Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I don't know man. Seems to be rather specific for a poorly placed rumor. And considering the heartless nature of American corporations I'd not be surprised if they're talking about these things.

 

Unreal is not designed for you to go full c++ annoyingly.

 

They don't have patents for that since it's illegal to do that in some market like the EU.

Tracking users isn't even hard as long as you're the one implementing it yourself and players agree to be tracked.

This isn't bout telemetry but about the legal ramifications of having spyware included in the runtime engine and it sending data to a third party.

 

And then unceremoniously deprecate it without telling anyone.

 

Unreal is designed with the intention that you go mostly Blueprint using C++ for performance critical code. The ratio that I've seen floating around is 90% BP to 10% C++.

 

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked footage from inside the all-hands meeting at Unity this morning.

Original post on X / Twitter

 

CEO:
"when asked about the now soured relationship with game developers, he and other executives replied they will have to "show, not tell" a commitment to regaining trust." ..
"I don’t think there’s any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened," Riccitiello reportedly said.

they don't get it at all.. : /

 

It feels like it's $1 million per legal entity again, not per title, as it was in the initial announcement.

 

Unity is promising new AI models integrated with editor , if Unity would make that AI model ticket based this will bring some real nice income source if the it can be useful for the developers.

 

Meanwhile Unreal's 5% is per game.

 

I'm thinking that too but I want to see it in their own words first in case it was a stumbled explanation. If it is that though? Hooo boy, this immediately gets worse than Unreal for a lot of people.

 

Well, with the caveat that you will write the foundation in C++ and put together in that horrible spaghetti-machine.

"Oh, that, we don't recommend using that, it will be deprecated soon(TM)".

But since AIs are legally questionable at the moment, they have to pretend that they are bringing value to the developers bundled up with S***load of changes. AI advancements in practical sense isn't real at this point.

 

If the only way to count installs is some kind of built-in spyware then gamers like myself won't like that. Don't be surprised if games using the Unity Engine are boycotted by gamers.

 

I really dislike the slimy nature of all this. Pretty sure they're going to come back with something that sounds like a great deal , but because you misinterpreted a word in their agreement, you're actually going to end with a S*** deal.

 

honestly their GUI system on mobile is actually very slow and their performance mediocre.
its just that the phones are getting stronger. the best thing is their text system.

and mobile phones have tons of hidden complexitiy. all those you gotta login / timed events / collectables / payments etc etc add tons of complexity.

and controls are very hard to get right on mobile. followed by resolution and reponsive UI. and performance is super hard.

 

So nothing inherently tied to the engine itself? just basic inertia?
Which mean:
- new entrants will not have to through that pain, they'll jump directly to another engine.
- old practices erode other time to adapt to new trend in the market, the shift will happen organically.
- the cost is a high incentive to look at cheaper alternative.
- cohort shift will make it easier to shift, by flooding the market with skills and best practices, accelerating as the cohort grew.

Many articles point to the fact that unity is a f2p services more than a game engine, than premium game is around 10% of revenues. Looks like they killed 10% and are inciting f2p dev to look away, which mean they are loosing almost everything. That applovin 20B proposition sure looks good now.

They overspent the golden goose, and are realizing that gutting it won't bring golden eggs anymore and that one goose can't make enough foie gras to cover the loss, and they have to suffer people horrified they gutted the goose... Tales as old as greed.

 

Why not both? The "tracking users because the game creator makes them agree in their TOS" part is exactly how this would play out with the currently floated proposal. Every successful game creator would make their users send data sets. Maybe I'm missing other solutions.

e: You could even automate the audit of the install count to siphon the data sets every month.

 

I've already posted an example of how Unity's unchanged business model with pay-per-install can bankrupt a hyper casual developer.

As for the 4% rumor, here's the math:

A hyper casual game purchases $1M worth of players per month, from which it earns $1.1M.
You divide the resulting profits in half with the publisher.
Minus advertising costs, that's $100K.

You each get $50,000.

4% of the revenue in this case comes from the gross.
So the developer owes Unity $44,000.

Total:

A team of 3-4 developers gets 6k a month before taxes.
In fact, they are in the deep minus, unless they live in Zimbabwe.

 

Nicely said.

 

I think that will be irrelevant as the charges are based on per a game and they can argue that whomever is charging the money (dlc ) is supporting the game.

No one as none has made any revenue from anything. No revenue no fees.

You can try, just don't be surprised to find a strongly worded email in your inbox claiming you owe Unity fees. Alternatively they could just ban accounts for each business as you are deliberately trying to circumnavigate the fees, which might be included in the fine print of the T&C.

 

You are talking about godot specifically?

But thanks those extra precision makes a lot more sense, even if it's presented as engine agnostic, I have no idea what engine cover these.

