Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

But they will assume by your own words. Not about install bombs, but they will assume in general and then bill devs for that assumption. If Unity runtime is not calling back home, then the number is pulled out of their ass based on some data model which could be close to reality or completely wrong, same as something like SteamSpy. We've given 0 reasons to believe they've developed some groundbreaking tech. In fact, all the communication so far indicates they have nothing yet.

 

What? No. But THEY do.

Not everything has to resort to personal attacks yall. If things end up bad I will move too. I dont understand why make this a 'either you completely agree with us or you are sucking their dick' kinda thing.

If you say something dumb or wrong I will tell you that. Whose dick I suck notwithstanding.

 

Anyone who is defending Unity's right to change TOS retroactively should also be fine with Unity sending a bill to everyone who's ever installed a Unity game.

 

I'd still be upset. The only way this could have assuaged my concerns is no retroactive & a maximum percent limit on overall earnings, at a rate similar to Unreal. Where someone who hit these thresholds could owe between 20 cents and 5% of their earnings, but never more.

Because as it stands, there is severe uncertainty on how some games might be affected, and it theoretically could cost them more than they make -> even if in practice, Unity would not go through with that and say "Oh yeah, our model should not end up charging you 110% of your income, we will reduce it to 10%". They very well might do that, but the uncertainty is pretty scary.

 

We are sorry for all the ruffle, here are some free months of unity pro, everything fine now?

 

It shows the disconnect too. If you look at Unitys 10K filings there's no question that the fundamental issue is that Unity needs to make more money, they need a 50% boost to revenue just to break even and more than that to actually generate profit. But, they're trying to raise those rates through a convoluted system that has no upper bound on payments, isn't coupled to revenue generated, and is charged on a metric that Unity is either unwilling or unable to define on a technical or legal level.

They can't back down, because if they back down the retroactive change to the TOS which makes working with Unity going forward a huge business risk is still there, and no one will trust them without provable assurances that won't happen ever again (and of course revoking the current change). And since Unity can't really provide that, they'll never regain the trust of developers. So if they back down, they can't even get back to where they were, and will have nothing to show for it.

But by going ahead everything just gets so much worse. And the real problem here is that they can't make install concessions without explaining how they detect an install and what an install is in the first place. The only "concession" here is their language that if you're using ad's, use their ad platform and they waive the fee. But that's not much of a concession because it locks developers into Unity defined ad rates, which aren't competitive since if they were people would already be using them. So even the install fee concession requires devs take a large revenue hit.

 

Hahaha, someone was bored too much...

 

So does the one asset rule still apply for the free version to publish a game or can we use multiple assets and is there any platform keys for the free version which platform keys will be given out

 

I'm not sure what kind of assurances could be provided, other than the case being decided in court to create a legal precedent that they cannot in fact renegotiate licenses retroactively.

 

So this assumes 50% migrating from Plus to Pro? It's quite a huge jump for people to make, I would think.

 

The options you describe imply a game engine charges money for the product up front. That implies the high school kid learning game dev is charged the same amount as the top engineers at a big studio. That's what a guitar company does. Now of course it's a little different with guitars, because there are thousands of models of guitars at all price levels, including used or hand me downs. There are maybe dozens of game engines to choose from, and you can't find a used copy in a thrift store.

One option to offset this is to offer a free tier with fewer features. Unity did this for quite some time. One downside is that among professionals in the paid tier, there is risk involved. A new studio with only one completed project may have some revenue from their project, but little to no profit. They might need to take out loans to pay the upfront cost of software for their next project, with no guarantee of any return on that investment. That's risky, and discourages anyone to make anything that isn't guaranteed to generate profit, which in this industry is dubious.

A revenue share model has 0 risk to the developer. You can learn the software for free. You can start your new project, for free. You can make an experimental product hoping to be the next viral hit, fail miserably, and not be on the hook for software payment. Those 3 cases are subsidized by successful projects.

None of that is to say that revenue share is the best option. I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting a money-upfront model. I'm just explaining that unlike the other two examples I gave, it is risk free for the developer (at least as far as game engine fees are concerned). tl;dr: revenue sharing makes large, successful projects subsidize new developers, and reduces risks of financial failure for all future developers.

 

Accurately determining installs in the first place isn't possible. No one has ever done it.

However, assuming they actually can determine installs they still have to distinguish between legitimate installs and non legitimate ones. They also have to figure out what an install versus a reinstall is. They have to do this within the scope of privacy laws around the world too.

If you can get install numbers, you can't stop an install bomb. If you can't get install numbers you can't provide an itemized list of install numbers and are instead using it as a proxy for sales numbers. The difference being that one of those two numbers can be proven while the other can't.

