Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

The way I see it ...

1. Unity is not unaware, they are aware of this poorly modeled business decision, this was not put into play without considering its market affect.

2. This is a business minded decision. Unity is attempting to move users away from its game developing software, so that it may downsize that area of its market share or focus, with less financial loss, this means Unity can just focus on other areas of technological development/acquisition & sales (as historically proven in the past).

3. Unity has larger market outside of their game engine, according to various forum posts I have read in the past. This decision reinforces the idea that they just do not want to be bothered with it anyway, and prefer shocking away the majority of their user base. I mean, no one wants this, so that is a way to downsize drastically in a short period of time.

It seems like, it is time for some users to consider other areas of the market to get into game development, Unity may not be as focused on that area of the market any more.

I myself may go into micro-plastic farming and recovery, maybe genetic engineering in plants, as we all needs a wheat crop that is capable of hosting naturally occurring nitrogen fixing root nodules (similarly to legumes) so that we can resist world hunger due to climate changes from world wide pollution. I also implore everyone to consider doing the same, even if it is only a side hobby for which you can dedicate only a limited amount of time, as it concerns all of us on planet Earth.

Anyway, I got tired of seeing emotionally based responses, remember, they are not unaware of this decision and its implications.

 

I like Russian people as well. I even have two Russian guys in my team. Great guys. But that doesn't change the fact that I know first hand that the Unigine guys wanted to change an existing enterprise license agreement to their favour big time which led the company switch to Unreal.

 

They conveniently left out that the threat came from one of their employees:
https://www.polygon.com/23873727/unity-credible-death-threat-offices-closed-pricing-change
Probably safe to assume the unity devs don't like this either by now.

 

(The answer is "no", obviously)

 

Nice whataboutism.
Sorry pal, but this topic is a bit sensitive to me, and its definitely not the place to discuss it.
You're getting ignored.

 

Please revert these changes, you're making a big mistake here.

 

You don't need that for game dev, you could use community pro, it's $1500 / seat, it's now added on their website.

 

Just keep using Unity you say?

 

@zombiegorilla may I ask you again another round of political clean-up in the past few pages? Apparently people can't keep it out.

 

Parts of that are legitimate concerns, but it's also peddling FUD. The graph at t=7:35 is described as showing "the proportion of developers who'll lose x% of revenue" where it's nothing of the sort. The graph shows losses based on monetisation per user up to $1. We've no idea what proportion of Unity developers are earning what amount per user. It could be 99% of devs are earning 10c per user and are losing massively to uTax. However, it could also be 99% of users earning about the $1million threshold are making $10 per user and the uTax will be in the green.

The amount of misinformation here is part of the problem, as people scramble around to understand and, of course in classic human fashion, get the wrong end of the stick but run with it anyway and spread misinformation based on poorly-formed belief.

 

Yep, flamethrower time please mods.

 

I mean, when you intentionally design a monetisation scheme that is hard to understand, this is bound to happen.

They are probably doing it on purpose, so we can have arguments like "it's bad, it's not that bad" etc. The Devops / cloudbuild pricing is similarly confusing, doesn't make sense and has similar bad alignment (where the slower builds are, we pay more? I want faster builds!)

I think if your pricing needs a calculator to make sense, you've failed.

 

Don't get stuck on the numbers, they are not the 10 commandments, they are not there to stay, few years from now the threshold will be 0 and everyone pays x install

 

Same can happen on any other engine

Remember Unreal charged a 5% for long time now and if Unity goes away could easilly become any percent without competition

 

You don’t have to marshal if you don’t use managed code.
I had really high hopes for unity’s ECS a few years ago.

 

humble bundle Unreal books:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/game-programming-with-c-unreal-packt-books



EDIT:

also, a link to the Unreal Engine forums with information for Unity refugees:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/hi-everyone-where-to-start/1294127/6

 

here we go
https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/82432/egdf-lashes-out-at-unity-calls-for-eu-regulation/

 

Like the guy but he’s way out of his leauge on this.
Wish unity would just say something. Anything.

