Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

That is not as re-assuring as you think it is!

 

That's interesting, so if you have a F2P game, and earn >=200k$ in sales from cash shops, and have 1 million installs at 0.20 cents, and apparently over 50 employees, or choose not to go pro, you owe... 200,000$?

Worse yet, you have a sequel game, which is almost the same, and only >=50k$ in sales, but 2 million installs, because you put a sexy heroine on the main roster, you now owe, apparently (as an operating business subject to new future Unity terms), $400,000?

That would be --

oh sorry, I am not finished, while production is running, you also decide to yet again produce another product, which just has >=20k in sales, but your demo is the right type of addicting,

because its also multiplayer,

oh wow, you know multiplayer products just drive installs, apparently, you can now owe x amount from installs, while in business, because guess what?! Your entire player base from the previous two games jumped onto it due to it being like a multiplayer version of the previous two titles. So now that was 3 million more unique installs! $600,000!!

$200,000 + $400,000 + $600,000 = $1,200,000 in install sales revenue, under operating parameters over a few sales quarters for a somewhat successful small indie studio, perhaps? This is unique installs, there are a little over 2 billion people on earth who own a personal computer.

But, fear not, I don't know maths. Right?

Someone will correct me.

 

But don't forget, because of that software empty of content you are selling your game by filling that with your content. So this should be a symbiotic business relationship, but you are right, Unity started to decide playing the parasite lately, to feed upon your revenue regardless of your situation.

 

People also change mobile phones, often I might add. They also usually have at least one tablet, and there exist family sharing plans where you can with one purchase, install something on the phones and tablets of the whole family. 1 purchase will easily be 5 installs if not more.

What are you saying?

 

I'm saying that install rate of F2P software is relevant data. Install rate of already purchased software is not relevant. Logic infers Unity will not waste time and resources tracking irrelevant data.

 

Unity says installs on different devices are relevant regardless of Free to Play or not, if that’s not logical, take it up with Unity.

 

No they clearly stated that every device will count a new install, even in their updated FAQ.
But before the updated FAQ they also stated that the dev would have to pay for any new install, the update was just to try and calm people down with some PR crap.
You have to be very naive to think that they can detect an install from a reinstall, and they will do so against their own interest, because they are very kind to you.
With a ceo that would love to charge players 1$ to reload in battlefield.

 

Its good example how this "fees" will works

 

Guys any news?

 

yo guys if you want to migrate to unreal , here is some documentation that will help you to take the first step and ditch unity once for all , with unreal you get better graphics better performance and better support and features https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-engine-for-unity-developers/

 

I have two quotes from a web comic I would like to share.

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3000/fc02994.htm
"When lawyers take advantage of how a law is written in a way that is obviously unfair, the rule of law is also weekend. Then it is up to us to fix it before people lose faith in the system and take things into their own hands. Personally, I think government lawyers would have an easier job if we didn't have to spend so much time keeping private sector lawyers from burning their own house down."

This quote is relevant as it reflects the price of Unity's actions this week. No mater how this is resolved, they HAVE weakened the power of a contract, and the trust in Terms of Service. It's really done some damage.

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2500/fc02413.htm

"While I admire the scope, Mr Kornada is new at this. He's making an amateur's mistake. You don't kill the people you're stealing from. You want them alive and productive so you can steal from them again and again."

Okay, this one takes a little context... Please forgive Sam's delivery - his kind view stealing as an honorable thing. As for the deaths, that's related to the fact that Mr Kornada wanted to kill the robots and take their assets for himself. Don't worry, the thief Sam helped to stop this mess, and the conversation we're seeing is part of the aftermath. The robots are perfectly fine!

But his point is relevant here. Unity wants to, in Sam's terms, steal a rather large sum from developers. But they've made the mistake of trying to take enough that when the developers look at the impact of these fees, they see their companies and games destroyed. They're metaphorically killing the companies they're stealing from, and that's going to prevent Unity from being able to keep stealing that money in the future.

 

Yes, exactly. Because you pay your subscription fee, you do your part of symbiosis. That's the idea. And anything changes this balance towards you or them may/should trigger a replacement, in ways of living, perceiving, acting, etc. In our case, we can easily switch to another engine, we just loose some time, nothing more. The losses on the other partner of this symbiosis can be catastrophic.

 

spot on

 

If I had $0.20 for every dev that has switched from Unity to another engine already,
I'd probably be as rich as Riccitiello by now.

 

This "LeftyTwoGuns" F*** has been hanging around for days trying a F***ton of different specious arguments out to defend Unity, and I guess to rustle jimmies. It's getting pretty F***ing old, not least because people keep getting baited into replying to them.

