Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

They said every install count, even pirated copies are counted, if you believe the games was installed maliciously you can contact them, and after 6 months they will reply "we investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing"

 

Unity is still a good tool despite its flaws. But the fact is that is that, after speaking to my team, we have decided to evaluate other engines and migrate the code. We will have a delay but, we do not want to have the uncertainty of other possible changes that may arise to the terms and conditions in the coming months.

The changes Unity is now proposing probably won't even affect us. However, there's no guarantee that in a couple of months another "bright" guy will come along with an idea even worse than this one. The only move that could make us re-think our decision would be the resignation of Unity's CEO.

It is fair that Unity wants its piece of the cake but, an installation fee? That's a bad joke. We'd be happy paying a percentage on revenue, just like we do with Unreal. We are developers, we know how much it costs to maintain a decent engine. We don't want Unity to go bankrupt, but whoever thought all this up is simply proving that they should be far away from this industry. You can't trust an engine that is managed by people who have no idea of this industry.

We will closely follow the evolution of all this in any case. We wish Unity the best of luck. Especially when they start negotiating with Microsoft, Apple, and other companies to pay the fees for their respective services. Also when the various lawsuits start to arrive.

 

I'm definitely exploring the migration options into Flax or Godot. A large part of my game code base has already been built separate from Unity, as I can actually hook it up to a barebones C# WPF project. It's all the graphics, animation, assets and editor/build pipeline that are the main concern. It's already been mentioned in other parts of the internet, that you'll have to go on a per-asset basis and see what their license permits, but for the most part, it'll be Unity-only. But things like graphics, audio etc, maybe there's a chance. As far as code assets, that's a completely different story. For example, I integrated Cinemachine. While the source is availabe on git, I can't just take it and adapt it, as that's beyond the license. Animancer has been great, but it's Unity only.
UI is probably the biggest impact. I've been using NGUI, but even if you were using Unity UI, you'll have to reuiild all that from scratch. Luckily, a lot of the dev cycles I put towards UI is more design challenges that I've since overcome, so migrating to a new engine would be largely technical.

Everything assetbundle has to get retooled, all the AssetPostprocessors have to be rebuilt. Shaders can kind of be adapted, but not really sure about all that right now.

Another thought I had is, maybe I can use Unity as simply an editor that exports standardized files like json data (most of my codebase already does this), and then have Flax or Godot as simply the runtime engine. But managing that workflow could become a nightmare.

 

I download your game. Install on my PC, on my laptop and another PC. You get charged for 3 installs. Get it?

 

It can't feasibly be multiple installs. The vast majority of customers don't have multiple PCs and it's not feasible to "share" games on Steam. For console sales it's absolutely irrelevant.

And even then, put some wild figures into a calculator. Let's pretend you sell 100k copies of a $20 game, and literally every single customer installs your game twice, which is absurd and would never happen. That's $2 million in revenue, and you're still not paying a fee yet.

 

Why don't sell at 200$?

 

He's either trolling and doesn't care that his ideas don't make sense, or he's drunk the kool-aid and believes what he's been told by Unity. Unfortunately he's not the only one of these people, but fortunately we can just ignore the innane ramblings of him and others like him.

 

I asked this before but it seems nobody can answer me:

How am I supposed to plan for install fees for a retail game? It is impossible for me to determine if 1 sale means 1 install or 3 or whatever. This is a serious question since this factor is impossible to determine when setting a sales price. How is it possible to put the fee on a liability balance? These fees can potentially occur long after a game has been actually sold.

 

The good of this crisis is that most Unity users learn that is bad that their companies, jobs or incomes depend of few people that can make any thing for money inclusive ruins you.

 

As opposed to believe what you're being told by attention seeking YouTubers and Twitter accounts who don't even make commercial games and have no more information than we do?

 

So you don't get it?

 

Do you know whether sharing through steam family sharing will be counted? because if not, then sit down.

All my friends and family share with multiple people

 

Unigine isn't open source, so you may want to consider Godot or Stride since both are open source.

That said, Unigine is quite nice. You will have good Editor and 3D performance with it.

 

Is flax good with streaming?

 

We are still in the spreading FUD stage of whatever the plan of unity managment is.

 

it took almost 5 years for anything to come back at torque at it was a private company dont see unity going same way value of company way to high for people pitch togther on buy out of code.

