Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Ic, that means there is no firm definition on the term "Lifetime" game install. Thanks for the feedback.

 

LOL
Probably your son. Its a debt bro.

 

..we can use them as pencils next week.

 

Probably Unity will try to pass along the fees to your favored deity, who hopefully will then properly smite them once and for all or at least sue them.

 

You only have to pay above a certain amount of money and number of install during a specific time. As of now(and this will change probably) you could always watch your metrics and act accordingly, i.e. pull it from store, make it cheap etc.

 

I look forward to the newer policy. Hopefully it is a more logical, sustainable and fair policy.

 

Not sure about that one.

 

Way too little, way too late.
This should've been an instant reversal day 1. This may only fan the flames.
Hopefully this gets people midway through projects and past releases off the hook (I'm in that camp and very much set on porting my current halfway-done project).
However, I don't see them doing anything that will make people stay for the future.

 

Yes I already answered that.

1. This is a VERY extreme outlier. It's irrelevant to like 99% of Unity users.

2. It would probably fall under the same clause that GamePass and Apple Arcade do. In this situation, Epic is the distributor of the Unity runtime and they are liable for the fees.

 

Hold on, is that what they are going to try???

Then EPIC just drops your product from the store and brings you to court to recoup the loss.

 

I'm a 3dsmax user who moved to blender and I strongly disagree.

Blender's UX is a nightmare. It's full of counter-intuitive shortcuts that require to use a search engine for basic stuff I never had trouble to find on any other 3d modeling software.

The only reason I'm using it is because our economy is so broken and corrupt that it allows Autodesk to lock me out of my 3dsmax perpetual license.

 

The chocolate cake is an analogy.

It doesn't make sense to talk about throwing it away or make your own when it's not an option for a game engine.

 

I mean gather a bunch of “irrelevant” cases together add them up and they become relevant.

Also the distributor paying is bullshit. The platform holder will pass the cost to the developer.

“$200k for your game to be free for one week. Oh, it’s a Unity game? $50k is the best we can do, I’m sure you understand, there are additional costs and potential retroactive risks we need to shield ourselves from”

 

After all this damage, the only way to regain back trust and fleeing users is:

- Make the editor completely free.
- Charge a percentage on income (5% ?)
- Write the TOS in Stone, lock it in safe in a bunker 100 meters underground and throw the key in the pacific ocean.

- Ah. And make unity usable again.

 

It doesn't make it free and doesn't make it possible for everyone.

 

Of course. "We hear you." Stereotypical PR-speak.

There was a ~0.1% chance of stubbornly holding the line entirely, and around a ~1% chance that Unity would actually take the sort of action needed to save the company. This is a milquetoast ~98.9% response. Disappointing, but entirely expected.

What this likely means is some concessions on retroactivity, some change to the thresholds and fees, and some limiting factors (eg. a cap on the % of revenue, or the fee only affecting certain sectors/platforms). Maybe the plus plan comes back. Again, pretty much what anyone who understands these sorts situations would expect from a leadership team that refuses to acknowledge its own unforced fatal error, and narcissistically believes they can somehow talk their way to a lesser win.

It won't make any difference. The problem isn't the fee structure. It's the obliteration of trust and the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads that comes from doing business with backstabbing liars, where even if the TOS is hardened against retroactivity (again), we cannot trust leadership not to renege when they've already broken the same promise before. We will stop doing business with Unity as quickly as we can anyway. It's the only rational move.

Unity leadership believes that they can meet us part way and save their hides. That's not the situation. Leadership cannot escape unscathed. They've shown their true colors. Trust cannot be rebuilt without real consequences for the people responsible.

If you're wondering what the ~1% chance response might have looked like that would signify the necessary conciliation and resolve, well, here you go:

 

Oblivious unity dev doing calculations before policy goes into effect - "3.2 Install fees. Not great, not terrible."
Actual profits after policy implementation, piracy - "Its not 3 Install fees. It's 15,000."

 

I'm gonna be honest...if the changes aren't "we're scrapping this scheme, replacing it with a much simpler revenue share, reinstating the previous Terms of Service so that the new one no longer overrides everything, and are no longer going to make a change as significant as that again", then it won't be enough.

Whether you hear us or not is irrelevant. What matters is the decision-makers hear us and do something about it.

 

4.9% with the exact same terms as Epic otherwise. Restore confidence and undercut the competition.

 

You should win a game engine company for this response.

 

Wow.. I go away for a week...
Unity.. this is ridiculous.

I quit my job about 16 months ago, and spent the time learning Unity, so I could try my hand at a mobile game development. I picked Unity because it had a significant community behind it, and because the terms were attractive for free to play mobile development. I am finally close to releasing a first title - a small mobile word game. I was about ready to purchase Unity Plus, go through the hoops of starting a company, work out how to take it to market to at least recoup some of my lost opportunity cost (I can earn a lot as a developer).

Now, if I get lucky and the game is even a small success - I'm likely going to lose a significant portion of any revenue to unity.

I just don't know what to say.

 

Thanks for the spreadsheet, but Flax could also change their TOS in the future.

 

I don't know.
It has to be something spectacular.

 

I understand why they chose this "we tell you how much and shut the F*** up, you don't get to verify our proprietary numbers". And why they don't want to change it:

They do not trust their customers.

They expect us to trust them after all the shenanigans they already done over the years. I find it hardly reconcilable.

 

Yup. Swapping to GoDot. Goodbye, Unity.

 

This tweet response to Unity hit the nail on the head.