 

unity should still go away from pay per install and self reports.
edit: seriously its just a stupid metric and makes no sense and also leads to unfair situations when developing games. unity activly encourages developers not to make mobile games with their solution. its objectivly a stupid idea

and they should be sued about their TOS changes.

if someone chooses to go with the latest unity 2023. or if they start a new project with an older editor version.

Any game started before 2019, where the ceo publicly stated that you can stay on their TOS. Should be still hold to their old terms. Also any game released before that.

Only if you want a new version of unity or want to start a new project with unity. Those new changes should apply

 

oh no sorry, i meant Unity itself

 

Yeah this is another important point, its not just the loss of trust from the changes, its the loss of trust that they weren't even competent enough to implement it without so many clear and obvious edge cases, poor or lack of definitions, no clear examples and just poorly thought out in general. On top of that it would appear they didn't even have the tools ready and unlikely to get it that, plus the necessary front/back end web interfaces needed to have this system in place by Jan 2024.

 

I don't think they will reverse the ToS changes. The community has been vocal about this specific issue ever since the changes to the terms of service (TOS) were exposed on Reddit last week. However, neither official nor unofficial channels have addressed these concerns since last Tuesday. Instead, we've received condescending messages from Unity suggesting that we're confused. The fact is, we're not confused; we understand perfectly well what Unity is aiming to do.

This morning, I read a Facebook post by Helgason that merely characterized the pricing changes as poorly planned and communicated, while conveniently omitting any mention of the retroactive ToS adjustments. It became clear to me then: this isn't a mistake, a lapse in judgment, a strategic blunder, or a simple miscommunication. It's not solely the result of Riccitiello's actions, nor is it some complex 4D chess maneuver by the faction from ironSource. This attempt to retroactively alter the ToS is a deliberate and premeditated betrayal by Unity's board and executive team against all the developers who have dedicated their careers to supporting Unity. The entire board and executive team are complicit in this unethical move.

 

Do your input values (the 1mil vs 1.1mil) have any founding on reality?
However a game that needs to invest this much into advertisement where people barely spend more than that cost, can only be a horrible clickbait game.
For the sake of our mobile game addicted peers I'm actually hoping that Unity makes such crap unprofitable, lol.

 

I really wouldn't give a S*** if they wanna take 5% after 500k. BUT, as we all know, there is too much shady stuff going on. I couldn't put this more simple way; THE TRUST IS GONE. The CEO has spoken so big frogs, and there is only ONE way to regain the trust: Total change of the management. If this doesn't happen, how EVER they think to regain the trust. It was the base for all of us devs. I'm one of the devs with no value for Unity; I bought the Unity 4 with (about, can't remember, $2000 or something). Then was forced to annual fee, fine, bought hundreds of assets, if not thousand+. From the insect like me, and thousands of others, we don't matter it seems.

AND STILL, as the latest update says; 5% after one million, again PER install. WTF? Are they stupid?

You, the management, let me give you a piece of information, and this is for free, as anything from your side has a price tag:

1. IF your management has made a poor decisions, then who is responsible for it?
2. IF your financial situation is bad, what SHOULD you do:
A) Sack people
B) Find the reasons and the people who got you into this S***, and sack them

This math, as a former a CEO of a post production company, should NOT be hard to understand.

So, what are you gonna do about it?
A) Management, put your heads to the backpack, and hope it's gonna go away?
B) Understand your non-capability to run this kind of company and leave?
C) Make a kinda semi-solution and hope for the best?

I'd go for B-B.

It really doesn't matter how you are going to do it anymore. Godot gains income so fast, and all your clients loving you guys are leaving. Me, hopping to Unreal takes about 6 months, as hundreds of devs. We are building a learning network as writing this.

 

The primary reason to choose a publisher is that they will market your game. If you're paying them half of your profit and paying for advertising yourself you've chosen a scummy publisher.

 

Not impossible, more impractical for large projects. C# is just stupidly easy to decompile in comparison. You immediately get something very readable.

 

Not everybody will agree to the TOS and there is so much we can track.

The main reason I use telemetry is to monitor the players' behavior within the game. It's useful to see where the game is too hard or too easy, make adjustments and use that data to make better products.

It's good at giving you broad data like how long is the average game session, when most players rage quit etc, but these works as long as +1000 players agreed to the TOS, even if they're a minority.

Getting the number of installs is impossible since legitimate players can opt out while pirated versions can send data, not to mention people spamming you with fake installations.

 

Tell that to the developers who used decompilers to reverse engineer Super Mario 64 and Breath of the Wild. You still have to massage it into a useful code base but the core logic is there, and now it's on Github.

 

they just keep making it worse, now they're saying users could self report an install? that still doesn't give developers any kind of information, it would go straight to unity and they would have to tell us, it's still a "trust us bro" variable.

why are they so hell bent on pay per install.... it hasn't made a lick of sense since the initial annoucement.

 

That's how the mobile market works.
And it could be easy 70% cut for publisher.

