Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

https://unity.com/runtime-fee

 

This is his bread and butter, ofc he is gonna say that.

 

This is a terrible change and we all must prepare or activate our migration plan away from Unity Technology products. Their willingness to nickle and dime developers now that they are a public company, and doing so retroactively which you cannot plan or budget for, is the end of Unity3D being a viable platform for serious game development business.

Mark my words, they're a failing public company that cannot seem to turn a profit and they will continue to do more things like this. They will continue to chase growth in their revenue at the cost of all of us. Even if that cost exceeds 100% of our revenue which the new model they're proposing could do in some scenarios.

This won't be the last time they break our trust and retroactively change their model at the financial burden of us, the users.

 

Maybe we should all become Youtubers and get paid by Unity...instead of paying Unity

 

F*** me.

 

Well, for those who don't want to learn a new lenguage like c++ and want to make games with c# + impresive graphics (better than what unity offers right now IMO) you can try Unigine, i'm working with that and i think you will be happy
This is just a reference video: Unity to Unigine

 

At this rate, Unity probably won't exist after January 2024 to charge those 'runtime fees'

Very bad decision on Unity's part.

 

https://unity.com/runtime-fee

 

He interviewed the CEO not long ago in a soft ball puff piece. Nothing against the guy, he's a cool dude and makes great content, but like most tech people he's a lapdog for the paycheck. This industry is full of cowards and back scratchers, which is why we get sh*t like this.

 

They have cool tech. But these are russians, sponsored by russian government, trying to pretend they aren't. In fact they were bragging about it just recently

 

I was going through Unreal Engine forums, and one of the random users wanted a inverted mouse drag (like Unity). Few days later Tim Sweeney whoops in and adds the feature...

I can see my mistake now...it was clear all along...just my love for Unity blinded me...now I pay with my sweat and blood.
Good luck guys. I wish you best for your future projects. I am done - like completely.

If anyone knows a good UE5 (advanced topic) tutorial kindly share them.
Peace.

 

blizzard hearstone made with unity interesting will they pay or not

 

Wow, how is this not a bait and switch?


As someone who's been using Unity for almost 10 years, this is a slap in the face. What happened to "Unity is royalty-free"? These fees might not affect me significantly, but I have lost faith with this company and it makes me wonder what other curveballs they might throw next. I've been an big fan of Unity, but for the first time we are discussing the feasibility of moving to a different game engine. And the way this was communicated, it almost seems like it was intended to cause mass confusion.

 

Sweeny is a really awesome dude, runs a tight ship, and has a huge passoin for his product, which is why it's eating Unity's lunch right now. His engine is also gatekept from all the major store fronts. You should follow him on twitter, he has great takes on things. Unlike Unity they actualy talk gamedev.

 

I can't see how this could possibly work from a legal perspective. Piracy rates can be very high. I don't think Unity can legally make developers pay for installs they didn't authorize, and that leads to the question of how can they tell if an install is authorized or not?

This is the 1st time I have actually considered moving to Unreal or another engine in 7 years of development with Unity. The lack of thought put into this announcement and plan is shocking. The proposed rollout in less than 4 months is equally shocking since it also affects existing projects that are already in production. At the very least it should be opt-in for only newest versions of Unity and not retroactive. If this gets implemented as announced, I won't be surprised if there is a class action lawsuit around it from all the small indie devs that get hurt by this to the point of going out of business.

If Unity really wants to go this route, they should just change to % revenue based fee after a certain revenue level. At least people understand how that works in most situations.

 

lol, just when I thought you couldn't screw things up more...

 

that is a pretty bad thing to say, do you have any proof?

 

Mid-sized long time Mobile F2P Unity studio here. What a train wreck.

 

I really wanna see the numbers the MBA numbskulls crunched to show that this would increase net revenue for Unity. I can already tell they severely underestimated the amount of users that are gonna migrate, especially the studios that make decently popular, revenue-generating games.

 

No, it doesn't add up at all. The only conclusion one can make is that they want to kill off those types of games (high downloads but low revenue/player).

 

...and what is the problem with that?

 

Don't give them ideas... a royalty would be each time the game was opened... it's _only_ a licence fee for the pleasure of sending an essential piece of software along with your game. </sarcasm>

 

Thanks for showing that. So we have multiple different FAQ's on different pages, yeah I'm not trusting these one little bit at this point. They aren't legally binding, so they can say whatever they like and contradict or have stupid ambiguities all over it.

