Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

That's not true, I develop with Unity for Mac and iOS and things go smooth and with no problems at all. And Vision PRO will work with Unity, there is an agreement. So Apple won't let Unity mess with the future of Vision PRO.

 

I agree. If they'd simply said, "Our shareholders don't accept the red numbers anymore,s o we need to do something. So, the changes as you suggested above are implemented." I think devs might grumble for a few days, but that would have been it. Sure, the price in total would have gone up, but for new projects (starting 2024 is all new, or upgrading and in development) that revenue share something you can calculate in (most of the time).

 

Hahahah, you are right. "crazy enough" are the right words

I don't think SpriteKit, SceneKit and GameplayKit are tools comparable to Unity or Unreal, and Apple knows this very well, otherwise it would not have collaborated with Unity for Vision Pro.

 

That's simply INSANE! I've been with Unity for more than 10 years now, but it's time to start looking around. How can you trust a company that makes such moves? Having to switch platform will hurt, but not as much as having to deal with such policies.

 

Yes, but that also a risk if apple can take hold of Unity, they could make it "Apple first" engine that just moderately can cross platform

 

I would not even think about moving out. Maybe bargaining a bit about 4%. I think revenue share is very fair model (not as fair as profit share though). But we can hope for better future and better technology for the engine we know and love

 

Apple are more likely to create their own engine. They've created their own entire processors!

 

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/unity-o...e-hike-after-game-developers-revolt-1.1973000

If it's accurate that is good and would be an acceptable policy that I do think Unity needs if it's going to survive.

The issue is you destroyed trust this past week and took a week of high stress to realise you did "a bad" and need to walk it back.

We can not crawl into bed with Unity for a game project (multi-year relationship) knowing you are prone to rash decisions, with pore planning and thought and even poorer community response.

Heathen was fortunate enough to be in a position where switching wasn't a big deal. We know a bit about UE having been ramping up on it for our community. Our project was in pre-production so it is completely unaffected by the engine we choose at the moment. It was a perfect time for Unity to straight up have the dumb and only worked to encourage us to diversify our skill set and do our next project on another engine.

We are not comfortable with Unity as a business partner and had we been locked into a project we would be concerned. What happens when this deal isn't enough to stave off Unity revenue starvation? Will they change the rates overnight and retroactively again? ...

Unity you need to put in place some form of (ironclad mind you) legally binding guardrail that prevents you from retroactively nuking everything in flight and already shipped.

If Unity is so hard up with cash that it's making this level of stupid decision will Unity still be stable and viable through project development ... sure if you're nearly over the line but in 3-5 years is Unity still in strong enough of a position to support such a large user base many of which are low-value customers to them.

In short Unity do we as a small studio matter to you at all or are we just a liability?
In 12-24-36 months from now will we still matter to you or are we nearly a liability?

We need some idea of how Unity is doing actually ... not bluster, but Unity's plan as a game engine to do whatever its goal is.
Unity used to spew the "democratize game development" constantly and it used to constantly showcase how it was doing that.
Well right now all you showcasing is the "stop the bleeding and boost revenue F--k all else" line

I am glad to see Unity still has ears
But Unity ... do not think that is good enough ... that is the bare minimum, you have a long road of work to correct the mess you made for your self and apparently you already had a hard road ahead ... I am curious why you choose to make life harder for your self?

e.g.
Was this whole thing ignorance, naivety, malice or some mix thereof

 

So far Godot hasn't gotten my interest so, you better step up your game and make your engine more interesting for people like me or I'll just move to Unreal and skip Godot. This is a good opportunity for Godot to become the new unity with a growing community a lot of years down the line, just making a prediction.

 

Yes, that's why before I wrote "Apple will certainly put pressure on Unity to change things radically, otherwise it will be forced to acquire Unity itself, although this will not please many."
I was implicitly meaning that many would be afraid that the system would become more closed and more subject to 'Apple policies'.
Apple should offer itself as a guarantor in maintaining the initial spirit of "democratization of game development" with TOS written on stone (not only), but it will never happen...

 

That's highly unlikely because there's simply not enough income from the AppStore for that. And yes I know they make billions with the AppStore but nevertheless it's peanuts compared to their core stuff.

If they'd ever create their own game engine (what for?) it would be Apple only anyway.

 

Let's say your subscription ended 1-Sep-23 and it auto-renewed for 12 months. It seems utterly perverse that they can change the TOS so fundamentally and yet still expect you to continue with a subscription until Sep-24 with terms in flux.