 

That still took a psychotic amount of effort. It's definitely not impossible, just very impractical.

 

I believe it would be like unreal, so you don't pay 4% of the first 1m you would only pay 4% of the 100k

 

The C O C C chart makes no sense in this context:

- Dev expected unity to raise price someway, and have already said they would pay more if it was sensible according to their tier.
- Dev expect they won't get in bankruptcy and nor want unity to be

Thus lowering expectation is not possible when the expectation is led by math. Which is why revshare is proposed so much, the dev actually give more money to unity BUT according to their success, ie sharing success as a principle. What unity propose is sharing base on popularity, but popularity don't make money, thus killing both unity and dev. Which is why this whole ordeal don't make sense to dev.

I think the real business plan was to funnel dev to more paid options (f2p services, pro seat plan), but they did it in a coercive pattern. That roll back to "unity don't make game", in games, we try to present model as reward not coercion, for example you don't punish a player for playing too long, you reward it for coming back fresh, mathematically it's the same, but also it set the right expectation. That's too simple for the dev context and should only be taken as an illustration.

In the context to dev, the expectation is survivability, that's what the business should be about, I will help you survive bad time, not I will create bad time to force you into paying survival items (reload!). Ricci and co are just a bad designers.

 

I mean, sure, every exe can be technically reverse engineered since it contains ASM which the CPU gotta understand.
That discussion started however regarding what language reduces the risk of your codebase somehow ending up in the model of OpenAI and co.
I'd say one doesn't need to worry reasonably about this with any language, but Cpp or Rust would technically have the far lower risk.

 

At that point what are you paying them for?

 

The TOS must be made unchangeable for a given version of the software for the trust to maybe come back.

 

It doesn't have to be a hyper casual game.

Any mobile game that can bring 110% of the advertising investment is already a success.

Especially if the game can afford to increase advertising budgets to a million dollars or more.
Who would refuse to get 10% interest on the amount invested every month?

But with Unity's 4% royalty scheme, such a game would have to be shut down.

 

opt-out means they don't buy or download the game. What I described was how the install fee allows unity a credible claim to a data subset you can provide. They can track individual install with the tech they already got, i.e. nft's. Every new install checks online whether it has a valid nft per game token and if that is the case a second token is generated, representing the install. With a valid install token you are allowed to download a part of the binary that works only for your individual token and allows running the game. Sounds pretty close to what bits I understood skimming their patents yesterday.

What would your idea for counting installs and make unity believe the number be?

 

this wouldn't fix everything, but it would really give devs a chance to finish up their current projects before moving on, and if they so want to stick with it can maintain the old version of unity, but they wouldn't get any new updates.

 

Most important part, otherwise everything else has no meaning at all and it doesn’t change anything.

 

I agree and the only way to clear the way forward for a lot of companies, is to go to court about this issue. Their old Editor TOS had a part where it spoke about "additional fees may occur", while referencing to other TOS.

The Editor TOS had a clause that people can stay on their TOS. So you have conflicting information out there. Where people would assume that they are safe as long as they stayed on their major editor version. E.g did not go to Unity 2023.

So yeah this will most likely go infront of a court and really depending on those rulings it will be decided. Anyone who followed what happend in 2019 were it went about exactly this issue, had to assume that thats how it is meant and they made their decisions on what was publicly stated and Unity added a protective clause in their TOS. Which they split up in a way so that they have other TOS. But they formulated that in a way it is not clear, what this indicates.

Its basically they gave you the right, for nothing, while lying to everyone. This should actually be the main point everyone S***s at them all the time over and over again.

So basically there needs to be a lawsuit to show those practices. Its really shady. Someone needs to come forward and plausible needs to state that all what was communciated and etc it was reasonable to believe that their decision for making their game was made on those statements.

The question is if there will be any consumer protections laws. Since most Unity devs are not considered as such.
But yeah i seriously hope there will be a big fat media spectacle, even if they lose that case. Those devs that go forward will be supported financially by the community.

 

You are out of your mind

Even without the 4% cap, 99% of users would still be paying FAR less royalties than 5% of gross revenue. You guys should be lucky Unity isn't actually listening to your demands, you have no idea what you're asking for.

 

What happened to the 99% of users won't pay anything argument?

 

Agreed.

 

No, what I meant was Big Business doesn't care about ethics. Big Business just pursues money. They only care about Ethics when they get caught. Unity aren't going to ever consider ethical actions unless some government body forces them to.

 

Elaborating: It's 5% per quarter after $1,000,000 in lifetime revenue and exceeding $10,000 in quarterly revenue. I think it's possible that some games will only ever pay the 5% in their spike phase.

I hope there's not people out there paying a publisher to do nothing.

In hyper saturated genres this wouldn't be too surprising but they would always be at risk of a failed advertising quarter bankrupting them without external funding.

 

I hope they're planning to have opt-in to their AI/servers scraping our source code.