Note that in the post you quoted, it even says Unity hasn't figured any of this out.

 

"Using their new pricing scheme,
Unity needs 1,033,559,935 installs to pay the wages it paid its top 5 executives over the last three years.
Yes that's the real number."
https://twitter.com/bobbydigitales/status/1702549567366152349

 

oh.

So Unity is a sinking ship now, not even the Unity staff trust its path. It was a great decade though, I made a buck and the community is lovely. I'll probably give Godot a shot.

Thanks Unity and good luck in the future.

 

Really nothing.
Even if they back track this , the fact they took this long and even attempted to justify this nonsense is enough for any developer with a brain to bail out.

The only way I can think of would be a massive rebranding of Unity, after firing the entire executive committee including the CEO.

This will take months if not years to recover out of. It's why companies need to be extremely careful with PR and marketing. One post is enough to destroy a decade worth of work.

 

I think the reason people are reacting so poorly to this news it because the tool you and your colleagues are creating is so amazing. If Unity wasn't so great, nobody would care if it was taken away from us. Basically I really hope that you and the other employees at Unity are able to

Are you just ignoring what's going on here, are you John Riccitiello on a new account, or are you not understanding how they are screwing themselves for free by changing the terms so drastically and ruining all credibility they have?

 

I'm saying that they have no intent of even trying. This stuff is an afterthought to them.

 

Sure, maybe for cutting grass or painting a living room lol

But if you're making millions of dollars every year selling games made with Unity and you haven't tried negotiating a contract or at least upgrading to Enterprise/Industry licenses then that's on you. At that level you need to treat this like the business it is and not like Mario Maker

 

I have no f... idea what they assume (I have (soon to be "had") plus, so i'm guess unity made me save money...). I just found this article (actually more articles with the same s**t), hoping the unity stocks where much lower (they are not, unfortunately).
That's the problem with investors. They only care what happens until they get money at the end of the fiscal year. After that... nobody cares...

 

https://twitter.com/FreyaHolmer/status/1702763041123684601

 

The more I investigate the more I agree with this assessment. Even the language choice is telling.

Unity users *had* a Python-like language for a decade and rejected it entirely. If Godot were intent on being an alternative to Unity that was intended to compete on Unity's level it would not have taken up the language that nearly no users wanted.

Will the leadership be receptive to the fact that their engine is about to be descended upon by a large group of people who when offered the choice of C# over Python chose C# 9 to 1? Not judging by today's tweets justifying the existence of GDScript.

 

What's a bad news, how can i refund all my assets in unity store? I bought them because of the old fee, but now they update, i dont accept with it, and i dont sure about the new fees in future. so that is a good reason for refunding? You know, these assets just use for Unity engine

 

i hope they are talking about bug fixes and really good features that you can not find on any other game engine...

 

Certainly, but one party can't just unilaterally and retroactively change the terms of a contract, whether it was implied or express. You can revoke the right to future services, but you can't revoke the right to services already provided or promised, and if the other party has already paid whatever you required for those services at the time they were purchased, you can't send them a second bill.

 

lol weta digital to team up with games workshop. If i understand this right that would be (unity x games workshop) correct?

 

That's today. Leaders are the most fickle minded people in the world. It's an afterthought cos they probably didn't have the expertise or resources.

We will just have to wait and see. At least for 2D it's a rock solid alternative.
There's always unreal for some badass 3D projects although it's a bit more than a challenge.

 

I find it semi-amusing that Unity itself and most of the discourse on this issue has not even touched on the refund issue. Wanna know how install-bombing can still happen? The same way review-bombing works on Steam. The process to put some playtime on your account is exactly the same as review-bombing, then you just refund within the 2h-playtime window. There we go, distributors' refund policies are the reason why install-bombing will still work.

 

Here is the problem with that.

I can GUARANTEEEEE you that the upper managment of this company couldn't give a wet(or dry) fart about what happens to this company.
This is something that can only be done, that can only happen when there is NO consideration for this industry OR this product.
Only money.

This is like a experiment for them. See what works. What revenue it creates. If any. Like a drunk dare.

Like I have stated before, unless EVERYONE in upper managment is replaced(certainly the ceo) OR the company is bought up by some benevolent benefactor and delisted, keeping EVERYONE in r&d but letting go of ALL the "paperweights"....this thing is not going to survive.
There are toooo many other options.

For a non programmer like me, this is a major blow because Playmaker was THE(!) asset in my pipeline. As I am much more comfortable with doing art, animation, music and fx. All the artsy stuff(but when is doing ANYTHING in a computer ever really art).

