Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Absolutely atrocious decision making on Unity's part. I've been an avid fan, preacher, and teacher of Unity for the last 5 years. A near-total lack of notice on monetization affecting games past and present is utterly ridiculous. I will DEFINITELY be taking my money, support, and skills to another platform that treats its customers (and MONEY MAKERS) with respect. Great job, guys!!!

 

It was an exaggeration and I think we won't pass the threshold (but not by far), but let me tell you, I'm not going to pay them a dime for a game released 5 years ago with no updates in the past 2-3 years, I'm not even using any of their live services.

 

Aw man! Why did you have to be that guy. Hah.
Thank you for the information.

 

It already specifically points out both thresholds have to be met. People have calculated with this in mind.

"Delta patching" has no relation whatsoever to what I mentioned in that post. If you do not believe that mobile gamers manually reinstall games, I don't have anything else to say. I am not interested in further discussion as I believe you're not arguing in good faith. I wish you a nice day.

 

Time to switch to Unreal...

 

No, since the game jam game didn't get $200k revenue in addition to the 200k installs, it doesn't hit the threshold. At least this is my understanding. I could be wrong but it has to be both to meet the threshold to be considered for the monthly rate. From the FAQ: "The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games made with Unity Personal and Unity Plus that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime installs."

 

Just imagine the c-level guys watching this thread, hoping it will just die down...

Does anyone know how to contact Linus Tech Tips, Gamer's Nexus or anyone like that? I feel like most Unity users are not even aware of this bs. I saw Gamesfromscratch video by accident and found out.

 

NOBODY is going to comply with this fee. It is ridiculous, no judge would hold this up in court. It's obviously accountant level shell game to extract more money out of already paid for licenses. Internal proprietary ways to track installs, totally up to the discretion of Unity. With all safeguards against fraudulent installs also owned by Unity.

 

That was probably how they tried to sell it, but it ended up alienating a very large percentage of their users instead. Not the first time, sadly.

 

"We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed."
This isn't true for iOS games. Please clarify.

 

Since, as far as we know (and some people in this thread have checked), the game doesn't "call home" when run, there's no way for Unity to detect an install in that case, so initially I'd say no, they can't tell how many installs have been done that way. And it's 100% impossible to determine the amount of revenue if sales are managed by yourself.

Regarding adding the game to Steam, as long as they just add a link to the .exe, I don't think Steam has analytics on that. If you sold Steam Cd keys tied to a specific Steam AppId, however, they would be able to track you.

In other words, if Minecraft was done in Unity, they would have needed to actually ask Notch about numbers (and also would ask for a zillion dollars at this point).

 

So are WebGL plays "installs" or not? I coded a webgl demo a couple years back for a Steam game that now has more than 850,000 plays on Newgrounds. It generated tens of thousands of wishlists but no revenue. If we release and keep the demo up, this could majorly bite us in the ass.

 

I fear I'm not going to be adding much to the discourse here, but I think it important to give companies feedback on ideas that I find idiotic.
Unfortunately, Unity's install fee plan, as it is currently stated, makes small scale development essentially impossible. Thus, I will cease development in Unity. As I am just a hobbyist, I fear that this will be no great loss to the company. However, I have purchased a number of items from the unity asset store (spending likely more than I will ever generate in game revenue), a practice I will also cease.
To summarize, with this decision, Unity has wasted a considerable amount of my time and money. It is difficult to adequately express my displeasure regarding the matter.

 

This partner youtuber saying that this is good/not bad:

Wow.

 

"Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs."

 

Can anyone from Unity confirm something please?

I have been working on a free-to-play game whose entire business model relies on many people installing it but very few paying money for it.

This will never make any money if there is any pay-per-install fee.

Can I bypass this fee by purchasing "Industry" version of Unity for the 5k/seat/year?

 

Everything about this pricing model is suspect. Feels like whoever is stearing the ship has no idea WTF they're doing at Unity. What little faith they had is evaporating fast. All they care about is gouging us as hard ass possible with their last breath.

 

it doesnt need to be true. Unity shareholders want your moneu, there isn't anything else to understand.

 

How do they calculate revenue over time?

 

One of the main benefits of Unity over Unreal was the business model. I didn't like the idea of paying a 5% revenue fee, and I don't like paying a per-install fee, either.

