Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I mean... they *could* try, but if you look at how open source software typically works, they're unlikely to be successful.

And do understand - developers HAVE tried this kind of thing with open source projects. There may be a bit of success, but it tends to fall apart as the structure that produced the project itself isn't really all that compatible with going closed source?

For popular open source projects, the maintainers are getting a lot for free - development, bug reporting, a support network, extensions, etc. Sure, they take donations and may have some paid developers, but they're still dependent on the overall community.

Going closed source is costly, and while some (redhat, for example) can manage it... when people look at their budgets and the price of switching, it's hard to beat free.

 

1) Not the same at all, a % rev share can NEVER exceed that % of your revenue ... Unity's hair-brained ass option yes can be less than 5% ... and can be a lot more than 5% what it will be depending on how its calced and its calced with "trust me bro" install count ... not sales, not licenses ... installs

WE did the maths, we sent that to support we asked for clarification and yep, it is what we think it is. It is absolutely possible for Unity to take 10% ... 40% ... 115% sure its also possible for them to take 2% ... the issue is the lack of a cap. Unity can eat your lunch and if your aiming for a wide install base with a low conversion rate and value e.g. F2P, Freemium, etc. then this is EXTRA bad so will definitely be more than 5% and can be well more than 5%

2) Setting all that aside the issue is of how the royalties are claced is an issue but one that is easily resolved with a simple cap e.g. "Not to exceed 5%" then it would be fine ... even good in some cases but never worse and not possible to eat your lunch so fine that is doable.

But this issue of ... o this is retroactive to all existing games and projects in flight and goes into effect in 90 days ... that is complete BS and no Epic doesn't do that in fact Epic has verbiage (as Unity used to) to prevent that behaviour.

So no Unity's model isn't better but even if you think your indie game can just adjust its price and your user base will just eat that you still have the trust issue. And yes both Unity and Epic are taking there cut at 1m, but you see with a % based rev they can NEVER take more than 5% ... it will always be 5% yes never less ... but it will be ... and this is DAMN important ... it can never be more than 5% ... it is predictable, locked in not a "trust me bro" variable to deal with

 

It’s the ashes of Amazon Lumberyard (Amazon’s CryEngine3 “fork”)
Not sure how is it theese days, when it released it was a mess.

 

So Google will reduce that from my pay? How much less will Google pay me per download?

 

Capitalism gonna capitalize - blame the game not the player. But alas Unity lowered the frog too quickly.

edit:
From my POV Unity did this move far too early. The engine is not in a good state. ECS is out, more bare bones than free Rust engines. UI Toolkit good but undercooked. Unity is nice because there's a mostly empty canvas in a new project but umm... this is not exactly the biggest selling point for having a TAX on using the engine. Honestly it's quite pathetic that Unity couldn't get this revenue stream via ADs, multiplayer hosting, other services, ...

this really

 

I can blame both.

 

That's the really funny thing... Google never agreed to this either, is not a party to the TOS in this case, and has no incentive or obligation to pay.

The part about collecting from distributing platforms may have been the most humorous part of the whole plan.

 

Yes, i would pay for Pro, if get past 200k can probably afford that, to avoid the issue.

Unreal may be free, but if hit 1 million you can loose millions of $, so i would personally prefer loose the Pro subscription money than potentially millions, depending always on how the games are priced and sale estimations

 

and a fixed % based on real numbers + the trust that we are finding out is more important...

 

Hello, thanks for this post.

 

If you get past 200k you can afford multiples of 2k per year for Pro licenses no problem, but

If you get above $1 million revenue you will lose "millions of dollars"? (if you get to like... 41 million?)

 

lol what are you talking man?

 

LOL .... LMAO ... RTFOLOL
Is that enough early 2000s expressions for you about how likely that turd is to float in the swimming pool
If Google doesn't just laugh them off the face of the earth they will simply ... em nope and hand that bill to you bud

 

Remember that 90% of these unaffected users are those who just download Unity and use it casually with no intention to even sell their games, which may not even be finished (ever). The people who are affected are those who use Unity in any serious manner which is supposed to serve as their income. Among them are those who may fail to surpass the thresholds, and those who are successful. Those are the ones most affected.

If you have any success you will be looted ruthlessly by Unity. Now - who has any intention to work with Unity knowing that in the rare case of a big success you will earn a fraction of what you'd earn before their install fees were implemented? And with some bad luck, you may even go into the negatives with it.

So why even try if the case of success is so severely punished?

 

Yeah, bundling and and illogical unbounded fee structure, suggest the train is coming off the railroad.

Part of me speculates iron source had more to do with this. Unity has flirted with the idea, but it's always been too dumb, and shot down by the rank and file.

Now however Unity has new blood, and I wonder if iron source is on the board of directors. Further, I wonder if they lobbied to increase revenue through this naive manner.

But it doesn't make sense because iron source should know that there's no unique identifier available for exploitation, and therefore this revenue idea would create an antagonistic customer situation. Unbounded $0.20 installs and reinstalls.

It's just so confusing.