 

Based on reports coming out from Unity employees... they have NO IDEA how they will collect "install metrics" and seem to think they will do this without "phoning home". This is technology they are still working on, trying to figure it out by the end of the year.

I get that they don't want to bankrupt us developers, and likely willing to work with devs that have excessive fees, but that was messaging that should have been ready from Day One of the announcement. This is starting to look like just general ineptness on the part of the executive team that rolled it out. The intention was not to rape their customers, and they (the execs) genuinely thought the announcement would be better received. Employees tried to inform them, but the exec team must have thought they were the smarter people in the room and promptly ignored all of that good advice.

Now they are stuck. Several ethically questionable moves (around the Terms Of Service moves) have compounded the situation, and they still have their original problem: Making a profit.

Ultimately, this whole mess goes back to their refusal to run with the AppLovin deal... a company that would have bought Unity at a greater value than it was valued at, and likely run Unity as a loss leader to provide clients for their ad services. I can't help but wonder how Unity would look if that deal had been accepted by John Riccitiello and the board.

 

Now that you mention it, it does all seem like outside interference to demolish indie devs.

Promoting AAA centrical sales focus.

Oh no, just another Ultima 7 situation.

Oh wow, it-

no.. it-- Oh god, it's an EA exec

NO!!!!!

 

I said underpriced.

If you look at them compared to Unreal, Unity loses out big in monetization. They're more expensive for smaller developers that produce enough to make a living but not enough to strike it rich, and at the same time they get almost nothing from major successes. Unity would be about 2 billion wealthier on the backs of Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Magic Arena, and a couple other games if they licensed the way Unreal does. At the same time, a lot of small developers would be better off too.

Unity is based around the idea of having a lot of developers paying for a lot of services and sitting in development limbo. They see no direct benefit from successful games, and that's their problem, their pricing model is fundamentally broken.

 

Monday:
multiple installs won't

1.Tank company
2.Get fired before end of contract
3.Profit(severance package)

 

The switch is not going to be immediate - don't be naïve! For one thig most dev's have only stated they are exploring other engines, that future titles that have not progressed too far will be switched over. However they wont do anything for the next couple of weeks at the earliest on the off chance that Unity can some how walk this back.

We will not see the effect of this fiasco for at least 1-2 years and probably later for the obvious conclusion assuming Unity don't some how manage to regain trust in a whole new system during that time.

 

It's not even accurate is the frustrating part. (what the "insider" said)
Let's assume Unity (the company) did go broke...

Their assets would be liquidated, and there's a near 100% chance another company would buy the engine and keep it going. It wouldn't just poof out of existence.

 

Bellular following up on his last video:

 

Let me get this straight...

I give away my game for free and get 2,000,000 installs in 12 months. But I make only $200,000 in micro transactions in that time. Now I owe $360,000 to Unity? So, I'm now $160,000 in the red.

 

You are right. This plan is actually most harmful for the developers standing between AAA studios and small developers in means of revenue. Now, if we want to block emergence of new enterprises, we should find something that does not effect small developers as we need them on our side. Then, we should put some fees that AAA studios can easily pay. Well, we should design a vague feeing system for this, if we design the right system, we throw the emerging studios into a huge struggle, we can easily manipulate their business, in fact, we can drive them into bankruptcy if we want. The essential part of this plan is to invent a fee that can accumulate vastly over time. The second essential part is giving the impression that we are checking the relevant data efficiently. But, we won't be doing that. Also, we should not be transparent on this, because we will sink businesses with this tool. Because, we don't want the guys in the middle grow more and threaten our business.

Can you see a structure here? Any idea who might be these people? And any idea who is executing their plan right now?

 

Just going to leave this screenshot here, for Unity's marketing department's consideration.

 

Yes for now... sure they won't remove the threshold next year...

They would never do it...

 

I get what you are saying, it'll be even worse in the long run,
but I'm closely following Godot, Unreal, Flax, Unigine, Youtube, Twitter, etc.
You won't believe how many people are making the switch,
some even cut their partnerships with Unity and cancelled the trip to Unite,
some people even cancelled educational material they were working on
like courses that were on production for months, this is just the beginning.
I for one can't imagine the board backpedaling from this.

 

I get what you are saying and agree with the overall premise that Unity is trying to increase revenue of the backs of big games. However their mistake is to assume that if Unity had this or even a royalty scheme in place before those games were made that the development companies would still have chosen them. Those companies might, but could just as easily gone with a competitive for a better (custom) deal or just wrote their own engine.

Of course their current plan is to just 'grab' money off these companies after the fact, though at far lower value and possibly even have custom deals in place for such big developers, that none of us here could dream of getting.

