Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

And they were a huge waste of money that could have been invested in improving the engine. Something a game engine company should probably care about.

It's me I'm Jim Ford. I make cars that people enjoy but for reasons that are not clear to me my next ten years of R&D money is being invested in pokemon cards. Now all my car designs are showing their age but I need to start charging the people still buying my cars a distance tax to ensure I have enough revenue for more of those sweet cards.

 

You and others can feel that way. It's not invalid, you guys are what make Unity great. Still, it is a publicly traded company now, and all executive teams for public companies serve at the discretion of the board members and thusly, shareholders. Believe me, I'd much rather you at the helm or any other person that worked on the editor and runtime products.

I loved all my coworkers at my previous companies, I consider them to be what the company is. I also understand that they are not beholden to me, or would always have my best interests at heart; I think UT made that apparent too given they deemed a merger more valuable than 700+ employees they've laid off.

Hoping for the best for you and all the other folks contributing the actual value to UT. You guys deserve much better.

 

Correlate number of installs with average expected subscription tier level. Also look at whether they've self reported, high priority given to those that haven't yet. Much like how Adobe or Microsoft tracks install numbers associated with geolocation to flag 'suspected' abuses of the licensing agreement. Unity has somehow manage to do this in the past before this (likely used install tracking already in the past), and I wouldn't put it past other engines like Epic to already have a similar system to initiate audit too.

The carrot for self-reporting is the reduced effective royalty rate.

Once you start the self report process, you're legally on the hook for outright fraudulent numbers. While those that haven't yet can try and sneak under the radar but the automated flagging algorithm will eventually kick in the process. If the OP claims zero or 200k-1 revenue, Unity can simply assign someone to find the retail price and see if it is within ballpark of the reported number. If OP is belligerent, they can then package up the evidence pass it to the BSA, of which Unity is a member. BSA is very used to dealing with these types of things (eg. Adobe, etc).

 

No one is defending him, but Unity's problems won't get fixed with (just?) him gone and the insider trading stuff are silly.

 

The CEO is appointed by the board of directors and answers to them. But the board still aren't 'in charge' in an operational sense.

The CEO has an obligation to act ethically and not 'run the company into the ground' even if the board really wants it, because the CEO works for ALL shareholders not just the board.

 

Have you never seen VFX in a video game before? Although to be honest this was a purchase more for the film industry than video games.

 

Have you seen a billion dollars worth of improvements in the Unity engine in the last few years?

 

Now they are rolling out the guilt trip / "we're in it together" guy here. Day 4. Hold your ground people. Do not ever agree to using installs as a metric.

 

Yes. A senior developer is much more expensive than people realize, and there are at least a thousand developers working on the engine.

 

Have you seen '1000 FTE worth of improvement in the engine'? Because the number of people working on UE5 and in particularly the recently released 5.3 might surpise you.

Compare the release notes for
Unity 2023.1.0: https://unity.com/releases/editor/whats-new/2023.1.0

to UE5.3: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/unreal-engine-5.3-release-notes/

One reads like a maintenance patch and one reads like they've got a bunch of really cool features they can't wait to show you.

 

I doubt that number. What were they working on in the past years?

 

Yes. Just because you're fascinated with the shinies doesn't mean it isn't there.

 

@JamesArndt

I have a question similar to that of Antiquity83. What if I won't collect data from my players?
I wound prefer not to bother them with superfluous data collection and opt-in or opt-out boxes.
I thought it was possible if I don't use ads or analytics, this is not for a F2P game.
Is that still possible with Unity (maybe an old version)?

 

900 of them were working on implementing IronSource into Unity so they could track our installs

 

I appreciate your perspective and hard work. We all have loved the hard work of the Unity staff that created this great environment until now.

