Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

...The people that think a $7 game has a $7 revenue average per sale have not released a game.

 

Try using plastic SCM for a large repo.. It simply fails time and time again. My client was 6GB and after 3 months paying for Plastic support and trying to work with them they said our project was "too complex" for Plastic to handle. There is your Unity quality right there..

 

Well yeah, it's european bureaucracy. They work from monday to wednesday lunchtime, and then only if they have to. But some intern/secretary WILL read it, and if enough people send mails, the representatives and/or agents get notified.

 

It was reported many times Tuesday and Wednesday. The answer is yes

The trading it self isnt illegal because they did file the papers.. The timing of the sale is going to warrant the SEC to do an inquiry due to the nearly 10M in total stock sales by the Unity BoD in the 10 days prior to this massive announcement.

I am certainly no lawyer but they are going to be asked a lot of questions and better have an explanation..

In the end this isnt murder. the SEC will hit them with a large ass fine and life goes on. Dont expect any relief from the SEC

 

Not really. Silver Lake Group is an investment firm.

 

My PlasticSCM repo is 33.6 GB and I've found it to be great. Only Helix/Perforce seemed to be better in my experience. I'd use that but there's no cloud hosting option for them.

 

And we aren't even talking sales. we're talking *installs.* Its crazy to me that this keeps getting lost in all these talks.

 

Many models F2P, Fremium, etc.
Call for a very wide install base that is for every 2 paying customers you may have 100 total installs ... in fact 2% is the conversion rate we often see with F2P games

Add to that its installs ... not purchases ... installs
So 1 user WILL they have noted this several times ... 1 user will cost you multiple times

This means for a F2P or Fremium or any similar "free to install" approach which is DAMN common in indie game dev ... it means Unity can very quickly end up cost you 20-30-60% of your revenue and if you a small studio just barely pushing over the thresholds with a low-value conversion then this deal can ABSOLUTELY eat more than 100% of your revenue.

Now Unity could have insured that it never went over X with a simple little

"Not to exceed 5% of yearly revenue for the project"

That would resolved that concern


However, that is not the biggest concern.
Unity just retroactively changed the economics of working with Unity ... so every project that is in flight, every project that has already been released they are ALL now having to deal with this.

So the problem we are all riding on here has NOTHING to do with the $$$ amount that a project costs you it has everything to do with the % revenue it (could) cost you coupled with the complete loss of faith/trust that the company will not just screw you over next year with even worse, retroactively applied terms on a 90 day notice

A game is a multi-year investment and the partners you work with multi-year
The margins a game dev ... yes even a big AA / AAA game dev the margins are generally pretty damn tight for all except the very largest.

So to have such a volatile chaotic partner as Unity is just a flat no go.

 

i can almost see the banners on their walls - "every install matters!"

 

Which means he put the sale of that stock in motion at least three months ago.

 

Wait, so If my game gets ONE download does that mean I have to pay or not?

 

Interesting detail that everyone has missed about JR's 2000 share stock sale. They were his spouse's, not his. She exercised a stock option to buy 2000 shares cheap (<$2/share) and immediately sold them according to the trading plan JR was required to file in 5/2023.

I don't think that sale is the smoking gun everyone wants it to be.

Sec Form 4 Filing - RICCITIELLO JOHN S. @ Unity Software Inc. - 2023-09-06

 

That guy's on Unity's board. Still not sure how interesting it is.

 

Or, if you will pardon me for being overly suspicious.. it means Unity has decided not to walk back any of this and he wants to sell before the shares crater sub $20

 

Which is the other problem with this whole thing. How installs are tracked is proprietary info. Does it account for how sometimes a game is purchased but never installed? We know multiple machine installs count. How are they accounting for piracy? It obviously can't phone home because that'd be a legal nightmare in near entire continents sometimes, which means the answer is "just trust us bro"

Which is a problem when the entire rollout of this new model has eroded trust so much.

Again, no. These have to be done months in advance.

 

DC there is a list of about 8 members fo the BOD who cumulitively sold roughly 10 mill in shares in the 10 day lead up to the announcement

the info is burried in this thread. Not gonna search it

EDIT: Edit for clarity. They didnt each sell 10 M

 

it took full 4 days to jump from unity to world war 3 ...

