Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

the big question here is, are big devs ready to fill unity's money sink? are they willing to hand over hundreds of millions from their profit? so many internal engine projects have been started this week, but they will not come alive soon. i hope one of those will replace unity.

 

I'm not a specialist about boards, so I may be wrong, but my understanding is that the board is made of investors (or their representatives), and thus they are not specialists about what Unity is doing technically, and even less about the in/out of install counting pertinence. It's not their job, they might be also on other company boards and even have a full-time job somewhere else.

The one who sells the company strategy and has to convince them the new changes will make them richer is the CEO : John Riccitiello in this case, and possibly his lieutenants.

He and his team are then possibly the only ones really responsible for the current situation.

Of course, if he's fired, his replacement could be even worse, but at least we'd get a chance to get someone with a decent vision to enhance the development of Unity for its customers in addition to its shareholders.

EDIT:
I added "possibly" as I'm only speculating...

 

Your arguments against the hyperbolic arguments are fair, but this assessment that it's less than 1% of revenues is completely off. You have no idea what impact on revenue £150,000+ a year might be because a game paying that fee for 100k installs each month might be making $30 per install or 20p per install. 100,000 downloads could cost you anything from 5% to 750% from those two points.

You have to be making big money of massive installs to get the revenue down to sub 1%. I doubt that's even possible. At 1 million downloads per month, installation costs over a year is $558,000, 4.65c at the cheapest license, 2.3x the '2c per new install' of the <1 million install threshold.

You say to look at Unity's documentation, but it's ambiguous and has changed a lot since the announcement. You are over-simplifying the problems in an overly trusting reaction to this change, and arguing unfairly and inaccurately against those discussing the real and complex issues.

Even Unity staff themselves have said it's a bad move full of problems!

 

In my case the best alternative to migrate from Unity is Unreal, then Unigine.

A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game) and the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt.

 

Thanks. Here's one install.

 

Remember, they didn't buy the adware / spyware company IronSource, they merged with it, therefore there are IronSource people in leadership roles and on the board.

https://unity.com/our-company

 

I don't think that's really true anymore. There was a time when unreal was difficult to understand due to a lack of docs/guides and community support. Since sometime during UE4 they started creating a lot of guides and the community has become large enough now, the docs could be better though. Unity is still ahead with their learning platform and tutorial games but that distance is closing. The big hurdle for most will be moving from C# to C++ and finding alternatives to any assets/tools they might be relying upon. People probably shouldn't rush into anything but it's worth learning more than one tool and having the option to use it in future.

 

It's completely ambiguous and uncertain whether it's counting rolling rates or not, but I'm 99% sure that once the threshold is hit, it's into fee paying territory and not 1million a month before any fees are taken. Pretty sure Unity's FAQ gave an example illustrating this.

Importantly, anyone trying to make informed decisions at this point is just guessing because the legal situation is unknown. You can pay a lawyer to try and understand it and they'll also be lost because it's not clearly described.

 

There is David Helgason, one of the three founders of Unity. Also even if the rest of them have no expertise in game engines, no ones gives a crap about that, they still will dictate what happens. It's not like directors would have any conscience and withdraw their opinion if they don't have expertise in a field. That would be too professional.

 

GODDAMIT UNITY, WHY? You betrayed your community. F the CEO!

 

That person was one of the founders of Unity.

 

Good idea, but hardly feasible for a solo dev I guess.

 

Unity will retract this pricing plan. It's aggressively idiotic.

 

Yea, but Unity used to say that too. One day they may change their minds, and change the TOS.

TBH the biggest issue seems to be publicly traded companies. If Unity had stayed private we'd probably not be in this mess.

 

ceo may have come up with the plan, but the board of course asked for it and approved it. they are there to guard their investments, not to make devs happy. and now unity has reached the threshold, when it's time to turn popularity into cash.

 

unity3d is idiot. i must escape from unity.

 

I think what almost hurts as much as the betrayal is the lack of anything resembling a decent response from Unity's part.

Firing the executive team and anyone who suggested this plan would be a good place to start.