The absolute minimum should be a get-out option for those part-way through a subscription since they should have a right to end the contract in these circumstances. I'd prefer they honour the agreement you entered when subscribing.

 

Yes. I have an idea since some times ago that Google Microsoft Valve and Nintendo and some large publisher should all pitch some of their money to make a United Board of game engine for buying and investing in unity. Even then I don't expect a bit that Apple would agree to this and they would try to acquire Unity only for themselves

 

I don't know why do they make their own programming languages? If they could ban all other engines, they would make an engine that forces an apple like interface on all games.

 

Accepting any halfway proposal is a slippery slope, in this case. Unity, the company, is really testing the waters of how far they can go. This is not one of the hiccups like "no shadows in free" or "dark UI only Plus and above". This is a severe legal problem we all are facing. Accepting any sugar coating and meeting halfway here will result in a precedent for further changes and as a signal for other companies.

Seriously - don't be fooled by any math calculations about how much money you lose on this or that scenario. This is not the point. The point is that the company tries to revoke a standing contract and in parallel apply a convoluted, difficult and unpredictable mess of a pricing scheme with take it or leave as the only options.

Any developer who is outraged about this should realize this. Any half measure in this case leaves the door open for any further changes in a similar way.

Ultimately every single one has to decide for themselves if they are fine with this. *shrugs*

 

So we are into the next week has Unity management got an actual update to this idiocy yet?

 

YES

 

Cocos2D isn't an Apple product. Or a game engine.

 

We all know it's only red because of management payrolls

 

Clearly it would be a great loss for game distribution platforms (not from an economic point of view) if Unity and most of the games developed with it were to disappear.

 

Yeah, I remember the wrong name, sorry. There is one engine for making apple game that was only obj-c engine at that time the iphone came out. Unity still not a popular. So everyone need to use that for making iphone game

 

My Plus expire September 26

 

For some update yes, something like this https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-reportedly-tells-staff-details-of-runtime-fee-backtracking

For actual official announcement, no, the above news is just the news platform trying to glean what they can from orally meeting

 

While waiting for the final word from Unity.... This is what I found under Unity Industry. Anybody knows about if this real?

 

Do you remember SceneKit? Because that isn't an engine either and came out well after Unity has pretty strong market dominance as well.

 

Yeah, they're better than plain SDL, but still probably mostly for learning. Great tools to use for teaching Swift though.

 

Not really important info but...

https://youtu.be/P-mqgi25pPQ

 

The only real question I'm asking myself is under what condition would most developers return to considering Unity as a reliable tool/company, assuming that they absurdly go back on everything.
Would a change of CEO be enough?
Maybe I would feel safe if it were acquired by Microsoft, Apple, or whatever big company.
Bah...

 

i think he is talking about "Over the edge", which is unity before unity, they released a game called "Go Ball"

 

No, they're talking about an Apple developed game engine that does not exist.

 

Unity,

We are now on day 8 of this exodus from Unity.

Your terms leaked from Bloomberg yesterday are STILL woefully inadequate.

You STILL do not seem to understand that for many of us, the MAIN sticking point is the Unity's bad-faith removal of the ability for the developer to remain on their current TOS.

So, I will repeat my demands plainly and succinctly again, along with my plan of action if these terms are not met:

Unity, leave your hands off of my already released games. Let them remain on the old TOS, as you previously PROMISED could happen, in PLAIN LANGUAGE in your blog as well as in contract. Anything that you did to alter this promise that YOU MADE TO US as a conciliatory gesture after that last TOS fiasco was a shady and unethical shell game and clearly done in bad faith so that you could launch this flaming wreckage of a plan.

Basing your fee on a number that is not tied to revenue is ludicrous and unworkable. You do not have the magic means to count number of installs, and neither do we. It's an unauditable metric. Eliminate the install fee.

Until these things happen I will continue to standby with pitchfork and torch in hand and explore options to enforce my rights under contract. I will also begin actively and passively campaigning against the use of Unity in the industry, highlighting your bad faith business dealings even further than they are currently exposed publicly.

No one can deny that Unity needs to do something to improve their income statement. However, core basis of the proposed plan, even with the Bloomberg-leaked updates, is unworkable and unacceptable to pretty much all of us. Over the last six years you frittered money away on everything else except the new technologies that we need for Unity to stay relevant. Now you come hat in hand for more money, talking about the need to balance some value equation, yet over the years, by letting your core product languish while chasing tangents, we are receiving less value from Unity than we were six years ago. Which end of the value equation really needs balanced here?