 

Why do you think I don't get it? I'm using actual math with official figures to demonstrate that this plan will not even REMOTELY affect the vast majority of Unity users. Why do YOU not seem to get this? Do they not teach math in school anymore?

 

There are incentives for big players to buy out Unity to prevent unreal monopoly. Like Valve helped wine to get away from directx and now we got steamdeck with proton.

 

If you like math, what number is this?

 

In this post an (unverified) employee promises a calculator for that at least:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ackaging-updates.1482750/page-55#post-9299384

 

It will, every install is counted, there is no way to detect an install from family share, normal sharing, game pass, humble bundles, copy pasting gog exes etc, there is no difference between any of these.

The best they can do is that you contact them to tell them in advance that there will be an humble sales, and if you are lucky for those 7 days of sales you are only charged for 20% of your install, that's how it's probably going to work.

 

You fail to see that with this current bridge being crossed, Unity can and will raise the prices in the future unilaterally to whatever they want. Math examples on the current suggested thresholds and prices are 100% meaningless from a big picture perspective.

 

Wow, deja vu. Here we go again with the UnityScript arguments. It can be dynamic if you want, but it's also typed:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/gdscript/static_typing.html

Also, Tim Sweeney apparently likes GDScript, and Godot got a $250K grant from Epic for graphics rendering and GDScript development:

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epic-megagrant/

--Eric

 

I don't currently have an accurate way to count the number of lifetime installs/reinstalls for my existing games.

And who knows if how I count installs is different than how Unity will count installs.

So I can't currently give an accurate estimate what I'll pay in fees under the new pricing. Yikes.

 

you're the very best

 

plain and simple there is no way for them to factor it someone can get you on a humble and wait 30 days to install it wont be any way unless there is a diffrent run time build for humble packages.

 

Vast is not all. How lucky are you that you will not be affected. I guess those that are... who cares about them.

 

So, I will avoid to express my opinion here as after being with Unity since quite long time, I can say that I invested plenty of money in it and see it going down would not be a great conclusion. Although that does not mean that I am going to move forward with Unity either, so I am evaluating alternatives at this point, depending on what is the line of conduct that Unity will adopt.

Basically my questions are 2:

1) Can I use an older version of Unity that won't be subject to the 20c per download rule? Or that apply also to older version of Unity moving forward from Jan 2024?

2) What are the terms and conditions for the packages and assets on the Unity store? Clearly if I move to another engine I won't be throwing away any asset I paid for, and while the code is trash at that point because it is associated to Unity APIs, I want to get a feel for how much of those assets is basically also locked behind licenses. Is that under control of Unity or is under control of each of the individual store owners? (May whatever God have mercy on you BTW, as you selling on the store are as badly affected as us developers).

Depending on this, I am considering to either move back to a previous build of Unity to complete the last project or just start fresh with a different engine. Clearly I can't stay with Unity anymore as things are currently, and I am sorry as I built my knowledge on this engine over more than 15 years, but can't be doing shenanigans like this, especially when you have a small team and bills to pay

 

Actually read my post. I already used an extreme example of pretending literally every single one of your 100k customers install your game twice. And you still don't exceed the first threshold, while making $2 million revenue. Is that not extreme enough.

Okay, literally EVERY SINGLE one of your 100k customers install your $20 game THREE times. That's a $20k fee on $2 million revenue, the equivalent of a 1% royalty. OR, you buy a Pro license and PAY NOTHING

 

Unity already turned down $20B (6 over market appraisal at the time) from App Lovin this year.. It isnt going to go private.. The fact that the Iron_shit CEO sold ALL of his shares in Unity in the last 9 months.. last sale this Friday is a clear message.. (Let this sink in for a few minutes. CEO of their partner company hasnt bought a single share of Unity but sold 100% of his holdings in the company.. You dont do that if you think the shares are going to get back to the $200 /ea they used to be. You do that when the ship is sunk and you wanna get paid. Insider trading much?)

They do not intend to walk this back and the company is DONE.