 

I feel you, I feel discouraged to continue supporting my assets any further but we shall see how things evolve. I was looking at Unreal for a long time either way, still have it on my PC. I will probably stick with Unity till the end thou but won't keep all my eggs in one basket.

 

I am out of unity, good luck to the ones sticking to it you are gonna need it.
Even if the changes are reversed the trust is already broken. Its just risky business.

 

Fifth day and we are still at this stage of events:

 

I know. I can't believe it. I mean, this was exactly what I feared after they went public... And here we are. It's surreal when your nightmares become reality.

 

This brings back so many lovely memories!

 

True, but nobody is crazy enough to destroy themselves like this, this is the stupidest business move
I've seen in all my life. Pay per install? Really?! I'm just glad everybody is mocking them
and showing them how absurd this model is, we can rest assured from the pushback
that everybody universally agrees, this is a terrible idea. I don't think any engine would be
stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot like this.

 

As long as the game’s revenue in last 12 months was below the threshold, then sure you could. If you aren’t making enough money, then the fee doesn’t apply.

It’s still a dumpster fire of a policy, and the TOS trust issues remain, but any totally free game wouldn’t be affected, unless they unilaterally changed the TOS again (which is the problem).

 

Does ANYONE know how they are going to charge you per install? It's bizarre. We don't even know how this thing works - I believe that's the real reason we're all angry. They just say they're going to charge us with some arbitrary metric and VANISHED! Man. I don't get it.

 

the more im looking into this the more im sure we need to kill unity as a company. they need to go bankrupt.

they just dont give a F*** about it. they will brute force their buisness model on everyone and if their funds run low they will just increase that metric.
unity is dead guys. i still hope they roll back this moronic metric pay per install. if not its over.

i worked at a game for 6 years and if i finish it like this it would be a free to play title. its for kids and i dont want to show tons of ads nor do i want shady pretatory practices. i dont want to look at download numbers around the globe. and i dont want any of this. unity is taking people with their work as hostages. its outragous.

unity you are a unbelievable. honestly everyone at unity should companywide threaten to quit. layoffs are coming anyway. everyone with an subscription should turn of auto renewal. anyone that uses their ad network should turn it off.
whatever comes after doesnt matter, we need to get rid of a company like this.

no one in their right mind will use them after this. its such a shame

 

It is exactly what you think. They will bill you using random number generator. There is nothing else to consider here.

 

It's like they don't know we're all programmers. We need TECHNICAL details of how they are going to charge us.

Is there going to be spyware in my game? Is it going to impact performance? Is it going to impact my livelihood? If so, what can I do to counter, in case of any discrepancy?

So many unanswered questions...

 

Possibly this crazy movement is a process to force down the stocks price and then other company buy most stocks and appear like the Unity savior.

 

Nothing is going to happen on the weekend. But if nothing happens on Monday then the chances of them rolling back are very slim.

 

Of course anyone with a published Unity game would need to provision for such eventualities, including legal costs if things go poorly with Unity, and add an extra price to the game. Most people will just refuse to pay, and I don't see any possibility of them winning in court, on the contrary, they may end up paying damages.

It is all so ridiculous and blatantly illegal. It'd have been so easy to simply ask the developers for a share in revenue, leaving all the accounting to them.

I am not particularly afraid of this, because there's no way they're pulling it off. But their implosion could potentially damage my business for the next years, since I'm about to release Early Access after 5 years and I predict another 2-3 years of development.

 

They are doubling down on this, and seems like won't roll back anything. So my only option now is to finish the game I've working on for 3 years, I will make it completely free (to not give unity, and myself a single penny). And from there hopefully will be able to build a community and live through donations until I can make a game in Unreal or Godot. good times

 

Unity really should have just been largely copying and integrating the functionality of a lot of the most popular editor tools on the asset store... Yeah, some of the asset creators would get salty, but by the time unity actually gets it into the engine, they have been coining it for years... Things like terrain tools, vegetation/object placement and rendering, more robust inspector serialization... Just copy success to improve the editor and standardize workflows that have proven themselves. The end user doesn't like having to rely on assets for basic features. Assets get deprecated and you have to redo everything. Asset devs demand you pay for a new version every major unity release so everything doesn't break. Upgrading projects using asset tools can be painful and risky..