 

Agreed, as i said before adding a cap would make it a win win offering versus Unreal, now would have to add more to the game price to be on the safer side if Unity does overestimate the installs and not change anything to their proposal until January

Also i doubt they will overestimate in general, as they can just watch the game reported sales and price and do a simple correction if their estimates are way off.

 

So it seems you didn't understand well what happens with this new Unity policy.

Simply, you make a F2P game, downloaded 2 million times, started to make $0.1 with in-App purchases or Ad revenue (means you made $200.000 revenue). How amazing. However you are doomed in this new Unity policy that, as you made $200.000 revenue, now you owe $0.15 dollars to Unity for each installation. So Unity can penalize you with $300.000 for making revenue of $200.000.

There are more than that, which Unity can combine all your 'similar games' (sequels, demos) as one project to inflate the numbers, which this can hurt developers who target Steam or other platforms too.

So I really do not understand how you try to defend this unethical scheme against developers. At least I suggested that paying a percentage (let's say 5%) can guarantee you still earn something. But with open-ended pricing plan of penalizing developers with installs is not ethical and it is ugly. You cannot defend that to me.

 

..... It's installs, it's not sales. A sale will probably be 4-5 installs since people have multiple devices and as we know, installs on different devices count as different installs as Unity has told us.

 

good luck with that xD

 

You do you, I personally don’t have a horse in this race as I switched to Unreal a few years ago.
I’d rather have a fix 5% fee I can calculate with than some arbiraty black box “installs” meteic from UT.

 

Unreal is a percent, so anything you make and no matterr what price is the game you pay a 5%.

E.g. do 10 million sales of $3, you pay 5% of 30 million, which is $1.5 million.

With Unity you pay around 50k for below million, 50k for Enterprise and $0.01×29 million, which is 290k, summary around 400k

You just saved 1 million for your team

 

even in that case is not a good idea, is also really bad you should move to another engine

Unreal is going to be now the most popular game engine (if not already) you will find a better market there with all new homeless xD so, you should move

In any case, is better if we just leave this ship

 

Not to mention if you price your game at $100 million per copy, and you sell only 1 copy (which will be like 5 installs), you will pay nothing with Unity, while you will pay millions with Unreal!

 

Remember that 5% is paid on the Gross Revenue, that includes Steam Fee, potentially even VAT.

In reality, it should be around 12-15% of your gross revenue.

 

And with Unity, I will pay ???? which will be ???? of my gross revenue! Now I know!

 

Two simple options, buy Pro to extend to million threshold or charge $0.25 instead of $0.1 to absorbe Unity fee.

 

"No one gets above 200k revenue so it doesn't matter, but what if you make $100 million though, you will pay millions with Unreal"

 

Guys I think the biggest thing that is going out of scope is that on mobile market you don't get the installs.

You pay for them. Always, except very few cases.

Simplifying, this is how 99.99% of companies operates on mobile. You buy installs and monetize the audience, if your game is viable, you reinvest your revenue in buying more installs.

I'm not discussing here if this model is healthy it's just the facts.

Unity also in a way sells installs and this is the major problem for company selling the tools as well. They are providers on user acquisition market.

They're trying to create a case when the only choice for you is either you buy installs from them or you literally die.

 

Or Unity could go back to the drawing board with this entire scheme. That sounds like a good idea to me.

 

There's something I don't really understand there.
(which doesn't change anything about this damn delirium)

This:
Prior month installs (Standard fee countries) - 200K
Prior month installs (Emerging market fee countries) - 100K

Why the previous month?
In the fee table it is indicated: Step2: if your game meets...... will be charged once per new install".
And then: "new install per month" and the prices.

New install, it's not previous month installs.

Do they complicate the calculation? or a lack of clarity ?
The threshold is exceeded on the 15th of the month and necessarily the new installations start from this point and therefore on the 1st of the following month, there are necessarily 15 days to count in the previous month?

 

You don't understand how maths work in this new pricing system or how it can penalize you for making your game viral. I gave you an example on the above in my previous comment, check. This new pricing system completely disrupts mobile market, for instance.

So you need to study it better before you write, otherwise your words don't make any contribution here other than misinformation.

 

You pay for the month after it has ended.

 

Agree to that, should cover edge cases with a cap, but certainly adding a 5% would be way worse in the general case.

 

If Unity's numbers were based on sales, sure that'd be great.

But Unity wants to bill based on installs, which for any game will be over the number of sales, and for F2P and IAP driven games can easily be over a hundred times the number of sales.

Combined with how Unity hasn't (and likely never will) explain how they calculate their numbers and will bill you before you can contest it.

 

How much they save for them?

 

This is not a solution. This won't help, if Unity combines all your "similar" games (demos, sequels) to inflate the numbers. And what about Mobile games, that are downloaded in millions? Completely unacceptable.

 

I understand your point, but is only one case and with many ifs, like for example assume you make only $0.1 per sale and not any number above that.

For sure some edge cases can go bad, i am not defending that, and from start have said that a cap is needed.