 

I don't know about "ironically". Users were asking for it for years. The decision to go open source was pretty straightforward. The company decided they weren't making enough money on the engine. They needed to focus on other projects in new areas to make more money. Since there weren't enough resources to do both, the decision was to give the engine to the world as FOSS. It felt appropriate, given the history of Torque. While the engine is not funded and developed at the same level as Unity, it's still alive: Torque3D. I'm proud of the community that has kept it going.

 

Now, epic tells you they want your game on the epic store as free game of the week, they will give you 90k and you will have around 9 million downloads, math me!

 

Ok sure Epic is a big corpa and you dont trust big corpa but i disagree with your exclusivity thing. As it stands right now the only real competitor to steam is Epic Strore. Epic is taking monetary hit to compete wit steam. Does exclusivity suck? yes. Would i rather buy games ion steam? yes. Do i want steam to have a monopoly? No.

Right now as it stands You dont pay royalties for sales on epic games store. And the cut is 12% thats less than half of steam. What if tomorrow steam decided to up the cut to 50%. Do you have anywhere else to go? Sure exclusivity sucks but if thats what they have to do to get market share then so be it. Its just a launcher. I think their business practice's have been more than reasonable. I've collected over 5K worth of free for the month assets from unreal marketplace for free. Same Assets that cost 100s $ on unity's asset store. Have you looked at the stupid amount of free stuff in megascans? Its all free to use in your project and the megascans vegetation even has it own season/wind system and they are availably in different quality. All of it also supports nanite with a simple check box. I really dont understands the Epic hate around here...

 

I figured I'd bring up some of the things that will have an impact on your ARPU that will affect PC/console games, so here's a few.

SALES
This one should be obvious, but some people tend to ignore it here for some reason! First, when you release a game on Steam, expect that your ARPU will be 15-20% lower than your actual price, since you'll almost always be launching with a discount applied. On top of that, deep discounts will also affect your ARPU pretty significantly. 50% off is 50%.

SELLING IN EMERGING MARKETS
"But Murgilod! Emerging markets have a different rate than standard games!" This doesn't matter. Aside from this being impossible for Unity to track, as repeatedly mentioned, these sales still count towards your 100,000 count. In some markets, the difference between them and your local price will be as high as 80%. This is, again, a major impact and starts pushing you towards having to buy into Unity Pro.

LEAVING EMERGING MARKETS
I brought this up earlier in the thread, but if supporting emerging markets becomes too expensive, you'll have to make the tough call to just stop supporting them. Unfortunately, you'll still have those markets counting towards your permanent install base.

KEY RESELLERS
Tricky to avoid but also end up counting towards the reinstall counter sometimes. With standard keys, you're looking at them being purchased with stolen credit cards/paypal accounts and then just listed on markets most of the time. However, the real F***er here will be resold Steam accounts. A lot of places like G2A will sell Steam accounts that were made specifically to purchase games, meaning that the moment you get that? There's your reinstall fee.

RUNNING ANY SORT OF LIVE SERVICE GAME WITH A FREE ENTRY POINT
While rare for indies, it is known to happen. Live service games you can jump into for free have the same general ARPU on desktop as they do on mobile. High installs, low revenue.

GAMEPASS
Being on Gamepass is absolutely a problem here. You won't see near as much money from being a Gamepass listed game as you will from actual sales (see: a part of why games leave Gamepass), so your ARPU is going to be absolutely hosed.

None of these things are outlandish possibilities. These are all things I've experienced in a professional capacity and things that will be impacted by Unity's new license. And, again, if you expect the platform holders to just eat these fees, you're a sucker.

 

Godot's UI is a lot like the old GUI of Unity, where you have a gui theme. You can style elements in it with a custom theme variant, but, you have to do all of the settings per item in the gui, if it uses a texture. Think, every time you use your sprite texture, you have to manually type in the settings from Unity's Import Settings. That's what the hour long video showed my that I just watched.

Effectively, you have an over all GUI Theme that you can apply (in multiple areas, including the project settings) and then you can stylized individual elements to a new style. You can also apply theme styles to "nodes" (game objects) in the scene and those elements will filter down that hierarchy. All in all, it looks like a step back, and a lot of work to have a GUI. Or, you can use the plain-jane version of the GUI... Dunno, it might be a lot less work in certain use cases.

 

Everything wouldn't be fine.

It's not about fees but about unity retroactively changing the contract and billing us with arbitrary made up numbers.

A cap isn't worth anything if the value can change by the time you're done developing your product.

