Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

If your math is correct, and there are only 200,000 Unity developers sustaining 7,700 Unity employees, I agree this is not a sustainable business for them based on flat subscription rates. They would have to cut their staff dramatically.

They also do make money from their ad business, so it's not like everyone's salaries must be paid by subscription.

Perhaps the $0.20 will push enough mobile whales into their ad revenue program to make more money that way.

I am sure they considered the % cut but the proportion of low revenue projects is likely much higher for Unity than for Unreal (where generally only big serious developers are). So I am betting the revenue split would have to start at $100,000 or $200,000 for Unity to make it profitable and that is why they didn't do it.

To me, if these are the numbers we're looking at, it just seems Unity needs to trim their fat and cut their operating costs by at least 50%. People are not going to volunteer to give them money when there are much financially better alternatives including free. You can't force people to buy your product/service.

 

Godot isn't great for 3D. We were talking about it in a few pages back.

 

Yes it is... but also this looks more like someone who wants to make us forget about current CEO which is not a god idea

 

They also make money from asset store sales, addon services, and a boatload of other ancillary products.

 

It was explained to him that each month its $0.20 a install regardless of if you got 100million installs the previous month it starts at $0.20 all over again the following month. He is trolling

 

What about creators that are making contract game for other company(Publisher) that is publishing it and collecting income from game?

 

Great chart. We need more concrete info here. First thoughts...

Free to Play
If you get less than $.20 per user (most people).... 10 million downloads & above is crazy percentages. It's a very expensive platform for a wildly successful F2P game. For a certain very real group, this is not good. And any of us can fall into that group at some point. Possible to pay 50% or even 100% of revenue and above, even for some games @ 7 million sales. No wonder Among Us and others are making posts.

Paid
If you get about $1 per download... 1 million downloads and above is very expensive, up to 25% of revenue. Once you make it to 10 million downloads, you go down to 10% or 5% of revenue. But that resets back to 25% at the beginning of each month, so a constant race to get back to 5%.

AAA
If you make $20 or more per download, you're doing doing better than releasing on Unreal. But the AAA devs aren't doing much on Unity and Unity knows it, so they're skewing the profits to lower priced games, and Unity developers can sense it. This chart makes it more obvious.

Unity has ran the calculations and has found that these are the 'house always wins' numbers.

Godot
I'm wondering if the big F2P devs will invest some resources into Godot so that they, and at some point all of us, can benefit? Would be great to have an alliance of devs working to secure a better future platform.

 

Those are stupid questions, Unity didn't have enough time to think about.

(Sorry, obviously joking, they don't know WTF they will do with these things just yet)

 

Let's look at this as though Unity were a game developer. $10,000 income this month, $5,000 goes to rent and let's say the electric bill because it happens to be due. Now you spend $4800 on assets from the store. A week later you've burned through the last $200 you have and you're like "I can't even afford to buy food.. my phone's getting cut off.. my neighbors' internet is slow today.. smh.. fml..." meanwhile those assets make you nothing, they're not in your games (yet, if ever) and even if they were, nobody cares or would rather they weren't in the game anyway. Not to mention the assets you bought which have nothing to do with game development. Then you blame the economy for your situation and start sending out invoices of new surcharges and expenses you thought up. Valid excuse? Sure, everything is valid to the person thinking it up at the time, but everyone else thinks you're a dumbass.

 

Hahahaha...

https://www.morningstar.com/news/ma...h-at-unity-as-analyst-upgrades-stock-to-a-buy



Source: Casey

 

GUYS CHECK THIS ARTICLE OUT
https://venturebeat.com/games/game-...ity-ads-until-its-price-increase-is-reversed/

SIGN HERE:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeSRvFrXeDocqPwyjsYwbQ4fObJGJ2THrUjzSqHvMcoCWaIIA/viewform

Predator Unity President:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattpe...olleagues-former-exec-claims/?sh=4c45ba7a435a

 

how about having Limited company (lead by i.e. wife) which would be responsible for distribution of your game i.e. for 5% of revenues? In the worst case scenario that Limited company would bankrupt protecting i.e. your house/bank accounts from debts.
Is not it better solution than switching to different engine?

 

Clown world in full effect. The best part is these ratings are about as good as the clump of toilet paper I used to wipe my diarrhea this morning. One analyst says this, another says that. No accountability. Hurr durr Unity gonna make lots of money now hurr.

 

Not a lot of peeps doing 3D in Godot, but it seems viable for indie purposes:

1. https://twitter.com/JaanusJaggo/status/1634475393552924675

2.

3. https://twitter.com/alex_igntv/status/1696450113852592142

Some popular Unity boomer shooter devs strongly consider switching to Godot but they're doing retro PS1/PS2 era look.

 

Something like that might be inevitable but I'm telling you Godot/open source is the future. I had NO idea how good it was. (right now, version 3!) I am still working through a test app to understand the full pipeline, working on a team with it etc. But yeah.. super promising. Blown away.