And lets not forget

They are going to give you THEIR invoice based on THEIR "believe me bro" method of mathematic artistry(no further information supplied).
This could HORRIBLY wrong.
For anyone.

And if anyone thinks that having to Lawyer up over something that you believe, now, will not happen, has never happend before, is never going to happen. You are wrong.
Because that is just your experience. There are other experiences out there.

You always have to ask yourself who plays the most convincing game of chicken on a bill that is put to YOU.
Those with the deep pockets to push you to dig into the shallow ones you have, or...well there is no other way this can play out.

Maybe a "Ooops. Our Fault. Sorry"
That would be so classic corporate. Right?

Why take that risk. Deliver yourself into the shadows. Why the hell should that be part of indie game development?

 

No I understand all that. I just think people hoping they are gonna delay this change for a year so they can move out of unity without giving them a dime and hoping unity will do this out of the goodness of their heart are just really, really stupid.

Is it for free? Do you think they are doing this for fun? That they are doing this to charge all the people here with games that wont break 20k on sales? That the guy on top get his rocks off on spreading pain and misery?

I dont want to defend Unity. But if it means I will have to act like a complete idiot and just agree with whatever braindead take and wrong facts thrown here, well no.

Take the guy who said big studious were leaving. About 5 people asked for source and yet where is it? Am I a shill for asking for that? Am I a shill for saying 200K is not the cut point and that anyone that needs to use that to make up their doom numbers is being disingenuous?

Contrary to other people here I take my money very seriously. I aint about to move to a more expensive engine or a worse engine just because I am afraid of doing math. I an mature enough to know that both Unity and Unreal can F*** me over any minute. Overnight epic became paragons of justice.

I will wait till everything is ironed out, then make my decision. Just as most huge studious will, because they aint dumb.

 

I don't disagree, they're certainly handling this aspect of the plan very badly. But the only thing that might be suspect is counting existing sales as the life time install threshold. But the revenue threshold and subsequent fees are only applied to new sales after the plan takes effect in 2024. So I don't think it's altering past transactions. Those devs already got the revenue from those sales and they don't have to pay any fees on them. If they decide they don't agree to the new terms they can stop distributing the runtime come 2024 and not owe any fees

 

Yep, it's an ideologically motivated, reckless, nihilistic experiment in what the public will accept. This is why they remind us, "90% of you won't be affected". To see what levels of depravity general apathy will allow.

 

Yes, I agree those are also reasonable options. Flat Unity fees could be scaled by:

1) Having the ugly splash screen watermark on cheap tier.
2) Have a "student" tier, as many companies offer (including Microsoft) where you get a discount if you're in college/university
3) Charging "per seat" at a company so bigger companies with 400 game devs are paying 400 licenses.
4) Making them annual subscriptions for licensing rather than one time fees (like Adobe and many companies have done).

All of this still scales their revenue based on the number of people using their systems, and allows entry level pricing.

Having any entry pricing will scare away people who just want to fool around or are testing the waters. To maximize hobbyist uptake, zero entry pricing is always best. I agree with that.

But if you are talking about a big company or someone with a big plan (something they are hoping/expecting to draw tens of millions or more of revenue), any income sharing or per-download surcharges are poison.

If someone needs the absolute cutting edge of realism they will go with Unreal already. Revenue sharing makes sense for them to accept because they have no alternative, and it only kicks in after the first $1,000,000. For a company making something massive they won't have time to re-create an equally complex engine as Unreal (virtually impossible).

Ease of entry is why Unity has thrived on mobile and casual/indie games. Simple mobile and casual/indie games developed with 1-5 people teams do not typically need an incredible engine to run. All the engines can do simple things at this point, and the free and open source ones will now catch up.

Spotify and Netflix and other streaming services cut piracy dramatically because average people thought paying $10 per month was more convenient to get what they want than dicking around on torrent sites. Average game devs went with Unity because they figured a few thousand dollars for a launch license when they finish their game was similarly convenient and made sense, rather than weeding around with a less known/tested engine.

I don't personally think revenue share or per install fees will fly with the Unity market, because Unity can be replaced for 90% of people developing using it. If you are making a simple/fun indie game or 2D game with Unity, there are other ways to do this. Why would you want to give them even 5% of your revenue or a per-download fee forever when you can take a few months to switch platform and never pay them?

What Unity isn't getting to me is their primary appeal was being a simple, easy, convenient flat rate service. The Netflix or Spotify of the market. It was never that their engine is astounding in any mindblowing way or that people can't do similar things other ways.

