Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

How can 4% of any number be more than 100% of that number? What kind of math is this?

 

There's a non-zero chance that someone who tries this will be one of the ones audited. If I were going to continue using Unity I'd just take the easy approach and simply factor in the 4%. I'm already going to be doing it with Unreal.

 

Here comes the Spanish Inquisition Unity.

 

In my humble opinion 4% Maximum per Sale should be the single and only acceptable change to what existed previously before all of this began and nothing else. No install tracking or install fee should be acceptable. Everything and anything else should revert to or remain as it was prior to all of this happening.

4% I presume is enough for Unity to stabilize itself and move the product on if that is done "Wisely" and without wasting Money.

Even 4% in some cases may mean some game dev's make nothing at all (bottom line profit) from their hard work possibly as every case may be different I guess its impossible to say. Whatever, no one should be in that position, never mind the "Only 10%" suggested. That's a lot of people.

Regards

Peter

 

You don't get 100% of your sale. If you end up with less than 4% revenue, unity puts you in debt.

 

This was something I saw right away, and I am glad that this individual brought forth the C.O.C.C. chart for all users to dive into.

 

yeah but no editor online force. why would they even think about that. its already subscription online

it unlikely to happen, but its true. im still waiting for a few of those bigger dev firms to sue them

 

It sounds like they invited bloomberg to listen in on their all hands meeting. Clearly they want to calm investors first, that article wasn't meant for us but to trick people into thinking this will all be settled.

I think publishers will need them to clarify earlier licenses to prevent retroactive changes and only add changes to the next version licence.

Some will finish their current projects but I don't think anything they do will be enough for people to stick around long term.

I'm not finding any issues porting my game to UE5 and I'm sure many others are having the same experience. I'm not sure why I would go back to unity really.

I think this has opened unity users to a lot of other engines too, I'm thinking i might use heaps.io for my next game.

 

I'd love to see a breakdown of the numbers to show how you end up with less than 4% revenue.

 

Everyone, don't forget that unity plus disappears!!

 

and unity needs to get rid of their splash screen. its damaging to games. its the only thing ill consider them having goodwill to their devs

 

Just answered the question. Can't see how that might happen, but just because I can't imagine something it does not mean it's impossible.

 

the 4% cap ONLY EXISTS if you passed the U$ 1.000.000, if your revenue is BELOW this, lets´s say U$ 999.999 there´s NO CAP

"Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million"

 

I think the idea was so bad that the employees aware of it were the first to be surprised it was announced anyways.

 

so.... now we have to count the installs. no idea how that could happen and how they can force it. maybe a new TOS? maybe i will charge 21cents for every install i have to count? what will happen is, that they will also try to track the installs and if your numbers don't match with theirs, they will keep asking for who knows what documents and proof and origins of your calculations.

 

Even setting aside how lousy of a financial deal it is for folks, whether Unity does the install counting themselves or expects devs to keep track, whatever "tool" they implement to register installs must by necessity phone home to a server somewhere which would require all Unity engine games (likely built after a certain version) to be always online. I find it hard to believe they would go this route, since the PR nightmare due to an entire engine going always-online and essentially becoming spyware (yes, I know about that company they bought) would be a thousand times larger and worse than the reaction we've seen this past week.

I don't know why they couldn't just say "copies sold" instead of "times installed". Not saying it would necessarily be a better deal but it would at least be a real, measurable thing that everyone understands.

 

So Unity is saying: If you make more than 1,000,000 - then we will take up to 4% of the amount after 1,000,000 based on the number of installs.

I'd like to see how this results in you losing money, unless you are paying someone 97% distribution fee. Please show me the math. Now, I'm not a fan of the currently published plan by any means, but this new method sounds significantly better. It doesn't address the "We can retroactively change our minds" that is the main issue, though.

 

Pretty sure they're saying devs under 1mil are exempt, like unreal.

 

I quoted the article...

 

Possible. But they still seem to require devs to report installs. So it will be interesting to see how that get's factored in.

 

meme from the future:
"What have you done when they introduced the install fee?"

 

unity counting the number of installs is overall a stupid idea. please consider it. if we count the numbers of installs fine.

but you are just afraid that people underreport. and its still a dispropotional number of games affected. just make it a fair revenue share on % of income. otherwise this will hurt the engine in the long run

 

I think if a company is already on very low margins then they might not be able to absorb any increase in revenue share, their business model may have depended on existing licenses, platform costs etc.

 

I agree with you and are going to write the same thing. Sadly that not what unity trying to do

To be totally called "Backed Down" they need to stop utter the word "Installation count" and "Runtime fee" and "Cap" altogether. And only pick the vocab like "revenue share" and/or "selling fee"

But no, that's not what they want to do. They doubled down on making a system to track installation and charge fee. And only use 4% cap as distraction to cover their obvious greed and devious plan

 

I'm sorry, I know two quintillion people bought my game, but as far as I can tell, only 199,999 people ever installed it.