 

Or, you know, it was the other market factors that were in play, like how the whole tech industry was in a pretty severe downturn. But hey, let's not take facts into account here. This is Conspiracytown, baby!

 

Something people often overlook about open source: There's no monolith that magically knows all your needs. If you need something and don't have the skill or time to do it yourself, communicate it. If it turns out to be a quick thing to implement (which happens when you have strong foundations), you may find it's out in the next version, or that there is a plugin ready for you pretty quickly.

If it's not a quick thing to implement, you may still receive some surprising responses - like a way to fake your way through the missing feature.

I saw someone talking about wanting the option to spend 50k on paying someone to fix a problem for them (that's quite a lot...), and yeah, that's ALSO an option if you're really determined and are more time poor than cash poor.

Here's the thing. Must people here aren't complaining about paying Unity more, or about having a fee based on success. Indeed, Unreal Engine has a payment system geared towards paying more when your game is successful. That's reasonable, even if it's not what people wanted.

The problems are the retroactive change, and basing the fee on installs rather than a more reasonable metric.

I can say that it would not be unreasonable to estimate that I have installed Oxygen Not Included at least 10 times since I bought it. You don't want to know how many times I have installed Sims.

This is normal player behavior, and in line with existing distribution and payment models.

This is all with a single purchase.

A "going forward, starting with the next major version" fee that was based on any reasonable metric would not have lead to this backlash.

 

There, there, I sympathize with you for not doing anything substantial only trolling other people on the forum, and this hurt you internally or whatever.

 

Yeah the math is actually more like:

For a $5 game you have:
$0-5 revenue per sale and (I'm guessing typically it will be around $2-3)
0 to infinity installs per sale (I'm also guessing typically it will be around 3-4)

 

And apparently they have been working on this plan for around year

or so the random yelling into the keyboard keeps saying

Anyway none of this matters
I don't care if they have rats leaving a sinking ship I only care that

1) I can trust the company to not F&^%k me ... nope cant trust Unity on that front
2) The terms are reasonable and wont sink me ... nope cant trust Unity on that front

Ya nothing else matters given these two points, who did what, why and for how many cookies really don't matter at all to me.

 

I have to wonder,

how did this even get beyond "Certain number of installs not surpassing revenue threshold of X %"?

This open ended "life-time" install limit, who even does that?

They are,

in the real sense,

stating

"Once a individual, purchases your game once, we charge you for life, after a certain lifetime limit, every time that individual, installs that software, on a device, for life."

What?


This is a publicity stunt, none of this makes sense.

 

Yes, true. But this was only a few hours earlier:

Notice how, unlike in the clarification, they give a reason, which makes impossible to differentiate between a regular install or a reinstall, much less a legitimate copy from a pirated, or an install on a new phone. Unless they give a reason why now the impossible has become possible, this only casts more doubts on the issue.

 

Another one to the ignore

 

This pricing model seems just so insane it’s hard to conceive how anyone could possibly think it was a good idea.

 

Given how long this plan was in the works and how anyone could have seen how this would tank the stock, I think it's reasonable that even a 3 months lead on the sale doesn't diminish the likelihood of insider trading

 

And that's only if they really track installs (which they don't). Otherwise it's any number they choose to have that day so good luck even guess it.

 

It doesn't ensure it's insider trading either, especially considering how similar things were happening across the tech industry because of how the market was going. This is conjecture and just a distraction from the fact that there are actual real problems at Unity, especially ones related to this change.

 

Hello everyone present, is there any official response from the top leadership of Unity on the current situation?

4 days have passed already!

 

No, and there won't be until at least Monday.

 

No they aren't even saying that. They're saying that whether any person purchased your game or not, any person installing it at any time, any number of times, costs you money for life, and retroactively for everything you made in the past that includes our software.

 

The REAL problem is that unity thinks he had a monopoly (especially on mobile).

The reality is that it's not a monopoly, it's a convenience. Remove the convenience and the advantage is gone, making other options competitive.

Also AI is being trained to be free programming labor, so porting yo game might not even be that hard soon. In fact you might not even need an "engine" at all, you'll have an automated engineer.

I have ditch unity for javascript because it was more convenient, I didn't have to wait of look how to bypass unity's limitation. You have no idea how AI assistance is making that STICKY.

Unity chose a bad time to be greedy graby.