But what I would have liked would have been a simple flat fee for the software. Look at it from any other perspective and you can see how adbsurd this pricing fee is:

• Adobe doesn't take money every time a photo edited by it gets viewed on the Internet or printed.
• A book written with Word or distributed by PDF also doesn't earn Microsoft or Adobe money every time it is reprinted.
• A song I record in Cubase doesn't earn Steinberg money every time someone listens to or downloads it.
• Fender guitars aren't owed money every time someone records a successful song with one or performs with one on stage.

This business model is unprecedented and completely unacceptable. It would be unacceptable in any industry. Look at any analogy and you will see the same.

Your company could have just made us all pay $100-1000 flat rate to buy a software license if you are going bankrupt and can't control costs.

As it is I cannot work with this existing plan and have no choice but to keep trucking on testing and porting to new alternatives, as I started last night.

 

This post needs a lot more exposition.

 

I'm gonna say it. From all the names mentioned, I respect John the most. At least he has some clue about the gaming industry. Nobody knows if it's true, but if it is, well, we are in for some S***ty ride.

 

Yeah, I didn't bother reading most of it, but it seemed to be enough to get the impression that we're screwed.

 

And then pay them more money for the software on a monthly basis, for every seat, than an unpredictable installs metric. Either way they're going to get paid monthly. Pretty cunning move.

 

Unity said they won't charge for fraudulent or repeat installs on the same device. Come on man, don't you trust their proprietary algorithm is accurate? /s

Oh and they have a way for YOU to determine fraud has occurred and YOU to reach out and YOU to prove it and YOU to request not to pay for those. Nevermind you won't have any data on anything.

 

Never sell your majority share to anyone, kids.

 

Check the patch notes I released. Unity are practically in maintenance mode.

PS: What you call 'shinies' are the engine features that devs want to use in their games and would be willing to pay a premium (e.g. a flat 5% royalty) for.

You have the exact same contempt for users that the execs seem to have.

 

Its called "denial" phase

 

You could have written it in less time if your first search had directed you to ChatGPT.

Some of us never go through those phases because for us the engine is just a tool.

 

There's no 'unless' about it. Using the lower tier licenses isn't allowed for revenue >$100K. If you make $200k and are still on Personal, you are violating the terms you agree to on that Personal license.

 

That was removed.

 

Wrong user... Metron is my official company user... this one is a private one...

 

I hate to say it too, but I worked at EA when JR was at the helm, and as much S*** as he got, he did understand the gaming industry. It sucks he had to bring in the microtransaction bullshit, but he got Visceral created which brought us Dead Space. Everyone's pointing the finger at him, because he's an easy target. Not saying that he didn't F*** up along the road, but Unity was pretty much screwed when they went public, and we all knew it.

 

These issue with these graphs is:

1. You'd have to have been making over $200,000 (or $1 mio) over the past 12 months from this game in order to have to pay Unity.
2. But now you happen to be at an average revenue per install of $0.25 or less. This isn't going to happen suddenly, so you could see it coming that your business is not financially sustainable, with or without Unity's fees.

 

Important reading about how Riccitiello is being ruined by the shareholders - they are to blame. Unity going public is to blame.

 

Another outcome of this is radical microtransactions price increase in f2p games , so players are in the lost now

 

Dammit... posted with the wrong user

I go on holidays once per year... and look what I've come back to... You really can't go unsupervised, can you?

Jokes aside... this really is one big clusterf***. From communication to the actual numbers, everything looks completely wrong. As if Loki has taken over Unity...

The indie devs concerns are all valid. Some get the numbers wrong but for most parts the charts are correct.

What's most disturbing, is Unity's new definition of "Unity Runtime". Yes, it's a runtime, but devs have paid for it by paying the license fees (seats per month). Trying to get a share of the installation base might seem to be a "logical" choice for the C-levels (because they're constantly reminding us of the number of installed games), but, as many have pointed out, installations do not mean income.

Devs have told Unity multiple times that a revenu-based share would be ok if it's within reasonable margins (and if it would have a certain threshold dependent on the license they have). And Unity told us multiple times that they don't want to adhere to such a system.