 

I really don't see them ever fundamentally changing this new plan. The whole point of it was clearly to try and claw back perceived "lost income" from F2P games like Genshin, while driving people into their ad platform by waiving the fee completely (or nearly) if you switched. To them, they have to find some way to get that money, because their burn rate is obscene after spending billions of dollars on nonsense and tens of millions on their useless board and CEO. It's why they chose to use install base as a metric, and why the install count was lifetime, retroactive, and inclusive of ALL installs, so they could start gouging HoYoverse and others immediately, and rake in as much as possible (really it's just a wonder this didn't go into effect 9/1 instead of 1/1/24). Bumping subscription rates won't cover the gap they need to fill without making them prohibitively expensive, and axing Plus was almost certainly a projected "how many will upgrade versus how many will just accept the splash screen penalty and drop to Personal" that they decided would work out in their favor.

 

lol - How can Unity be so oblivious? This is just a joke.

Assuming this is correct, there is nothing to address the fact they were happy to stealth change TOS, nor change the terms to retroactively include any game ever made with Unity and the loss of trust that comes from such a decision. Then on top of if it, whilst pushing the flawed understanding that people found it 'confusing' in the first place they add yet another factor to the equation to calculate your install tax ( cap limit to 4% ), while failing to address that they can claim the install numbers are anything they want and demand fees based on those numbers.

Edit:
Ok missed the 'self reporting' installs. Is it better than the blackbox, maybe, but its still using installs as a metric, which no customers have to somehow work out? Will they accept sales instead? Will they accept the self-reported number, or are they going to run it against their 'install' estimation and then claim you need to pay them more, all under threat of having your account closed?

Not that it matters, as failure to address the TOS changes, means they can just introduce the blackbox estimation and drop self-reporting in a year.

 

yes, and i'm not buying it they would leave tens/hundreds of millions on the table just because a "little" revolt. they may postpone and rephrase some fees, but they are determined to get that cash from the market or die trying.

 

I understand that. I'm just saying I'd like to see a breakdown.

 

i am pretty sure prob less than 10% making <200k will upgrade to pro and rest will just use a unity logo splash screen, therefore they will still lose money from unity plus mutiny on the bounty, how about maybe raising fee of unity plus $5 a month instead of stabbing us in back with greed, they can save face by introducing a new plan say 'Unity Starter' like 50 a month

 

4% of revenue after 1 million dollars? C'mon. They're ripping off unreal.

There's no way they're going with this plan considering the previous one was a lot more ludicrous and insane.

They're literally S***ting their pants because of developers like us and YouTubers and social media. They'd say anything to damage control.

CEO AND the executive committee, got to go.

That's the only way this will fix itself. There's no way I can trust these bozos.

 

Keep watching, I feel a nervous breakdown coming on.

 

It's a sensible model right up until Tim trolls them and makes it 3%.

 

On what page can I find the official information for the new 4% offer?

 

HEY, I don't dev on mobile, I want to (genuinely) know what makes unity so important to mobile. As far as I know:

- Many engine since has the deploy everywhere, championed by unity.
- Most mobile games are low complexity with minor technical ambition, they don't rely on fancy features.
- Godot has a mobile first.

What prevent the switch to another engine to avoid the unity tax?

 

• cost of switching engines (retraining, porting over utilities and frameworks)
• time
• technical evaluation

Lots of things.

 

A Unity representative explains the new brilliant strategy they're developing in order to get a fee for every game installed.

 

You don't, it's only an insider rumor so far leaked to bloomberg by probably an employee.


---
Unity's official silence is excellent, every other engine which has any living fan are posting either "tutorial for beginners" or "unity to engine whatever" tutorials, videos, everything.
Finally, 2023 is the year of he video game engines.

 

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-unity-backs-down-from-controversial-runtime-fee-policy

 

In order for Unity to be worth this 4%, the engine must use actual .NET Runtime, not their DIY. And SRP + Dots should really be in production ready condition.

 

This really would be the icing on the cake.

 

The goal is data collection. Install fees is the only proposed solution that results in additional data they don't have anyway. You can't count your installs? Lucky for you we got patents and tech for that. You want to stay below 4% split? Better run that module.

 

Yes but these are linked to our concerns and feedback.

We don't express ourselves on social media in hope that JR will read it but because we know the bad publicity will affect their business.

 

OR... hear me out.. They could balance things out by leaving their runtime fee in preview for 3 years like they do with everything else.

 

I think the opposite

As some people pointed out, if they just make even 1% of revenue share, they would already got so much from mihoyo and similar company making gacha game. More than that stupid install count thingy. Because even game like Genshin are F2P they still have more revenue per user. Everyone playing will pay for some gacha. So counting installation is actually make them pay less than 1% of revenue

And interestingly, mihoyo is also shareholder of unity CN

So actually, the plan instead hurting casual F2P game that rely on ads service. Everything click on the waive of fee when using IronSource. Now they try to dustract us with 4% cap without backpedal the whole plan means they actually don't have money as top priority. The plan is actually maintain power to grip over all of us

And so yes, the subscription are not really what they concern. Making us put the chain on our neck is more important to them

 

There is nothing official about it. This article just regurgitates the bloomberg's original.

 

The rumorous 4% cap is worse than it sounds. The basic metric is so F***ed up and now it looks like a cherry on a S***.

Either remove subscription, stick with royalties (for the royality-free engine) and ditch the whole installs count in its entirety or just give up.

Also remember the changes related to TOS and how they were introduced.

WE CAN NOT SETTLE ON THIS ABSURD LEVEL GUYS!

 

It would be broken from day 1 so there would be no need to pay for it.

 

First and foremost they must address the retroactive change of ToS.

ToS must be set in stone, before investing hundreds of dollars and years of our time on a game.