 

Lost Relic Games weighs in (again).

 

That's not really true. It only applies if you had income from that game in the past year. If you stop selling your game, the installations run out over 12 months (well, whenever it falls under the limit). But until then good luck with the financials.

 

*mind explodes*

 

twitter rumors (since unity left the chat),
but even then they should keep Plus for indies,
Pro is too expensive. (although you could buy it after release..)

and like hippo(?) mentioned in those replies,
that would mean you need to keep pro license active for the rest of your life (if game is available to install..)
so that is fail offer then.

https://twitter.com/Ivmen/status/1702801617777565764

 

My thought about Unity shares being sold:
I personally know a manager at a global company ( as big as Unity). U.K. based non-tech company.
They were asked, if they wanted to sell their company shares. It is once a year. Date is decided by the Global HQ ( I guess they pick a non-suspicious time).
Amount is capped (can't sell all).
A press release is issued after the sale, telling this was planned, so public doesn't get any other ideas.

Can't tell how it is handled in U.S. and also if you're are a CEO level executive though.

 

We list a game on Steam for $5 and get on average $2 back from them. This is due to changes in the actual price based on which country it is sold and then the obvious revenue cut.

 

Monetizing based on installs is purely impossible.

1. Unity can't track Installs, even less "legit copy" installs, if it was, it would be better than any known DRM.
2. Even if they could (like by forcing an internet connection to every future game made with Unity) you can't run numbers on "installs" as a business, it's absolutely unpredictable. Plus, Virtual Machines exist so anyone could install a game 1000+ times a day on 1000+ "new" devices.

Sorry if I'm just repeating myself at this point, but I'm so blown away by their decision. I think the best is simply to wait for the lawsuits to begin.

Yesterday, the European Games Developer Federation called on the EU to bring a commission for a much-needed market certainty by banning retroactive pricing and contract changes. We, EU citizens, can only hope for the best!

 

Good thread I found on reddit.

Just started reading so dont worry about this being 'whiteknighting'. I have not seen it shared here...

Edit: I thought he would talk about it more, but guess NDA does that. Still got to learn who those 'insiders' were...

 

If they keep everything else, then you need Pro during your game is making $200k+ annually. If it falls below that permanently, then you're "safe".
If this is true and they keep the rest, this might be enough for the Unity Dev middle class to stay and Unity to screw over people a year from now anyway.

 

That's a "she" (Freya) and her twitter summary and link to the reddit was linked multiple times in this thread on previous pages.

 

I think what's more of an open question is the percentage of lawsuits Unity will win/lose, given the sheer volume of lawsuits that will be coming their way and the variety of jurisdictions. It won't be 0% and it won't be 100%.

 

Charging a small fee on a transaction is how royalties have worked for hundreds of years. It's "lmao just give us 5% of your gross revenue" that's insane. And how eager you all are for Unity or any other company to do that to you is honestly scary. You definitely don't speak for everyone in that matter

 

From Freya.. Explains the handful of shill videos that Unity bought and paid for and were ready to go.. That was probably their ultimate purpose for the Unity Insiders meeting. they didnt give a S*** except to see who wanted to shill for them on Youtube about these changes.

 

1. A transaction you’re not a part of?
2. Me installing a game on my Steam Deck is not a transaction.

 

Maybe Unity's internal AI team realized that game dev will soon be a clunky lost art, and marketing os all that is left.

Maybe they are right. It kind of sucks to think I spent six years honing the craft, and that in a few years, it will be obsolete, but I dont see how in ten years it could still be a valuable skill. AI assisted game design is probably the future , and my skills will go the way of 2d concept artists today, who are "struggling" to say the least.


I wont be fighting it like they are. Hopefully I will just adapt, and focus on good story telling.

 

Yes but still, if your game gets a surprise hit out of nowhere you could have to sell your house.
Here is Among Us (Unity game) lifetime player count history for example:


It's also funny to note that this game (like many games on Steam) was sold for below 0.2$ (in both Argentine Peso and Turkish Lira).

I don't know how you can still answer the uneducated trolls at this point, bless you.

 

Yeah, you sell your car to XYZ and the car dealer will still charge you a small fee every time the guy park it on his driveway. Small transaction fee.

That's why the "safe" is in quotation marks.