 

Insider trading? Look at Egon Durban who dumped his entire stock of ~2 million shares at the close of markets yesterday when the value had just climbed back up a bit.



Well, not insider trading or he'd have done that before the announcement. But that's 'getting out' and will broadcast to the market Unity is bad stock.

 

The fact that Epic hasn't said absolutely anything about Unity's retroactive TOS change and monetization trolling scheme bothers me deeply.
It's the perfect time for them to say: "at Epic, we will never do this to you"
instead, there is radio silence...
Not a good look.

 

? They did that. (not that it matters too much).

 

Can you please stop spreading racist bullshit around there is people of different races and nationalities united by another type of problems here. What are you troll or some kid from basement, grow up

 

They'll do it when Fortnite money runs out.

 

1 - Unity official information is misinformation from the start, and they clarify (retracted) many information again and again. Even edited then removed ToS document from the github

2 - ARPU can be less than 1$ anytime if you consider both F2P and refunding. What are you saying is Russian roulette in essence. Hypothetically 5 in 6 people will be safe from Russian roulette. But it make no sense to require everyone to play Russian roulette, given any slight chance it might have. Even 0.001% is not something that any sane business deal should contain. Given that game development industry need to invest time and money so much and mostly in deficit from the start

3 - And problem is the company in question itself that not even try to fix the cause. It got silence for 3 whole days as of now. Even cancel the town hall meeting that should be time and place to announce the clearly and officially statement of what actually real. It point out that they are not really have truthful information and not ready to explain anything as of yet

 

Unity said they'd never do that and looked where we are. Epic could just claim that and lie. Such promises don't appear to be legally binding or come with any penalties for breaking them.

 

The simple fact that Unity had the balls to post this means that they will be doubling down. I manage a couple of current small-midish game productions, 3 of which use Unity, I will make a mandate for future games and these games to switch to something else if possible, they have lost all trust that they had in my company.

 

First, they will condemn threats to their employees, and remind us violent threats are unacceptable.

Then they will say "Dear Unity developers and partners, We Hear You."

Then they will condemn the "misinformation" on the internet about their new plan.

Then they will announce they have reviewed the retroactive fees, and decided they will not be doing that, (to excited chatter on the internet of the black-eyed devs sniffing the boquet Unity just handed them)
Then they will re-state everything they have said before, no other policy change.

 

I totally agree with this.

 

Big poop. one after the other.

 

I'm sure investors are elated at the fact he sold 50,610 shares during 2023 and bought none. He sure believes Unity is a great investment.

 

Reading this(interesting post!) it struck me: ESG vibes. As a hobby popcorn enjoyer i can tell you esg is a safe bet for popcorn, sometimes it just takes a few years. So a quick search: https://unity.com/esg I guess you are all familiar with this being a thing and just in case you are switching: Really think hard about putting your eggs in a esg basket.

 

a bunch of pages back someone who doesnt use analytics did not find any packets sent to unity

 

Eh, most people really suck at math. Id say about half the people here still didnt get the AND in 1M revenue and 1M installs.

Like i get it, but it seems yall will take issue with anything Unity tries to do now. I get it yall angry, but at a certain point it stops helping.

Do you mean you dont want the calculator?

 

There's definitely something going on. It just doesn't make financial sense, from the perspective of the shareholders, to intentionally destroy Unity as a company, and that's what the insanely overpaid executive team at Unity is doing through its actions.

And if Unity has managed to destroy its relationship with developers as a result of some ham-fisted attempt to shut down AppLovin...what are they thinking?

Do Unity's executives think the FTC is going to let Unity abuse its dominant position in the market to kill AppLovin?

 

No. Epic Games is american. Tencent has only a partial investment.
And you don't need to answer me, because you are going on my Ignore List.