The problem Unity had was thinking services would be both a desirable factor to draw developers in and be profitable enough to sustain the engine, neither of which has happened. It was also reported by two old timers who use to work at Unity ( one of which was Aras, who was and is still well respected in community ) that the engine subscription system alone was profitable and could support the engine costs at the time 7 or so years back. See tweet and tweet

 

Sorry, I apologise, I misread you original post as being facetious, implying that developers were not really leaving.
That's totally on me.

 

Have you seen the Godot funding page when it started the same day as Unity's snafu and where it is now?

Starting


Now

 

Greedy, WTH

 

I'd like to know where they hired these guys, clearly above average skill level.

 

As long as indie devs exist and can be potentially successful, ubermonetization tactics can't get a full grip on the market. There will always be some reasonably priced, content rich game out there respectful of people's time, because indie devs are passionate creators who care about their fellow gamers. If there are relatively few players with the wherewithal to produce a playable game, that's much less players who need to be captured or brought to the table to submit to whatever ubermonetization tactic they want to introduce. It's classic cartel behavior.

 

No worries!

 

As I mentioned before, we are a studio that develops AAA games. We will publish our project, which 60 people have been working on for the last 3 years, on steam in the coming months. We already know that Unity needs money from the very beginning. But trying to solve this need in this way is a disaster. While we are ready to give a 5% share of the profit, it is very frustrating that Unity creates a table that will victimise both small-scale studios and independent developers.

What I'm saying here is, instead of implementing a system that you doubt you can even manage, why not choose an easier method?

If they are interested in ripping off developers, not everyone in the Unity community is indie or a small studio. They should not forget the possibility of hitting a hard rock.

 

we should then make a dispute fund, similar to a labor union, with a group of trusted developers, that can help out with such cases (if it really becomes like this). what we basically have here are workers, without rights, so yeah unity users need a labor union to counteract untrusty behaviours. but if they act like that unity wont be used by anyone, in the next dev circle. i wrote about 200k lines of code for my game and ill port my codebase to another engine for my next project

 

This is really not about revenue. It's about destroying potential competition. I think that's essential to understand.

 

Unity is Ruined - YouTube

 

I'm just posting because it's easier to reference

 

Well, it's been interesting to see people I usually watch on YouTube make Unity related videos. A small silverlining in these dark times.

 

I think there was some meeting where the execs thought "big data" would just know all these numbers using "ai" and "data models". I don't think they even know how they're planning on doing it but...

Will games made with Unity phone-home to track installs?

We will refine how we collect install data over time with a goal of accurately understanding the number of times the Unity runtime is distributed. Any install data will be collected in accordance with our Privacy Policy and applicable privacy laws.​

This sounds like phoning home is on the table so they will probably combine this with whatever data they can scrape from platforms.

 

No, charging upfront does nothing because a piracy is an install, and you can trivially pirate any apk, and many PC games. It isn't clear DRM would help either if it phones home on boot.

 

Won't be long until someone with a bot net goes around sending game owners a notice stating something like

"We won't charge you 500k in unity fees if you pay us 100k up front."

 

Adding a DRM would only make it more interesting for the kind of people unity does not want to be interested.

 

Pretty sure what you are describing accounts to a court action lawsuit, though I'm unsure you could get one for specific disputing the Unity invoices, it would have to challenge some other aspect of this unethical plan, like the TOS change, or how installs are calculated.

If it did get to that stage though I could easily see a crowdsourced fund being popular, but it would have to have safe guards and show there is a clear legal avenue to follow.

 

But what's the way out for a company like yours? It seems many people here hope to port their games to UE/Godot/whatever in a few months, but you obviously can't do it.

In the short term, it seems we'll have to suck it up and negotiate whatever conditions that let us stay afloat, but in the long run it's even worse headache to deal with an upopular platform of a free-falling company.

 

Wow, how many messages there are!) Any significant news? Mike shared his calculator?

 

No. We won't likely see anything significant till at least Monday.

 

Unfortunately, we don't have the possibility to change the engine. Now that the game has reached Gold status, the best we can do is to release the game in an anxious way. There's a chance that we might fall victim to a contract that could bankrupt the company, but otherwise it would be another huge waste of money.

This has even galvanised our player base of hundreds of thousands, and we can already anticipate a drop in sales.

But since Unity has lost trust in this way, we will definitely not use Unity in the next project.

 

To be frank I actually thought their plan was more clever than this. Like:
- have contacts in stores and other distributor to get numbers,
- any popular games will have number in the major store, as games seldom exist beyond them, at best you can track popularity on social media, any reasonable success will register, and you can "estimate" the business model,
- use that number to coerce "rogue dev" to front the money, will probably be a lowball, but that's money baby!
- profit

instead it's just literally:
- somewhat count install with constraint that don't make any technical sense
- ???
- profit