Also, next time, please release your "leaked" revised terms through a non-paywalled news entity. I shouldn't have to suffer an attempt at being monetized just to read your leaked update. Better yet, grow some institutional courage and fortitude and come talk to us directly.

You claim that you have talked to the community, but we here in the forums definitely do not feel listened to, having had zero meaningful contact with anyone from Unity in nearly a week. We may be angry and loud right now and VERY justifiably so, but generally we're really nice people and you used to know that.

Let's have some meaningful dialogue AS A COMMUNITY and not just these back-channel deals and attempts to mollify the enterprise customers.

 

From our POV
we have said in the past Unity will need to move to a royalty option if it's going to keep growing and pushing. So it moving to royalties isn't a problem for us it has to make money and a sub really isn't going to cut that at scale. Just like 1-time fees don't cut it even at the small level.

For us the issue wasn't the fact that they needed to apply a royalties model it was the model they chose and how they applied it (retroactive)

So on part one we always knew that plan would be fixed simply because the first plan I don't think would even be legal in all regions much less something any actual business is going to accept.

In the second part, trust was broken. They overnight change the planning and practice of all inflight projects, all shipped projects and all future projects.

That is not just a red flag for business that is a pull the emergency lever this MF has gone crazy, found the rip cord, smacked the eject button, etc.
That is really really really bad. All business relationships are a bet on trust between the parties nearly mitigated with common practices, contracts, etc.
Unity just showed that it has the willingness and capability to NUKE every inflight project, every shipped project and every WIP project with a 90-day notice and the arrogance to think that is even slightly okay to publish.
That damage was literally done overnight (the day they posted that blog post) stopped some negotiations, lost some deals, and did real damage. That showed that Unity cannot be trusted to be a reasonable actor, or a thoughtful one, or a tactful one, or a responsive one. And when you're a small company planning what to you is a HUGE project a game project, that deals with time scales and budgets that if done wrong will sink you as a company in just 1 project ... ya you are looking for a stable, reliable, predictable partner ... not necessarily the cheapest, not necessarily the most popular, or the "best" in tech ... but a stable, reliable, predictable partner that you can plan for and use to mitigate some of the MANY unknowns that is running a small business.

That will take time to repair, no amount of terms, posts, contracts, etc. will recoup that nothing but track record will recoup that. Unity was thought of as the Indie darling, here to "democratize game dev" who was focused on creating tools to empower game developers to achieve more. Now it's known as that company that tried to retroactively apply a limitless royalties fee to all games ever built on its tech with 90 days notice.

No matter how true either of those statements about "what Unity is known for" is ... that is where we are now.

 

Not to mention that their solution for "smoothing" things out is for us to subscribe a bunch of their services, which will increase our dependency on their solutions, which consequentially increases even more the impact of their decisions on our studios and projects...

I for one still can't believe that they actually thought people would have them as exclusive ad providers. The mere thought of it now seems quite laughable.

 

"4% royalty on earnings exceeding $250,000 (per calendar quarter)". The quarter that you don't reach $250K you pay nothing.

https://flaxengine.com/licensing/

 

It's not acceptable as long as "installs" are involved. That's a completely broken and fundamentally unworkable metric; any solution needs to delete that idea entirely. It was clearly thought up by somebody who has no knowledge of technology..."Step 1: Count installs, Step 2: ??? (Get some nerd to figure out that "install" stuff later, can't be that hard), Step 3: Profit!"

You mean "return it to an Apple-first engine like it was in the beginning".

They've only ever made one (Swift). Objective-C was created in the '80s, and not by Apple. They made Swift because Objective-C was created in the '80s (that is to say, not a modern language).

--Eric

 

Unity has been trying to push themselves towards a service provider for a while now, even before the IronSource merger, and I always kinda predicted this is the direction it'd take. Even if you're a pro subscriber, a lot of the things that pro grants you are just more opportunities to subscribe to services.


This doesn't even begin to cover things like SpeedTree, ArtEngine, and any other number of things. There's a reason I say it feels like the engine itself is deprioritized.

 

Dark times have come. Over the last week I've been trying several game engines trying to find a replacement for Unity. My choice was Cocos Creator. The Unity team's promises to revise its pricing policy do not inspire confidence, and trust in Unity will not return until the CEO of Unity Technologies John Riccitiello resigns.