What we need are the actual licenses, T&C's which AFAIK are not yet available?

 

He has a ton of "sponsored by unity" content. Just watch his videos. It's not bad, it is a fact. You always should take into consideration if someone has financial incentive to say or not to say something. He has plenty. He even had his "favorite" asset store sale thingy not too long ago.

 

Good luck figuring out which installs come from a humble bundle. Jesus nobody in management at this company seems to understand anything about the business they work in. Anybody investing must be a "f***ing moron" at this point.

 

Hey!

I wanted to ask what happens if:

- Let's say I have enterprise or pro

- I've earned 999,999$ this year from one game

- And at that point I have 10 million users that installed my game

Now after that, I get more revenue and pass the 1m$ mark, so I will need to start paying for installs.

My question is, will I need to pay for 9 million installs(10m-1m threshold) that occurred before I passed the 1m$ threshold? or only for installs after I passed the threshold



Thanks!

 

It's on the main runtime fee page.

https://unity.com/runtime-fee

Under the Unity Runtime Fee eligibility heading, below the threshold table.

 

Mainstream media picking up the story Game developers furious as Unity Engine announces new fees | Games | The Guardian.

This is gonna blow up in their face 1000x more than any of the other recent F*** ups.

 

I believe it's a very bad idea. Please do not do this *$@# step. You do not get extra money but will lose peoples which loyal to you many years.

 

I'm left him a tip and some choice words. Jason had this one coming for a long time.

 

Some clarity

 

yeap this is what worries me most, tons of loopholes and companies vs Unity cases in the future. Why do they bring this to themself?

 

Just tossing my two cents in, I know we're all confused, angry, and just about done with unity and it's poor management.

1) I don't see how they can track installs, I read somewhere else on here pages ago that It was a "ball park" guess which is ... asinine to say the least, they would need to put tracking software into unity to actively track installs, and that enters an entirely new realm of legal issues.
2) I know a good chunk of unity devs will never see these charges implemented against them, that being said it still exists and frankly we've seen games explode YEARS after release, so for me that just adds on a wholenother level of anxiety

So now if you'll excuse me I have unreal tutorials to watch... can i even bring my scripts over... god do i have to rewrite all of that

 

Can't wait till the next Slender happens and some poor schmuck is going to owe these ghouls millions of dollars.

If Parsec made made it today he would come back and find that he's suddenly in debt for being a success.

I don't even care if yall revert. The mask has slipped and I'm now fully aware how hard youd stick it to me if you could.

And I particularly LOVE how you announce it as being "introduced".

It's like a doctor telling me I have cancer by saying "I'd like to introduce you to your new stage 4 pancreatic cancer!"

Ghouls.

BOOOOOOOO!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

 

posts video from youtuber being paid by unity... yes very clarifying

 

I like to make a free games and soft, and i don't want to pay for people's will use my soft.

 

If they actually stick with this "plan", it would probably mean the large publishers like Blizzard have already negotiated more favorable terms that every one else would not have access to.

 

I do not trust Unity's ability to detect fraudulent install abuse and charging for legitimate reinstalls by the same user is ridiculous. I'm in a position with existing games and upcoming games that would be subject to potentially very high dubious charges from Unity and if they expect developers/publishers to just start handing over huge amounts of money out of the blue based on black box summer intern coded install tracking numbers they'd best think again.

 

Mmm... another can of worms. Hard to dispute an invoice if you never get it and it just gets discounted from your sales by Steam or your app store (unless I'm understanding this wrong).

 

Gee I wonder what might be wrong about working with russians in 2023. Pls don't talk to me

 

This is at the sole discretion of unity. You better get that timing on those UA campaigns right. Generally, you pay for every install.

 

Source: https://unity.com/runtime-fee

Cool, trust us bro, we will screw you just a little, you won't notice...

 

You’d just pay for every install made after the $1 million. That could include users that made their purchase before hitting the $1m threshold though from my understanding.

 

There's such thing as trust which is hard to gain and easly to lose. I have been a pretty lengthy Unity supporter, closing my eyes on all the problems before this, including bugs which hit yearly milestones, untrustworthy roadmaps and so on. And that was because of a particular level of trust that things may become better with time. Sadly, this is where my personal trust into Unity Technologies is over.