 

He has sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth since the IPO. Over $300M worth. Most of those in 2020.

 

I mean I want a pricing scheme where we DON'T NEED a calculator.

 

But I already created an install fee calculator in Unreal:

 

Dosen't metter, next year there will be no threshold and you pay for install from the start

 

Nothing I have ever made passed a million dollars, or two hundred thousand dollars. So nothing I've ever made would ever qualify for runtime fee.

Everyone on this thread is the same way. Nobody here is ever going to pay for any of this. They are panicking for no reason.

 

One assumes they didn't think this would be the outcome. That theory only holds if one thinks they knew what the fallout would be. Furthermore, it meant sabotaging their own share value. They have made less money as a result of this. It's more logical to think they expect this to increase Unity's revenue to significant profitability and more money, and rather than be a cunning scheme, they are just really, really dumb.

 

Don't care about a calculator, I don't want install fees at all.
I would prefer Unity to charge monthly for its software and/or to have a 1 to 5% royalty fee.
Even a game-selling fee would be better than this ridiculous install fee idea.

 

I appreciate you wanting to get past the negative and are looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, but unfortunately Unity has cast a dark shadow with their terms of service. I hate their pricing, but the terms are even worse;

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. ”

 

they only way i would accept install fees is if they cap them and let us self report them.

or they could just have a fair renevue share system inplace. like without all that stupid S***

 

This is inaccurate. Silver Lake no longer directly owns Unity, but they still own a bunch indirectly.

You can see the number of shares their other investment vehicles owns on this SEC form:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418226/000089924323019190/xslF345X05/doc4.xml

Silver Lake Group L.L.C. sold 188,007 Unity Software Inc. shares at weighted average prices between $36.16 and $37.25 per share on September 15, 2023. After these sales, Silver Lake Group L.L.C. no longer directly owns Unity shares, but Silver Lake affiliated investment funds continue to indirectly own over 34 million Unity shares.

 

Shrugs, i guess yall really took it personal, Did yall think there was absolutely no way something like this would ever happen? Were you people planning to invite Unity's CEO to your wedding or something?

I trust Unity as much as I trust Unreal. As much as I trust I will in this lifetime see something similar with Godot.

Corporations are corporations. We arent supposed to be buddies. Bet in 5 years top Unreal pulls something similar.

This faceless corporation cares for me today as much as it cared for me last month. I will do my best use it to make money, and it will do the exact same to me.

If it is a S*** deal it is a S*** deal and I will move on. But I dont get all the 'OMG, Unity how dare you betray me like this!?' drama. Youd think yall just caught your brother in your fiance's bed or something.

 

Given the situation I still have some hope that American and EU company will attack Unity and Riccitiello with class action lawsuit, in anyway possible. And demand might be changing CEO, regulation of Unity's revenue plan. And make all unity developer feel safe from this vendor lock in situation. Such as opensource unity editor

I can accept revenue share plan as compromise. And all other module could be moved into asset store

Actually unity should be split its company to not be anti-competitive. And unity source code should be maintained by community

 

My guess is that they won't add any spyware. It'd be too risky, legally speaking, considering the EU laws and all, and how it would be flawed in many ways.

What they will probably do is "estimate" via a combination of public information (store reviews, youtube videos uploaded, and other metrics) combined with a "volunteer audience" system, similar to that which is used to measure TV audience rates, they can have a few thousand people who agree to share their game install information, and combinign that with the public metrics, come up with algorithms to reach a number of installs.

When they identify a game that could be above thresold, they'll bill the developer. If the developer protests and offers different data, they'll use it to refine their system.

At least, if Riticello paid me a million dollars to make this pathetic scheme work (and if I had no soul) this is what I'd advise him to do.

Of course it's still a terrible system, but at least this won't get you sued.

 

Yeah, you have been told time and time again what this is about, and you keep claiming we are "panicking" about "the money", knowing it's not about, "the money".

You also know stating so gets you attention and replies.