Instead they spent their time trying desperately to implement ECS which is something hardly anyone needs, because for almost everyone it's overly complicated over optimization that lacks features and is more difficult to use. It was clearly a lot harder than they thought it was going to be. Audio hasn't been touched since unity 5. Visual Scripting development seems to have died about 5 minutes after it was released. At least we finally got splines, and networking (though I haven't tried networking yet). A Unified UI engine is cool, but they started building that about a year after they released a UI engine that took them 5 years to make, so a lot of wasted time and effort, and now we have multiple UI engines which is the exact opposite of standardization. The pipelines make the learning curve steeper and also are the opposite of standardization... Far too much anti-standardization in unity.

 

If you are trying to get me to stop using unity, it's working.

Please stop trying to get rich and try to make good tool, then we'll all get rich.

Please fire your ceo and rethink your approach.

 

Donations are calculated as revenue ... so the install fee will apply at the thresholds

 

I'm still confused by this line in their FAQ:

What does "distribute" mean here? If my game is being sold on Steam, I'm not distributing the runtime, Steam is. So is Valve responsible for the bill?

 

I will not take anything you say seriously at this point.

The breach of trust has crossed a line.

The way Unity is handling this is sickening.

You will see people leave this platform in droves.

 

Unity is implementing the new price-structure which would allow her to regain balance. Users sitting in the chair. Colorized documentary.

 

Riccitiello just cancel town hall and call to some major dev. it seem he dictate employee to be silenced while he try to come up with some plan to recover without him losing face

Or maybe all official member of this forum was being fired

 

I have been watching some general features of Unreal. I worked with C and C++ time ago for general business projects with Unix and I feel comfortable with the environment and main aspects of Unreal. Blueprints combined with C++ seems a powerful way of developing games. In the end next week we'll take the decision, but it seems that Unreal is good for us. Yes, Epic is a big company and can change things, but going as far away as Unity, we don't think that will happen.

 

Really does not matter, the damage is done, the trust in Unity is lost, if this monday they roll back the new fee and restore de Plus plan is possibly that they make the same in a few months when the users react in a more passive way.

 

Each Steam game has a listed Developer, and a Publisher. I guess it's the publisher. (another guess, yay!)

Good luck, Unity, trying to get a dime from huge publishers that have never signed anything with you.

 

It is confusing but here is my take. For Steam you or your publisher will be the distributor. If you read the next question, I think it was part broken off from the same original paragraph.

"The Unity Runtime Fee will be charged to the entity that distributes the runtime." "... in this case the developer is not distributing it so we’re not going to invoice the developer on subscription-based games (e.g. Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Netflix Games, etc.)"

 

Good morning guys

 

That's what's been implied by other posts here, but there really hasn't been any concrete answer. I'd imagine there is absolutely no way that any of the big distributors like Steam, Google Play, nintendo's eshop, etc. will be willing to cover the cost.
If that's true, then what incentive does Steam have to host unity games from now on? very little, because it can potentially wreck their bottom line, especially since unity has proven in the last week that they have no integrity.

 

Then release it. Free games that make no money are free.

 

Is your game going to make >$1 million? If not, the only person you're hurting releasing it for free is yourself. Stick with your original monetisation model up to $1 million. Go from there when that landmark is reached (remember to get Pro license when $100,000 made).

 

Still not canceled the killing fees?)

 

Okay. There are two days off to think about what to choose between GODOT and UNIGINE. On Monday, unless there is a complete rollback of the changes followed by the firing of the employees responsible for this suicidal act, I'm out.

 

I'm working with Unity engine for 10y now.
Yet I have to make 1 mil usd in a year. Even had 4-5 mil total download games out on store, still NOT making 1 mil usd.
PER YEAR.

Dunno. It sucks.
But also, I won't worry YET.
My 2 cents.