Thanks to everyone from Unity Technologies and the community who I had a chance to contact with, it's been a pleasure!

 

From Unity's website: "70% of the top 1,000 mobile game studios power their games with Unity".

Not for long!

I'm pretty convinced Unity is going to walk this back, because they clearly haven't thought about the implementation or the repercussions of this. The reps have no idea how the installs will be measured, and no idea how edge cases (reinstalls, demos, bundles, piracy, brigading) will be handled. They don't understand why applying new fees to released games is a big deal. Nobody at Unity consulted any devs about this.

Unfortunately, the damage is done.

Even if they say "we listened to you!" next week and pivot to Unreal's revshare model, they've lost our trust. Unity has shown that they're unpredictable, unprofessional, and unconcerned with the wellbeing of their customers or the future of their own company.

They're driving this engine into the ground, and I can't figure out why, but I want off.

 

Paying a per-install fee is really bad.

• How are you gonna calculate it?
• What if your calculations are wrong?
• How are we gonna settle the decision on the download count?
• What will happen if no revenue games reach millions of downloads?
• What if users open a new unity account per 100k install?
• How are you gonna prove the identity of Unity users?
• What if pirates block your tracking?

I think, there are lots of problems and questions in this fee model. You must clarify its details.

The worst-case scenario for you also that people will be starting to pass on the Godot Engine. You will lose your loyal community.

 

In no way does this make Unity a better product

Unity needs to increase its rev and I have been expecting a royalty fee to be added ever since IPO ... but to do it based on per install ... is the single stupidest thing they could have thought of.
Royalty can be a % of revenue ... ideally a % of net revenue but no its not reasonable or even sustainable to think you can do a fee per unit. That cuts out the exact games that created Unity in the first place F2P low-earning but still sustainable games ... that made Unity. That earned Unity the market share it has ... they have just killed that entire market ... I expect to hear this will be walked back or switched to a % rev share shortly or other means to reduce the bleeding.

But as much as it pains me and I do really dislike Epic as a company and UE as a tech base, just don't like working with it ... The project we are doing would absolutely cost us money to deploy on Unity. And sure I expect this to be smoothed over to some degree but this isn't the first face-palm WTF from Unity. save for some "April Fools" level switch or ... maybe we all went loopy and misread the whole thing ... but short of that no trust is gone, The expectation is Unity will kill the small to mid-sized Unity developer so best to move on sooner than later?

I don't want it to be true, invested over a decade, and built our tech, community and company around it ... but ya the more I read the FAQ, the reports, the post by Unity and the responses from Unity the more I see the only sensible thing to do is mitigate Unity killing our little niche in the community.

That is not good for Uinty in the short or long run, that is effectively the death of what made Unity in an attempt to find profit for it. Yes, Unity needs to find a profitable model, coming at this openly about that and using a common since clean and dev-friendly model e.g. % based rev share that would have been even refreshing ... but this ... worded like this ... communicated like this ... with these stipulations and plans ... it is not the first time they make it all look hopeless so it reasons to bet it won't be the last and eventually it will be the end of the solo, small team scrappy devs carving out a small but stable business. Really I'll be supprised if this flys with larger devs either but bet that deal is more case by case for them.

 

Four years of seriously developing with Unity.

2 source control changes
3 ads package changes
Several cloud build changes, and a complete mess when doing so. Including ignoring EVERYONES builds failing for days.
1 new input system
1 change to Unity runtime preventing fast interop of C++ code to C#, breaking plugins, and a bug report that never got updated beyond "we're looking into it"
Dare I say, dozens of unfinished "previews" that were released, but also required for some things.

Now this
I think it may well be time to say farewell
Don't know what higher up is running this circus

 

I think we got it all wrong here. They are clearly stating, that we have to pay for the installation of the unity runtime. We were all so naive and thought it was an Infinitely reproducible piece of software. Turns out, each runtime is carefully handcrafted by Riccitello and his special runtime team. They are in short supply, folks. So I think it's only fair to compensate for the use of this artisanal piece of unique runtime software, so that they can continue to provide it for almost no charge to the small indies out there.

Keep it up in your sweatshops, crafting away those runtimes. And here I thought, the 3000 employees of unity were developers, sales and other simple staff. No, artisans, craftsmen...all of them chipping away on those runtime blocks.