I already stopped using Unity a while ago after various changes made it clear that Unity's profit seeking knows no bounds (subscription model, then pricing increases, then threatening devs with remote engine shutoff, then the unfortunate anti-indie statements your CEO made, then asset store licensing changes, etc etc.). This latest tightening of the thumbscrews just (unfortunately) proves I was right to ditch this engine.

RIP unity. A technologically good engine ruined by enshittification.

 

As someone some pages backwards mentioned. Unity wants Unreal to win the market. We will have true free market finalization - monopol.

Probably our text boycot wont change anything. Decision is made on a top top level and nothing will stop them. Our posts are like a bugs' protest for them. Who care about bug's protest? NONE! They don't care. They are counting on that most of people are so depended on Unity and wont decline it.
Remember Only HUGE drainage of subscribers on the beginning of 2024 can do any effect + mass spam on Unity emails to overflood them.

None of the people in power wants small, uninfluenced and independent companies/organizations. These disturb the bigger plans to milk people of money using the smallest possible effort. And practice like that, is the way how you get rid off such a companies/organizations

 

Actually yeah this is an incredibly good point.

 

I hadn't even seen the update to this, who decides what substantially similar content is?

At least it answers the question about demos, they're definitely bundled. I'm guessing this is Unity's discretion, so whole series' of games will come under the same rev/install count even if they have different themes (think match 3/casual mobile) instead of it actually being per game.

 

explain

 

So, if my company peaked at 200k USD for the last 12 months, then sells 0 copies the next month.. I should only be charged for that 1 month.

 

I mean, this whole thing is transparently bullshit. You can whine all you want about the 'billions of monthly downloads' of the Unity Runtime, but that runtime is packaged and distributed with the games that Unity devs create. It's not Unity shouldering the burden of those billions of downloads - it's Google Play, it's the App Store, it's Steam, etc. Trying to pass off infrastructure costs that you're not even paying onto the devs who give your product value is ghoulish, especially for installs that generate no revenue for anyone - and no matter how you try and backpedal later, the initial post and official responses have made it very clear that you don't care if there's any actual revenue generated from these installs.

This disincentivizes devs from joining charity bundles. It dissuades them from putting games or apps up on subscription services. It effectively bars them from making mobile apps that aren't monetized to the moon and back. It chokes out many of the up-and-coming indie devs that have looked to Unity for its ease of use and extensive prebuilt packages. It makes the entire ecosystem worse, all for the sake of a bit of nickel-and-diming to appease the shareholders.

 

As a 6-year strictly-hobbyist dev, hoping to some day work my way to releasing something, I always saw Unity as the 'friendlier' engine choice for being low-risk, offering low and easy-to-understand pricing guidelines, having a thriving community, and not being too greedy with taking money from devs once a game starts selling. While the raise to 200k before fees even apply is nice, there's no point in me even bothering going with Unity if I could get ninja'd-nickled-and-dimed in the face at any moment in the future like this, especially with these vaguely-worded excel spreadsheet fee schedules. There's just no incentive for me to keep going with you.

And based on these more experienced community member reactions (the ones who helped me LEARN to use the engine), other beginners will think the same before even touching Unity. The greater community holds major influence and offers guidance on which engine we start to play around with and ultimately learn as users who are starting out. If they tell beginners to steer clear, they will.

I may have learned to code using Unity, but don't think that aspiring devs will stick around because of a sunk-cost fallacy. We chose to use Unity because it was transparent with us and because of the strong community around it that helped us beginners get started. Unity's managed to enraged its entire community with a poorly thought out pricing plan announcement, and suddenly Unity doesn't seem so friendly to me anymore. I've got nothing to lose and Unreal is looking mighty friendly by comparison.

 

These changes are comical, to say the least.

It's extremely clear that no one has done any technical assessment before pressing the green button and letting this kind of stuff go live. No chance at all.

Listen: it's technically impossible to precisely track all installs. As it is impossible to track precise distinct users utilization metrics, such as the WebGL scenario. Probably there is the possibility to implement some approximate tracking model which can - more or less - count-ish installs (ignoring all the legal and tech nightmares linked to it, like the need to implement and ship hidden telemetries, outgoing packets, tackle offline-only scenarios, blablah). But it's absolutely impossible in the WebGL scenario, and any IT intern will rapidly understand it: if I (single user) connect via a VPN, via an incognito session, by rebooting my router and changing my IP, using different user agents, sending random wgets to the WebGL instance domain...what am I? One user? Three users? Wtf?!