 

So $90k instead of potentially up to $180 million revenue is a good deal to you?
Something is telling me that most of you are not actually professional developers, let alone business people...

 

Just answering because it does not seem like you will get an official answer here. I don't do legal, just parroting: The "hidden" TOS for the runtime changed some time april '22 and the "we don't f*ck you" clause disappeared. Investigate going back to this. Depending on your tier unity will force some kind of new account, might be a problem.

 

There's effectively no reason to continue discussing in this thread until we have more information, likely starting tomorrow. It's completely circular, and anyone pulling your leg is either trolling or ignorant.

If you have more than a handful of posts in this thread today, take a step back and wait until later in the week when we have more info.

 

You won't be 'selling' anything at that price. That's a problem we have with Japanese games.

 

have you released game before? your acting like you get 2 million Dolores your not courting publishing tax employees store sales take , summer bundles free licensees and budget for marketing's budget nothing. some of us get a average of a CPI of $2,00 off the batt your hoping for around a CPI of .20 cents . the average APUR is $1.96 with north América players.

 

So no empathy then? That's cold man...

 

Make it $200k. I’m not pulling the numbers out of my ass, payment amounts for free epic store games leaked a while back.

But you’re not mathing me, you’re arguing! I thought you were here to talk math.

 

Unless they changed the threshold.

 

This is EXACTLY what Unity wanted when they appointed the most hated and greedy man in the gaming industry as the CEO. He ruined EA, now he has ruined Unity. Congratulations, "idiot"

 

you can do per item but there are "styles" for all at once, or inheritance if you feel fancy.
e: can't compare to unity but qt is widespread and i find that workflow much more cumbersome.

 

Things that I see here, on top of the distrust that Unity created for itself are the "Proprietary software is bad" mentality (Being a Linux user, I encounter this a lot) and "See?! this is the proof I was looking for to justify my biases! #LateStageCapitalism!" And while I've always maintained a "You do you, boo" mentality, it's getting tiresome.

This is a case where a company has made some pretty shady decisions, that negatively affect both it and its customers (us). The reasoning behind those decisions seems to be a desire to put a competitor out of business (MccAppLovin) and because of the relatively few quarters that they have made a profit, they are still seriously in the negative as the company hasn't been in the black since going public. They also just lost 70+ Million USD in March from a bank going under.

I guess that since most FOSS projects have zero funding, maybe it's a proprietary thing, but that's a huge stretch.
Maybe bad decisions is limited to Capitalism, but I would ask you, "Then how do you explain your life?"

I've stated before that Unity as a company has broken the trust that I had with them. I have also stated elsewhere 14 reasons why this idiocy is the last straw for my very small company and why we aren't going to use Unity as our engine of choice. We decided that we don't want to be a pawn in Unity's gambit to take down its competitor, nor do we trust Unity Technologies to actually take into consideration the very base of things - it's customers. Though, (personal bias here) knowing that their current CEO is from EA, and seeing how things are ran there, and (factual bias) how their current CEO has treated the company's customers (its developers), I am really not surprised by this.

Saddened, yes. Surprised, no.

 

Stop feeding the trolls. They cannot be convinced because they don't want to. Let them stay because "it doesn't affect them", until all the developers that actually generate revenue for Unity have left and Unity either comes knocking in need for more cash or goes bankrupt and their games are SOL because the engine has no source code access so you will become unable to use it for building for anything other than PC after one or two years.

"First they came for the F2P devs, but I didn't say anything because I hate F2P games..."

 

We are also evaluating Godot, Flax, and Unigine. We discarded Godot already as our game is 3D and we were not happy about Godot's performance. Flax looks lika a good replacement. Everything looks familiar if you have worked with Unity and Unreal. What we have seen about Unigine so far is quite impressive too. It's miles away from Unity when it comes to graphics and it is very well prepared for open-world games which is our case.

In other words, we are starting to think that we will even get a benefit from the change.

 

Pay attention please

In my example, that's $2 million in revenue with NO RUNTIME FEE. I've provided real math to demonstrate that even an extreme example wouldn't push you past the first threshold despite generating millions in revenue. I have no interest in arguing any other kind of worthless semantics. Give me real math with currently known official figures. Everything else is a waste of time to discuss