 

CryEngine also supports C #, and you can transfer the project to CryEngine. Although the environment changes greatly, you don't have to suffer from learning CPP. It should be better and more mature than Godot. The charging policy of CryEngine is the same or similar to Epic. If it doesn't change in the future, good luck to you.

 

The other thing to add, and this is a lot worse than it seems at surface level, which is already laughable and ridiculous to even come out with this.

But consider the board + CEO have a fiduciary duty to act in shareholders best interest. When these ratings come out from analysts saying the stock price will go up based on this new fee structure it makes it impossible for them to reverse this decision. Because if they do it looks like they are reversing a positive/beneficial decision that analyst consensus believes will make them more money, and they would not be guiding the company towards profitability.

Then their positions are in jeopardy. So essentially the opposite of what people here think will happen. They want the CEO to be fired for the decision (no shot) but he'd actually be fired if he doesn't go through with it.

Very saddening and scary.

 

Lordy. If your Unreal game makes $71 million, then your fee would be $3.5 million (5% of $70 million). Sounds reasonable to me, and more importantly, transparent.

What's unthinkable is Unity's retroactive change to its terms that charges successful developers for games that have already been released! Unity's charm used to be that you owned your successes with no extra payments, balanced by having to pay for recurring plans. That charm, that advantage, is now gone.

 

Thanks for the new forum signature:

Sexual Predator Unity3D President allegations:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattpe...olleagues-former-exec-claims/?sh=4c45ba7a435a
Damn:
https://venturebeat.com/games/game-...ity-ads-until-its-price-increase-is-reversed/
SIGN HERE:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeSRvFrXeDocqPwyjsYwbQ4fObJGJ2THrUjzSqHvMcoCWaIIA/viewform

 

There's no way it's getting reversed but we might get some concessions like not applying it retroactively and giving a longer period for transition. And they might cover the edge cases so people don't go out of business but who knows.

 

The issue at hand is that the tools used by Unity, initially, will mostly be based on downloads and not installs because most statistics data are based on the downloads and/or unique users.

Downloads, on the other hands, is a much easier source of calculations because there are tons of ways to detects such thing especially into today's age where the downloads count is actually part of the PR of any published games.

At the moment, there are no efficient (nor uniformly) legal ways for Unity to determines the number of installation without, first, accessing such data from the sources like the app stores that allows an OS to install the files. This is clearly shown by the fact about how any "non-attributive" installations are not taken into account in the new fee's FAQ.

In this age where all platforms uses a "download & install & clear installation files" kind of process, it's not an exaggeration to consider downloads as installs for a majority of the cases.

Take for example, if you install a game on Steam, it's a download, then install, then there are no installation files remaining. (In fact, Steam was, previously, downloading the games installation files as separate, but it involved over time and now, it's a bytes exchanges.)

Google Store and Apple's App Store downloads the package file and that packages files act as both an installation and application.

The patterns are almost clear in that they might be looking at taking the open/accessible statistics exploited/calculated from reputable sources and, possibly, have inside-deal with selling platforms on getting their hands on some numbers such as downloads/installs numbers and that is until they get a more precise solution that is hinted in the news/info that points out that there are some plans on implementing some counter/calls from the any built to some servers to keep counts of the installations.

This is why, at the moment, it might be hard for Unity to know about downloads/installations from sites like itch.io or GoG (unless such sites actually feed them the information). As such, I wouldn't be surprised if they do some blind "bills sweep" from popular Unity games on those platforms while giving out the option to "negotiate" the bills, which would be a process where the actual numbers of downloads that might only accessible by the publisher or self-publishing dev is shared with Unity to adjust said bill.

 

https://www.stride3d.net/blog/embracing-open-source-stride-as-an-alternative-to-unity/#licensing

 

So is unity, if you make < 200k you dont pay

 

It was over a long time ago:

 

Capitalism has a serious problem.

 

Wow thank you for sharing this information about sexual harasser and sexual predator/molester John Riccitiello CEO of Unity. I had no idea he was preying on his staff in a sexual manner but its also not surprising.

 

Steam tells the developer sales numbers not downloads or installs. All app stores are like that.

 

Does anyone know if the 200k includes funding? I believe the previous cap did include any revenue (including funding) but this was company revenue, not per-game revenue. Since this is per game it sounds more like this is just revenue from game sales/in-app purchases/microtranscations? I can't seem to find any detail on this though.

 

It's not even that. Unity has not defined what an install is, they have released what amounts to unpolished marketing materials. First they said reinstalls would count because of privacy laws, then they reversed that. They are doubling down on the idea that determining installs is proprietary, and they won't tell us because it would compromise their system. And that the same system will determine bundle deals, charity deals, and piracy and not charge for those.

They are relying on security through obscurity while saying they're going to charge on a metric they have yet to define in technical or legal terms. From the information so far, taking your game folder and renaming it by a letter, or changing it to another subdirectory counts as an install. If that's what they're charging on, so be it, and I can make decisions on using Unity in the future based on that information, but giving no information at all is the absolute worst thing they can do, because all risk assessments will simply take the worst case scenario someone can come up with as a placeholder as there is no information to assume better.