Lol how hard is it to just cancel these plans entirely? “Making changes ” just means you’re trying everything in your power to keep the changes but reword it in a way that doesn’t sound as bad.

What a story Unity.

https://x.com/snowconesolid/status/1703550854727389401?s=20

 

Blender provides industry-standard keymap by default and we don't have to use hotkeys because we can add any command into Quick Favorites.

 

Agreed. Plus CEO John Richie-rich needs to be gone. I wouldn't feel safe with him still being behind the wheel.

 

OMG thank God! Knew they wouldnt let their ship sink. Now let's hope they don't f up again.

 

It's nothing; they attempt to suppress anger, buying time, and subsequently impose their policies upon us

unity needs to do this :
1. split from ironsource
2. fire John riccitello and his board of directors
3. stop the november update for unity hub

 

If the intent is indeed to drive people to use their ad service (even though this would be legally iffy in EU), this can’t happen.

They also can’t really drop the retroactive part.

I think they’ll just add some more qualifiers so the bullshit artists in this thread can have more ammo for their “see, it doesn’t affect most devs” arguments.

 

I put a lot of time and effort into the projects I built with Unity, and when I had a Plus subscription, I was happy to pay what I considered its very reasonable cost to support the product. I think the fact that that tier is gone now is the least hand-wavy and most "we truly do not care about keeping you around or dealing fairly with our customers" part of this change.

If you weren't making enough money to stay solvent (which I really, truly doubt), there are certainly less stupid ways to monetize one of the most popular game development platforms the world has ever seen. Personally, I can't deal with this level of bad faith, so I'm starting over elsewhere. I guess I'll try to look at it as a way to move my client work over to something more Lisp-y; there's a few Lua-based platforms that seem to play nicely with Fennel, which is exciting. But man, that can't take away the bad taste this has left.

Bad form, poorly done, get wrecked, it's hard to put this into words that don't devolve into counterproductive profanity. But that really is what it begs for, and I feel bad for so many of the people at Unity who had no say in this and wouldn't have gone along with it if they'd had any choice.

 

.....

 

We could be about to enter a golden era of engine diversity and creativity.

Never before has a full half of all game developers been repurposed and loosed on the world.

 

It provides multiple industry standard keymaps which is the problem.

And quick favorite is interesting if you know it exists and know how to use it.

 

Remember when you fired that manager for tweeting your execs where out of touch 3 hours later on their one year anniversary? This entire disaster proved that person was absolutely correct and the firing was completely unjustified and wrong on your part.

You can start by firing all the execs that pushed thru the fee change despite your people internally telling you this was bad. You also need to, at minimum, revert the TOS and create guarantee's you won't pull that stuff again.

Then maybe, just maybe, you will start to gain back some of that trust you lost. But even that won't be enough to reverse all the damage you did. You have a long road ahead of y'all.

 

It's a canned response.

 

I think it is called "community managers".

 

As an argument I also went from 3dsmax to Blender. I agree at first, it's different and might seem counter-intuitive but I'd never look back. And "nightmare"? Please relax on the hyperbole. Hitler was a nightmare; Blender's UI at worst is complicated. Plus it's easier to adapt to change as opposed to someone else being in control trying to dick you over for more money.

 

I've discovered that all advocates of Blender over 3ds Max didn't really know 3ds Max, nor were they very good at modelling, texturing, lighting, animation, rendering, material creation or even composition. Their standards are easily sated by what Blender is and they're unable to conceive of how, where or why 3ds Max is superior, let alone for what.

 

Oh I obviously wouldn't do it that way, I am just trying to have a thought experiment in a frustrating situation.

I could imagine releasing "Call of Duty version 1 " and then after 200,000 units are sold... I just coincidentally stop offering "Call of Duty version 1 " for sale... but offer "Call of Duty version 2 " instead.

I would still update both games, they would still have multiplayer work between them... but the binaries are separate, therefore they are separate products.

How could Unity stop me? will they argue that my games (plural) are not unique enough, even though unity as a company is the face of "asset flipped" games?

 

I'm afraid the issue is much bigger than he is.

There is no point celebrating him being replaced if it's chosen by the same people pulling strings.

What we need are regulations forcing companies to act according to their business. A game engine company should make a game engine, not random investment in random sectors that are only done to the benefit of third parties.

It is bonkers that we have a good game engine, people willing to pay for it, people qualified to work on it, but that transaction doesn't happen.

 

They already stated somewhere similar games will be grouped.

 

There's no way that Unity doesn't negotiate specific partnerships with these platforms. Thinking Unity just sprung this on these companies and just assumes they're gonna go along with it is just nonsense.

 

Unity will refer to their proprietary data model for determining game likeness and say it's the same game.

 

Which is worth a metric ton of popcorn because the "let's bankrupt ad-supported games unless they use our ad services" and the "let's charge money from all ongoing successful Unity games on the market" are the two most likely changes to get them hit by class action lawsuits.

Extra bonus for the "let's charge Microsoft, Apple, Google, Valve, Epic, Netflix, and Sony for any Unity games they give out for free or under a subscription", which will also lead to even more lawyer fun time.

 

Conspiratorial Confidence is strong in this one.

 

Eliminate all tiers aside from Enterprise. If you're using Unity, you have access to it all, subsidize it with the increased revenue from rev share.

 

A suggestion to anyone with connections reading this by chance: Press for official statements from the big game delivery platforms.

 

Yeah I agree. For me personally, I'll continue to use Unity for my current project until I can migrate, and any new projects will very unlikely be on Unity. However if John Ravioli gets the boot I'm more likely to stick around.