Instead, they now opted for the worse system that anyone could imagine.

I only can shake my head in disbelief. The more money they have, the greedier they get...

 

Wow. The Unity Curve of Death visualized. This is why I have no choice but to leave even though it will cost me months.

 

It's certainly not sustainable with Unity rolling into snatch up 80% of your revenue.

 

I am just not that flexible, and take rather long time to find into stuff, their naming in the API ist different and and somepoint a bit of a brainfuck.

 

I heard that stuffedpinkowl got banned for posting funny videos in this thread ... watch out, there might be narcs about.

 

meh. Getting banned is like the last thing I worry about now.

 

oh no, I've seen this before... TWO MORE WEEKS.
This silence is a smart move that breeds confusion and misinformation. The longer the community spends with infighting and useless debating, the better. They might be shifting our attention towards measures that won't change a single thing in the end.

 

So can anyone from Unity explain this.

In 2019 you posted the article "Updated Terms of Service and commitment to being an open platform" containing this section:

Retroactive TOS changes

When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS.

In practice, that is only possible if you have access to bug fixes. For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project.

Moving forward, we will host TOS changes on Github to give developers full transparency about what changes are happening, and when. The link is https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService.

Except as of this post, that repository/page/link is dead.

 

Blizzard: "Don't you guys have phones?"
Me: "Dang, you can't get more disconnected from your playe-"
Unity: "Hold my beer."

 

Those graphs are gold at illustrating how impossibly ridiculous this whole thing is and need more people seeing them!!!!

Nobody can be that stupid. They MUST BE deliberate

 

I wonder if any YouTubers posted the https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/page-190 link to see how everybody feels good and bad

 

for pc games is not that bad:
If you have a game and sell it with 20USD, let say you make 10USD/unit.
200.000 units are free-> first 2 mil USD you earn unity gets 0 USD.
Unreal starts taking money after 1mil USD.
Then you pay 2000 USD/year until you reach 1 mil units.

When you reach 1 mil units you already got 10 mil USD-> unity gets 2000 USD per year. If 5 years- 10k USD
unreal wants 5% of what is over 1mil usd-> unreal gets 450k USD

When you reach 2mil units you got 20 mil USD- Unity gets 15kUSD(first 100.000 units)+ 30K USD(100k-500k units)+15k USD (500k- 1mil Units)-> Total Unity gets 60k USD vs Unreal 900k USD

When you reach 3 mil units you got 30 mil USD-> Unity 60k+20K=80k USD; Unreal 1.350 mil USD

 

Per seat.

And how many installs is that? Your math is wrong, you are using the wrong variables.

 

Cool. Then they raise the prices and lower the thresholds.

Then again...

Then again...

Etc

 

In this case, I am willing to pay more licensing fees to UE, rather than relying on a swinging number from the bingo.

 

Yeah, I'm still waiting for Mike Geig to come back and bring in his promised fee calculator so he can prove that this payment scheme is so much better than the 5% rev share.

 

The point is not that the fee is "not too bad", it's that they changed the terms that devs agreed upon when they decided to use/pay for Unity.

It is not okay to start charging fees for games that were released years ago. All games made prior to Jan 2024 should *not* be part of this new fee structure, period.

 

maybe and just maybe if unity didn't go around buying useless S*** like notorious virus companies this wouldn't had been necessary... Focus on the things you're good at; Making an amazing engine and the tools there in instead of spreading S*** so thick that it litterally in cutting your bottom line... I strongly regret my plus subscription over the past 5 years now...

 

You just got wrong a tiny little thing. They charge for install. Any of your user could install your game one time, uninstall, get it on steam, uninstall, and so on. And you have no way to check Unity data that says that you had 2,3,5...10! installs. And there is no way (paying taxes, wages, HW, offices, and so on) you can take 10$ out of 20$. It's impossible.

 

It's a really long flight.