 

Yeah, depending on my clients I may take up on Unity to purchase a year Unity Pro subscription on Plus price, but strictly for clients' sake and I won't renew it next year no matter what (unless of course this situation ends on a high note which I highly doubt).

 

I think they just want to make the unity brand so shameful that you have to purchase pro even for a free hobby projects just to hide the fact that was made in unity

 

It's absolutely true that Unitys financials are a mess and that they have to charge more for using the engine. Since they became a public company and all that information was available it was obvious. Here's the thing though, increasing prices needs to be done in a way that's predictable for a company. Install metrics aren't predictable, and even trying this has people not wanting to use Unity in the future. Charging royalties, dev seats, whatever... those are predictable costs that businesses can account for, and from there it's on Unity to do something that's competitive.

And quite frankly, Unity hasn't been the most responsible with their revenue. Their top execs get 200 million in bonuses per year, that's 20% of their shortfall this year. If their runway of 18 months left is to be believed (based on what that post claims about 1.5 billion in reserve and losing 1 billion/year), they would have 24 months of runway without that. Then you have deals like spending $4.4 billion on an acquisition. Then you have all their other random value add on features that few really have interest in but are costing Unity a lot in development resources. Then you have all the feature changes, ones that get abandoned, and so on. All of these are a huge waste.

Unity needs to get their finances straightened out, and part of that is going to involve fixing their free/pro structure which can help revenue but it also looks like most of these losses are driven by their executives and upper management that make bad decisions and waste company resources. Until those people are replaced or change their behavior it really doesn't matter how much revenue Unity adds, because it will all be wasted.

 

Holy S***. This is exactly like Bob Iger at Disney. Man pulls $25 million a year while the company burns to the ground.

 

its funny listening to these people try to rationalize a TOS that will retroactively change from year to year.. ok so you didn't get screwed that bad on this setting, but next year it drops to only 50k downloads and $100k gross income.. whoops..

 

Why is Unity depraved for implementing royalties on sales, but Unreal isn't? Especially when Unreal rolled that out when Unity had zero royalties?

 

Yet all the Strides and the Flaxes of the world are tiny even compared to Godot despite having latest C# features. Unity clones historically haven't done well on the FOSS game engine market. An engine has to do something unique like Godot did to grow and most of the current Godot userbase prefers GDScript.

Why wouldn't they be receptive? C# is already well supported and included by default.

 

Trust. Trust is the #1 problem. Changing TOS retroactively is unacceptable:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ackaging-updates.1482750/page-45#post-9297488

“Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer. ”

 

This is nothing like a royalty, this is a fee that you pay for an action made by someone else that you have no control over, you can't even stop it

 

If you cannot understand the difference between an install and a sale after this many thousands of replies you might be arguing in bad faith.

 

And who is making that argument?

 

Fine, everyone gets Unity Pro for free from now on, Unity can have its 5% royalty over 1 million and fix the F***ing engine and neighboring services to Unreal's level.

 

Hey, I'm all for giving Unity their dues, but with these terms, not like this...

 

I want to print and frame this. It was always perpetuated that Unity couldn't be sustained with regular licensing. Yet here is proof to the contrary.

 

Seriously. The fact that games take anywhere from 2-10 years just to develop depending on the company size and the type of game, and then have a life time sales potential that spans over decades if they are any good make changing TOS on developers retroactively just about the worst thing that can be done to them.

This isn't like changing the TOS on your Gmail account and you can choose to go sign up at Yahoo instead. People (me included) have spent years on this. You can't just remake your game tomorrow, especially if its already a hit game on Steam for example. The life cycle of game development is too long for this to be okay.

 

I rarely ever, and I mean truly, ever use these forums. But this? Unity.. Why? Why would you break our hearts like this? Why would you do this to our trust? Why would you allow that John Riccitiello from EA get to you?

This isn't any small change. This isn't something we can just "get over". This is going to impact the already hurting gaming industry, existing titles, jobs, wages, startups, and so forth. You're hurting us all. We're already getting heavily taxed, and many of us pay you! We shouldn't be held responsible for your misuse of funding, your lack of ability to properly finance yourselves. This is very, very unfair, and frankly, as a developer and past diehard fan of everything Unity, I am hurt.

Farewell, Unity. I will be looking into alternative engines. It was lovely while it lasted.

 

You got it.


But no worries, "our own proprietary data model", has got you.

Because "We believe"

This is the most rediculous yet logical thing since a guy went into a drycleaners in New York sometime in the 1930's and said:

"You got a nice shop here...would be a shame if something where to happen to it. "