But not all games are f2p and those with a higher price can loose millions if have a 5%, so i personally prefer Unity scheme than the 5%

 

The idea that someone can suddenly close source an MIT licensed repo on Github (like Godot with 1.3k+ forks) and then no work continues and everyone has to pay is ridiculous - you clearly have almost no knowledge of how open source works, MIT being one of the main licenses behind it. Apply this to Blender, Linux, Bitcoin, anything... then your trying to say Godot (open source) is like Unity early on (closed source) - you have no idea what you're talking about.

 

What's to say that Unity doesn't decide that you owe them more a few years after you release your game and you have to sell your family home to cover it or face the shame of bankruptcy?

The pricing doesn't matter if Unity can just change the terms whenever they want to. That's the main point. No-one is going to create a game in Unity if they can just retroactively change their fees at the whim of the c-suite.

I have been creating a game for almost ten years now and there is no way I'm releasing it under these conditions. I want Unity to be profitable but I'm not going to risk getting a huge bill in a few years time and then having to sell my family home just to cover it.

I'd rather take all of my game ideas over to Unreal or Godot or Stride and lay my ten year old project to rest as it's too far gone to port in a reasonable timeframe.

 

If you are making millions you can afford that. Steam takes 30% paying 35% is not much different.

 

i'm really happy paying for technology, from a company with year of experience and story ON GAMING...

not exactly, you are not counting the unpredictable factor, the installs, also what is the story of unity?
- calling their users "F***ing idiots" (incluiding you)
- merging with a malware company... (now we know why)
- the CEO is the same guy who makes EA the most hated gaming company in the world xD (the irony)
- bleeding their products to make more money for them (because the engine it has been stuck for years, maybe from 2019)

So you need to understand the big picture, is not all about the money, this is why we and all the veterans are leaving

 

I just love how people keep skipping over the fact that you don't have to pay 5%. You can negotiate away the royalties. You need to have made $1 million for the 5% to kick in so by the time you're there you should be more than able to afford any custom licensing so the only ones who pay 5% are people too dumb to read the TOS.

 

Amazing example.

 

For this move to work Unity would have needed something amazing to offer to counter all the negative aspects. Nobody is going to join this techno-feudalism thing just for the fun of it. And at this point it looks unlikely Unity can recover. The damage to reputation is huge and the competition is fierce. Why would a new developer choose Unity now?

 

I'm sure they're not on Australian time, so it'll take a decent number of hours more before John Vermicelli and his cohorts are back to work.

 

I still am. I checked it again, but nothing happened, they are still a risky company with an engine looks great on paper. We also have plenty of other engines with less risky background.

Yeah, I totally agree with this. But oh well, (technical) artists love it, everything has one way to do, no matter how convoluted it is. No personal workflow, so they don't get confused that easily.

Even if they back down (they won't), they will try again six months later.

Why not? I will blame the player as well just fine, thank you. They are total dicks and greedy assholes.

Don't worry, you're so bad at it, you won't have this problem ever. You simply don't know what you're talking about anymore and you are simply ignoring facts.

 

Here's the thing, though.

With Unreal, there's not really a subscription. You're only paying the revenue split after a certain point. 5% is a decent chunk, and I appreciate that you might not want to pay that much, and that's absolutely fine, but the solution Unity propose makes emmental wish it could be as full of holes, and on top of that, you can negotiate for better terms if you need to with Epic.

Unreal's pricing model is consistent, negotiable, based on easily-tracked data, and — importantly — is bound by the Terms of Service you've signed up for. There isn't an edge case with Unreal's pricing model where Epic can require you to fork out 108% of your revenue in all. You're only going to lose millions of dollars if you make many millions of dollars in the first place, and even then, if you do, you should probably be talking to Unreal about it anyway.

 

This is inaccurate, you don't know how many installs will be counted. You can know that it will be more than sales, but nothing else. Some random number Unity tells you.

 

A 5% fee wouldn't drive anyone into bankruptcy. The per install fee can and will. See the diffference

1. Include pirate installs which Unity likely will since there is no way to exclude them and the percentage affected will certainly be higher.

2. The limits now are 200k/1M. but they are already doing retroactive changes to their EULA. These limits may well be 2k/10k in the future. How can anyone possibly trust them not to change the limits retroactively further in the future. They still leave that as an option.

 

Actually you didn't save anything - As if you made games via Unreal - you'd probably be smart enough to sell them via the Epic Games store - then over $1m - you'd still be paying Zero

Plus - when companies get that profitable - they'd be on custom licenses

The real diff though is: Epic give you an option to not pay the 5% if you choose to sell via their market place - but if you choose not to, you're still only paying a percentage that won't send you broke

Unity - are pretty much saying if you're a f2p mobile developer - you can avoid the runtime fee by using their Ad platform - but if you choose to use a different Ad platform - or alternatively choose to use IAP's instead of Ad's - then they'll charge you in a way that could easily take more than 100% of your actual earnings and will be unviable.

Epic - Based on actual revenue
Unity - Based on Assumed revenue - and although they claim the threshold will be against each individual game - they've also stated that 'Similar" games will be bundled together for purpose of calculating (and I think we all know their definition of "Similar" will probably be: Any Games not on their Ad Platform.