 

Unity shares in a downward trend having lost about 8%. There is some support at $33 but if that breaks then the next level is $30 and then onto $25. They best come up with a good solution fast.

The charts indicate that this is a downward trend with a lot of volume, so it will most probably break through to the lower levels.

1) Fire management that were involved in the decisions.
2) Get rid of install pricing, it will never work.
3) Set a percentage cap like Unreal.
4) Remove the S***ty splash screen.
5) Bring back plus license at $400.

 

Yeah, I was about to say — Unity started out life as a Mac-only engine (though support for other OSes came not long after).

Sure has come a long way since then, huh.

 

That's true only in part. The terms should remain the same for older versions of Unity, since they are not updating them any more at all.

Developers should be pushed to upgrade their versions of Unity because of important innovations that Unity made during the years. We should pay more, if that's the case, to have more.

 

But you had to pay for Pro to publish on Windows. And the editor remained Mac-only until, what, 2.5.

You can say that again.

--Eric

 

I completely agree. The unacceptable aspect of their thinking is taking subscription fees + taking tribute over our content. Why do I say tribute? Because, Unreal makes Fortnite and earns some money with their Runtime, but when it comes to these guys, no effort, no added value, but more money. And they proved enough that this is a mind set. Not mistakenly entered direction. I also started to think that they are not brave enough to use their engine in such a production environment. So, why wasting time with this engine, you ask yourself?

When you say revenue share it is much more clear model. But, subscription fee has to go away. And current subscriptions should be refunded.

Now, what are we talking about? That mind set!.. That mind set will refund something? I am definitely dreaming.

Also, a guarantee that further policy changes will not affect certain versions, and they will stop trapping us with the changes they make to Term of Services. How can this be done? Simple! Each Unity version should be attached with its on use TOS within the engine. So, even if they change the TOS later, it will count for new versions.

This, but nothing less, may show a real will to restore relations with their community.

But, I am 100% sure that they can't do it. This much greed! They not only showed that to us, they very much insisted on it. They sounded in my mind like "those idiot developers" when they were talking to each other behind the scenes. This gains a different angle at this point. And I am 100% sure that they will repeat that sound, again, by their updates.

All of these are indications of a failing management, as well as a failing (or even failed) engine.

Better to move on another engine, now; not tomorrow, not 1 hour later, now! The more you wait, the more you loose time and money. This also applies to close to finish projects. I started to move everything to Unreal for such a project. I can not continue or let continue my business to develop on uncertain grounds.

 

Do you guys know that Unity grew by a FEW THOUSAND people in last few years?
What do they have to show for it? Increase in productivity? Service? NOPE! Nothing.

The trouble inside Unity is based in the inflated headcount. My guess is that 500-1000 people should be more than enough to run this company. This is why Unity is burning money like crazy and is now frantically looking for new money sources.

I'm betting that from this over 7000 people that work in Unity, developers consist of what... 50-100 people? You don't need 6k+ people to take care of HR, CM, marketing, sales etc, dont be funny.

Unity - look at Twitter and learn from it - PR aside and Elon haters aside - they indeed cut the headcount by ~80% and... Twitter still works. Whats more, they add new features faster than ever before.

 

Godot lead already said he's not interested in catering to Unity users. Either you code in a proprietary language inside a proprietary ide, or go elsewhere. No C# libraries from other industries, no rider, no auto pilot, no chatgpt training data. Good luck.

 

Yea I ity has 5000 engineers. God only knows what they do all day, feels like there's a handful of like 30 engineers carrying the entire company at this point.

If we follow prices law, 70 engineers are doing 50% of the work.

 

https://s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/files/doc_financials/2023/q1/2023_Q1-Shareholder-Letter_FINAL.pdf

AI is repeated 16 times, and i've yet to see any use of any of that mystical AI tech anywhere.
It seems that by simply not spending billions on purchasing useless tech unity could "earn" more money.

the link is from here https://investors.unity.com/news/default.aspx

 

No way they have 5000 engineers. Where did you get than number from?
And if they have 5000 engineers, then I do agree - most of them probably cant even code OR are mismanaged like hell and waste 95% of their time on meetings, processes and other corporate bullshit.

 

They didn't just break the stone: they ground it into a fine dust and snorted it.

 

Fully agree!

 

Even after all this, the Unity management is so far out of touch that it's baffling.