Until they can define an install, say how it's determined, provide tools to track installs (including data on prior games installation rates, as they should have that under their model), and a list of best practices to minimize reinstallation charges, even beginning to entertain using Unity for new projects is a non starter.

 

This guy hasn't played a video game in his life

 

None of these matters, Unity admitted the begin with that they will guess with an opaque "data-model" and won't measure jack-S***. They will tell you how many install happened in their opinion and you either accept it and pay the ransom or bring them to court and try to prove that it's wrong.

 

I think their biggest problem is going to be the total lack of any new developers choosing their engine.
No new developers = no new Unity projects.
Then when their current devs can finally migrate out, they are going to go under.
Who will be left making Unity games?
I have 1 game I am currently trying to build and feel like I am too deep in to pull out.
But once it's out, unless things have changed, I will definitely be learning a new engine.
Unity's fees are going to be like a "reverse lottery", as in "Gee, I wonder how much I will owe this month!".

 

For Real? holy moly, but ok Steam is not really what unity is aiming for as we know by now. but was not expecting that.

 

Totally expected that. This is what shareholders want, more profit.

 

And whether it's legal or not, I refuse to sit here and let it happen. Because there's no reason for it to happen in the first place. That's my point in all this. People are talking about whether this means we pay more money than Unreal or whatever. This isn't about the dollar amount, this is about there being no earthly reason why Unity needs to track installs.

Unity insists on adding random crap to their pricing scheme.

How about, everyone uses Unity for free, stop this free and pro nonsense, and you take a percentage over $100k of any game made with Unity? Why is this so complicated?

 

Yeah, Unity is killing the influx of new users, which is REALLY BAD.

 

Professionals who can't migrate away from Unity for one reason or another be it multiplatform support, up to date 3rd party integrations, specific services or whatever else keeps them on the hook like studio leadership not wanting to pay or being unable to pay for switching technologies. Months of downtime and retraining ain't cheap. Most studios will keep operating as usual.

 

i posted an idea for a dev protest on reddit.

can you upvote, share & repost, maybe it gets some traction ( i dont care for reddit fame, i just want to go back programming and not dealing with this S***):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16jswhq/unity_dev_protest/

basically everyone with a running subscription should turn off their auto renewal and also anyone running IronSource and Unity Ads monetization should turn those off.

https://venturebeat.com/games/game-...ity-ads-until-its-price-increase-is-reversed/

just fight fire with more fire lol

 

Not actual legal advice.... but 'suggestions'...

Like Unreal, I'd say get it in your work-for-hire contract that the buyer understands that they require a Unity license and that subsequent install fee obligations are on them. You wouldn't trigger the install limit anyways.

An ancillary scenario would be that you're already running the game, and another entity wants to buy you out. You'd be obligated for the fees up until the transfer of ownership and again you should have it in contract that subsequent obligations from DATE are on them. You should also contact your rep and let them know of the transfer.

edit:
FAQ says it's the entity that 'distributes' it that the fee applies to. But they don't clarify the word 'distributor'. Depending on how you read it, early knee-jerk worries was that it could mean the store, or the publisher. However, their usage of editor seats makes it seem like for practical reasons, it is the entity (you or publisher) that compiles the distributable and has the active services account bound to that distributable.

Thus, when you transfer ownership, make sure it is in contract that they have to use their own compile. I doubt we'll get a button in UGS or whatever invoice system to unbind/transfer it from our account, so definitely would be a rep call.

 

​

This is Unity 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20090308055022/http://unity3d.com/company/



At some point it makes more sense to add more people to a team. Just like air resistance when speed increases, the waste of manpower then increases exponentially. And then you have 7700 employees who are less effective in comparison.

 

Seriously. They don't have enough resources to come after everyone. Is part of their spyware suite of bullshit the ability to remotely disable my .exe from launching if I inaccurately report I've reached the revenue threshold or not?

Does an alarm go off at Unity HQ every time they think someone reached the threshold and hasn't forked up for a license or notified them? I am genuinely curious.

This all starts with us raising our hand and saying to start charging me per install because I just crossed over the threshold and made $1,000,000. Up until now I'd never advocate for not being truthful but I am starting to think all my revenue was lost at the bottom of the lake along with my guns in a boating accident.

 

They are too stupid to make a system like that and if they do just sue them

 

A small publisher ditching Unity (EDIT: for Godot and Unreal): https://twitter.com/FDG_Games/status/1702687949760950333

 

Caves of Qud dev actively exploring the possibility of porting the game from Unity to Godot: https://twitter.com/unormal/status/1702793280323281163

It was previously in a proprietary C# engine pre-Unity and is quite portable unlike most projects.

 

I'll be getting my grandma to be our publisher going forward, she charges 60% and publishes the product herself

 

I think I remember seeing this picture. But I surely remember the angry robots demo.

 

Sonic colors: ultimate was one big title

 

i think he is being sarcastic... a joke

 

The title is clickbait-y, but this got 52k views in the first 3 hours.

 

No, he wasn't.