing' going to change, they probably already have given carrots to moody studios and brought them back on board.

 

They are not going to back track, so there is no point in discussing the issues, just make plans that are appropriate for you.

 

Why are you so sure? I'm not trying to get at you, I am simply wondering if I missed anything

 

Except if you take into account these transactions and the timeframes they have to be planned in, you can see the other things going on, like the stock prices and trends at the time. This is an attempt to build a conspiracy when it's really much more simple than that: the way ad revenue is working on mobile is about to change and Unity makes a lot of money from that. Because the change isn't in their favour, something we've known about these changes for some time, they're shifting the way revenue is collected.

It's Occam's Razor. You don't need to invent stuff.

 

That's not true. They could back out and try again with better conditions. Not losing a substantial part of the community here. Again, Unity using indies (including my clients and bigger fish, all over twitter this week) aren't against sharing their revenue with Unity. We're against sharing this way. Those years are enough to work out something.

 

For me it's the statements we've been shown from the indie studios that have discussed things in the backroom with them and have still decided to leave. One of the recent ones (I can't remember where the link is but it's on Twitter) mentioned that they were left with the distinct impression Unity was fully committed.

 

Hmmm... so hypothetically, if I make a F2P (Free to play) game and decide not to use any of unity's services, I get charged $.20 cents per install after the given threshold.

So, if my game gets 1million downloads, and I finally hit the 200k revenue in say 4 months, then I will owe unity (given that the download is exactly 1 million), $160,000 from my just hitting $200k, thereby I will make $40k...

but if the installs are beyond the 1million.. then a little creeping $.02 cents


I feel it is pretty common for f2p or freemium games to reach said downloads in a few months or heck year.. dang. Or am I missing something?

 

We've been told that you can upgrade to Unity Pro and have the increased thresholds applied immediately.

 

The only thing I’m keeping the Unity editor around for is to generate stuff I don’t have alternatives for yet (like trees, which I make with Broccoli from the asset store), which can be exported and transferred to Godot.

 

We know what you're trying to say but the problem is no one that isn't on the team has actual information aside from speculation. Sold shares isn't really proof of anything, and especially when he's barely sold any.

 

Unity bought IronSource for 4.4 billion dollars? Never knew that. That makes absolutely no reasonable sense, I can only assume that the purchase was done as some sort of crony capitalism backroom dealing that directly financially benefited a handful of people. So now they are pretty much forced to use IronSource tech, which objectively, doesn't even work in this application of the tech, and can't be used in this model, and can't be shown to work, and is considered basically malware by most people.

This one move sunk the company. Which incredibly sucks, that a couple of super rich CEOs can single-handedly destroy the entire work of 7500+ staff working on an excellent project, for their own personal wealth expansion.

4.4 billion. That could have covered operating costs for years, even if they were losing money. If half of that. 2.2 billion (!!) was spend on improving Unity itself, and maybe $200 million offered in grants to promote development say, Unity could have been made into the best engine on the market, and secured another decade of popular use. This is just a sad story all-around.

The pay-per-install concept is incredibly flawed, and whoever made this the business plan going forward for Unity can't be fired, because they are on the top...and no matter how bad of an idea it is, they are forced to justify the purchase of IronSource, because it was purchased at such an inflated price, for unknown reasons, that management has to use it, even if it kills the entire company.

This just stinks and sucks all-around. It's just a sad state of affairs, and these actions will be remembered as the decisions that ended Unity, I'd bet my future negative game royalties on it.

 

The thing is, this indie revolt is a rounding error for Unity. PC/Console devs are the minority of licensing sub revenue, which itself is a minority within Unity's total revenue. We don't use ads so Unity don't care about us. Unity is not a game engine company. Unity is a mobile services/ads company that also has a game engine.

 

I agree.
Make big acquisitions to get stock price higher. Which puts your company in a big debt. Tell that your company needs lots of more money. Just because you've increased Pro License prices last year, invent something new. Make your users pay that debt with a new system (spyware). Profit.

 

It makes perfect sense if you look at Unity's earnings reports and how much they make off ads. Merging with a company that's entirely about ads, analytics, and tracking becomes pretty natural at that point/

The IPO sunk the company, but it was already sinking well before then. There've been numerous decisions for ages, going back to even when they were taking VC money.

 

Hrm. Maybe. What definitely will affect this is if it impacts the console and mobile platform owners. Apple is very particular with how you approach certain things and if they don't like it they are known to kick game engines off their platform.

 

Unity didn't buy ironSource. Both companies merged and share leadership. There was no money spent, they exchanged stock or what ever else happens when companies merge. As for why - Unity's internal ads team F***ed up their Apple iOS data irreversibly, so they got ironSource's data to recover from that. There are also extra synergies, ironSource was always considered better than Unity's native services in mobile space.

 

I wasn't aware of those. That sounds pretty damning.

 

It's also very difficult to tell how much weight these studios can pull. For example, some people are wondering if this is doom for Niantic and Pokemon GO. Who knows what their license actually is, if it's something more exclusive and exempt. It's still 50/50 in my eyes. Either way, as much as I don't like this policy change, I'm part of that 90% that's presumably unaffected, at least for the near future.

 

wtf 2k dollars just for removing splash screen ...

 

It's from Among Us dev: https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1702448286014091754

 

Except you don't agree because you've completely missed the point of what I was saying. The stock sales weren't some big conspiracy or rats fleeing a sinking ship because they simply have never been in quantities where that's the case. Almost all of Unity's acquisitions have been to try (and fail) to branch out into different markets. You are making up conspiracies when the reality is that this is business as usual.

 

This. A 1000% this.

Original link.

 

It's just a return to how things were prior to 2016. Speaking of past decisions Unity Personal used to be Unity Indie and cost $400, and before that there was just a Unity Pro for $1,500. Of course back then the splash screen didn't mean what it does today.

 

Sorry, but what an idiot. The biggest issue here is that Unity changed their pricing model on a whim and retroactively applied it to existing projects that were operating under the old pricing structure. And that's saying nothing about the utterly ridiculous install fee. I have a hard time believing anyone can't see this problem as there are now well over 180 pages on this thread talking about this issue. You are either a paid troll or the most moronic person on here.

 

Also no 'from just hitting'. Hitting your threshold is when you start counting stuff.