And that's already acknowledged - in a goofy way - also by them, as demonstrated by the tweet from Unity itself posted some pages ago: we have our model that "we believe" it will work? Believe? Believe what?

I honestly ignore if there is any legal entity which can regulate this. Bills will be emitted based on this "we believe" model, and even if I lack the legal knowledge to express a solid idea in these regards, to me it seems clear - and desiderable - that it's impossible to emit a bill based on some one-sided obscure model and speculation that can't actually be technically verified in real life. Because that's the truth, again, you can't precisely count installs and WebGL unique utilizations.

If these new pricing models will stick, I think there will be legal and lawyers hell out there. Sad.

 

same story bro, multiplayer game, we are planning soft start of October, our competitors have over 700 milion installs and def over 1 mil rev, hopefully we can scale fast and ditch Unity

 

We can launch and exceed 200k revenue, it's not that much. Meanwhile, the demo can continue to accrue "installs" via the webgl demo and cost us real money for no reason.

 

Just throwing my hat in as a professional Unity developer of around 12 years, the past few years have been a non-stop torrent of bad news and inept desicions from Unity but this is the straw that broke the camels back; I'm out.
I'll see out my current client projects in Unity, but starting tomorrow, I will begin the process of reacclimating myself to Unreal. I have a background in C++ development from before I started using Unity, so I'm not concerned about the transition process.

 

anyone know how to make an alternate runtime compiler thingy?

 

Have engaged Unreal. 32K person-hours in Unity flushing down the drain and 6 years of MMO development taking our S*** and moving to Unreal.

Thanks for nothing Unity. I did engage legal council this is actionable. Based on the EULA that was released and the affirmation unity gave us after the 2018/2019 EULA debacle this is simply illegal by contract law, and represents an actionable situation where Unity has caused "Egregious and undisputable loss of money and investment" in their own platform.

/done Go F*** yourselves sirs.

 

I remember when Unity wanted to DEMOCRATIZE Game Development. Now they wanna be the Hitler of Game Development.

 

"Initialized" there, "Is distributed" here. Unity reps here are talking like sales are counted, FAQs and post are using "installation" term and give (pretty bad) reasoning why it's exactly that - installation. And in twitter they are talking about distribution, which would be downloading. Which is completely another matter.

They mix up terminology and contradict each other.

Amount of preparation and damage control is astounding. /s

 

So I release all my games without any kind of DRM. If a user now decides to give his legally purchased copy (for which I might have to pay Unity) to all of his friends and spreads it via Torrent (usually my games show up on day 1 on all of the usual sites) I will have to pay for those pirated copies too? As those games are 100% the same as a legal download Unity will have no way to distinguish these two.

And what about Steam Family Sharing? This doesn't sound legal.

 

First they came for the successful indie dev and I said nothing...

 

That's it for me too. 10+ years and the only engine I've ever known, gone. I've had a game in Early Access for almost 2 years and I'm going to put it on hiatus and I guess try port it to Unreal.

Shout out to all the devs going through it right now. I'm sure I'll be seeing lots of you in the Unreal forums. We deserve better than this.

 

This is very concerning, expecially on HOW they will measure installs, this is really shady

 

Let's say for example you make a game that makes $200,001 profit, and has 1.2 million extra installs in a year. And you pay for the Pro license.

If your installs are divided equally in all months of the year (100k per month), you must pay Unity monthly 15k dollars. Because the installation count is monthly. Not yearly. Do not pay 15 cents for the first 100,000 installations that year. You pay for the 100,000 of each month.

In total, of the 200.001$ you earned, after taxes and stores you get 100.000$. To which you must remove salaries and Pro licenses. After all that Unity charges you 180k.

 

Welp, one less incentive to make demos.

 

I was refraining from posting until I could read through all posts in this forum thread, but alas page after page of new posts keep appearing, so I apologize if this just repeats points made in pages 16 onward:

I understand that fees are PER GAME and must reach TWO thresholds. I've read this many times.

HOWEVER, let's explore the verbiage used on Unity's own pages:

The FAQ section of this page asks the question: https://unity.com/pricing-updates

Who does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to?​

The answer provided on this page does NOT answer "who", it merely states what tier of a subscription. I am not a lawyer but a "Game" is not the same as a "Who". It is neither a person nor a business entity. WHO will you be billing and how are you assigning a LEGALLY binding responsibility for billing?


Further information is provided on this page (READ IF YOU HAVEN'T YET!): https://unity.com/runtime-fee

Unity Personal, Unity Plus, Unity Pro, and Unity Enterprise plan subscribers and Unity Runtime distributors will be responsible for paying the Unity Runtime Fee, which is calculated on a per-project basis. The fee applies to all platforms (mobile, PC, console, web, etc.) and is based on the number of installs once an app reaches eligibility thresholds.​

I've bolded Unity Runtime distributors; This implies that Unity will somehow convince Steam, Apple, Google, etc to record, calculate, collect and remit this fee? Subtracted from sales, or what? I don't see how this could work at all.


Some further selections from that runtime fee page:

Install definition

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Each game or app’s cumulative install amount cannot be reset or reduced even if it has been sold, transferred to a new party, changed its name, been republished as a new version, added expansion content, or had its unique identifier (e.g., BundleID) altered. Additionally, a change in publisher or distributor does not reset the cumulative install amount.​

So again I need to know HOW would Unity determine this data? I have a game with over 500,000 installs that was originally made with Flash. I had been considering porting it to Unity, but I would be keeping the same bundle ID and certificates so that my users would get the update rather than be forced to do a new install, but this overly broad definition here would include the installs of the Flash version!

Revenue definition

A game or app’s “total revenue” includes all revenue generated (without limitation) to retail sales, in-app purchases, subscription fees, web payments, offline payments, ads-based revenue, etc. Total revenue is calculated without deduction, including any relevant digital store fees.​

What's crap about this is they want to calculate it off GROSS, not NET. Forget about operating costs, platform distributor fees, advertising, marketing, user-acquisition and all those other costs that typically eat away any profit (or send you into the negatives for that matter).


This one is just... mindblowing, under "rates" section:

The fee schedule for each install is based on a set of tiers that is a progressive schedule. Each install within a tier is charged at the per install rate listed. For example, a Unity Pro user with an app that exceeds the Unity Runtime Fee threshold and has 200,000 installs in the month will pay 100,000 * $0.15 + 100,000 * $0.075 = $22,500.​

In my experience, an average mobile game monetized with ads only MIGHT make $2k a month with 200,000 installs (or it might only make $200!). Their calculation completely ignores retention rates (or lack thereof). Assuming you keep 15% of your 200,000 installs, that's 30,000 players who stick around for a month. At a 1$ to 2$ CPM you're looking at $30 to $60 per day off those 30,000 players and if they play every day, then that's $900 to $1800 for the month (optimistically! You could even make way less!). And this isn't even accounting for further player attrition. But Unity expects $22,500 !?

The math just doesn't add up.

 

From where did you get that screenshot? It doesn't look like that in my FAQ page.

 

not only that. even games under the threshold are effected, because if a user buy the game from gog (or any other drm-free source) and offline install it, will the game even work without be able to phone home to tell unity +1 installation?
They said nothing about this offline only scenario.

 

Yup, hour 2 of UE5 tutorial video. UE5 is actually a lot like Unity. I think I can make this work. Might take a good few weeks to get a good idea, but so far, it does everything Unity can.

 

Hi GODOT!

That's unbelievable.

 

Yeah, he is also paid by Unity. So...

 

The removal of Unity Plus basically means I will not pay for any subscription now, a Pro license is not worth the asking price, especially since I only really need it to remove the splash screen.

The install fee will most likely not affect me in the near future, however that fee seems ridiculous and completely disproportionate depending on the type of app/game you want to create. Semi-successful small / free to play projects will suffer the most from this.
The vague information and lack of transparency on what counts as an install or how they are supposed to be counted will render Unity as an unreliable partner for many people. Seems like I'll have to start looking into Unreal again.

 

Good point, but its a bit more nuanced than that. I think the way its meant to work is that the point you hit $200k again, is that point after which additional new installs are counted again as being eligible for a fee. You should not be charged a fee for installs in-between.

However you are correct - its bloody stupid, and even writing out what I think is meant to happen ( because Unity have utterly failed to explain it ) makes it sound even more stupid and even less able to accurate plan and manage ones finances if you game is ping-ponging between the thresholds every month.

 

Question to the team: What about Apple Arcade? (Same as game pass games etc?) They will all disappear from the stores then?