Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I have systems in place where I often do testing on the different branches of one of the games we have on Steam that would qualify for these charges and that could often mean I'm reinstalling and running the game 50 times in a day. I guess that costs me up to $7.50 now. I can't wrap my head around the level of ignorance involved in these changes.

This is the death of Unity here. I've got 14+ years of experience working with Unity professionally full time that has kept me from changing, but time to start back at 0 with a new engine after current projects are complete I guess.

 

Same here.. biggest load of rubbish, also can I have refunds on all the assets I purchased over the years, seeing that I won't use them now.

 

Don't forget about 1 new UI framework, years of DOTS/ECS breaking changes, and the huge RP debacle from a few years back.

 

Sooo, what if next year Unity decides to tax us over player session time? Or what if Unity wants us to pay for per minute while we're using Unity Editor? What is stopping Unity to do that? If this "Runtime Fee" is normal, these possibilities are normal. Unity completely lost its trustworthy image. They just became a trojan horse.

 

A bottle of petite sirah sounds good. But now I've learned that Unity personal has to be online all the time or it stops working. My dev computer is mostly offline. Has Unity lost its ever loving mind?

I only sign in to update my assets if needed, but my game development is offline for safety

 

Sorry, Unity developers, are you out of your mind? Do you think you are monopolists and there are no other game engines in the world? Good shot in foot!

 

I'm also leaving them 2. You can't defend such nonsense.

 

Okay, this took me awhile but I *think* I've got this figured out.

There's two things at play here, the threshold to trigger "you must pay a runtime fee" and the actual fee.

This is all explained on the chart Unity put up and it's clear. The wording has issues because it says "standard monthly rate" and everyone keeps wondering about a monthly fee.

Going on an example posted, a game sells 2 million copies over it's lifetime and made $200k in the last 12 months. This pushes it over the threshold (assuming Unity Personal/Plus here) and now we're in the "how much do we pay" category.

Here's where it gets tricky but in a nutshell (and this is all from the Unity FAQs BTW):

* you have 2 million copies installed but users installed 100,000 copies last month
* you'll be charged for the 100,000 installs for the month (hey, that's a lot of installs isn't it?) during your monthly billing for your plus plan
* the charge is going to be $20k for that month (100000 copies at 0.20 per install, 100k over the 200k lifetime install threshold)
* If next month users only installed 10k copies, your total install base would be 310,000 and you would pay $21k (110,000 copies at $0.20 per install)

The runtime fee is totally based on how many copies are installed that month (again from the FAQ) and not revenue or lifetime installs. The revenue and lifetime installs are only used to determine the trigger to charge the runtime fee. The fee you pay (based on the installs in the last month) don't take into your revenue so if you have an install base of 2 million copies you would expect the revenue to be higher than $200k (I'm assuming) which might offset the $20k/$22k fee for the month.

Also if you're looking at an install base this big you would probably be considering Unity Pro (where the threshold numbers jump to 1m) or Enterprise (where the fee can drop to $0.01 per install). This is all rough and doesn't account for variations like the number of installs and plans. Remember the installs over the threshold are charged based on the installs for the month, not the lifetime. Just because you have 5m installs means you might trigger the fee, but if you only had 100 new installs that month, you would be charged $20.

Like I said this isn't as some people are making it. If you have 1m installs and made over $200k it doesn't mean you're automatically paying $0.20 per install. It's based on how many installs you had in the last month (when you go to pay your plus/pro/enterprise monthly bill). This is from the FAQ "For example, a Unity Pro user with an app that exceeds the Unity Runtime Fee threshold and has 200,000 installs in the month will pay 100,000 * $0.15 + 100,000 * $0.075 = $22,500." (https://unity.com/runtime-fee). The *key* thing I think many people miss is the "installs in the month" part (note the example above from the link has a split install base of standard + emerging-market rates which overly complicates it).

Still not as clear as it could be but I think I have it figured out. Maybe.

 

I was going to install Rust this weekend and play a bit...but now I don't wanna...cuz that means Mr Newmann will be paying for the reinstallation...

EDIT: My 999th post on the forum, after 10 years...is this crap....amazing.

 

Yep, long term this is the bigger problem, even if it turns out this is a bait and switch
- why are there no actual legal licence or T&C's released yet? hmmm.

Unity have annoyed me several times in the past, from bad decisions to terrible price changes, but the community spoke out and they were able to come up with a solution that worked for pretty much everyone. Many times I personally was even better off financially after the back track than on the old pricing, which made it all the better.

The difference then was they didn't try to retroactive apply a fee to new installs of your game made with a Unity version and released 5 years ago! This unilateral and surely illegal, change to the TOS of Unity versions bought and used to build games years ago is just so far beyond anything they have ever done, they can never gain my trust back.

I mean how can anyone truly trust they wont try the same thing again or something worse in the future? This wasn't just some spit balling internally that got leak but was never going to be implemented, this got to the stage where they got rid of Unity Plus and stated categorically that in 3 months you have to start paying them for every game that crosses the thresholds!

While I may be forced to continue some development with Unity for the near future, new projects will look to other engines or incur a significant surcharge to clients to account for potential future F***ery from Unity.

Looking to a wider field, I can't help but see this event causes a reduction in new users, anyone wanting to get into making games as a business should not use Unity at this point and thus learning Unity as a game engine becomes pointless. Honestly it just feels like a catastrophic misstep that will cripple the company and engine for years or decades to come.

 

One thing I haven't seen brought up anywhere is the case of games like Pokemon Red/Blue.

Would releasing slightly different versions of the same game split the install numbers? How would this get settled?

 

This whole thing is so very frustrating.

I'd like to see concerted effort around breaking the install analytics. Block the network request. Deliver fully packaged games that don't need install. Refute EVERY SINGLE bill with a "Prove it". At just before a threshold, disable purchases of the game or make it free. And on and on.

What are your ideas for how to work around this awful change?

 

What if they decide to tweak the numbers? Someday. Suddenly.

 

I don't want to curse, so let's say I'm not happy with this change.
Currently I don't close yet to "200k/$200k" treshold, but I feel like I can touch this cellar with one of my current projects.
It will be sad, but I will go further without Unity on my own projects, to mitigate the risks.

 

Oh and also
This is lunacy.

"We're going to charge you based on installs we track"
"Could you elaborate on that?"
"Trust us bro"

 

Last month we spent $78k advertising our mobile F2P game Pocket Planes (9M downloads to date, projected over $1M annual profit by the beginning of next year) and took in $110k in revenue for a monthly profit of $32k. Unity wants us to pay $18k (cutting profits by more than half) based on 120k installs last month (Pro subscribers). This doesn't even take into account various other substantial costs so it is even worse than that in reality.

 

a lot of devs were already on the fence about jumping to unreal, or even godot... for a lot of people this is the last straw, they've done too much to damage their name, unless they sell the company or get rid of the CEO and bring in someone new who drasticly changes the way the company works, i don't see anyone who has jumped ship coming back

 

Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.

Wow. Just wow.

So that 200k threshold is meaningless. And yes, bad actors could spam the hell out of installs to cause developers serious grief.

 

Apparently it's National Video Games Day today. Wow, perfect timing...

 

i need a official statement talking about reinstalls, meaning: deleting and reistalling the game or buying a new phone and downloading the games you have on you android account, games you alreadi paid, i just need that from an official unity guy, not a ramdon twitter guy saying "i believe it is..."
I need a yes or not to know if a need to change my actual project to godot. Can someone from unity please respond?? Please

 

Do you want to bankrupt your opponent company? Just send bots to download their games.

 

who said that? do you have a link?

 

Read the opening post on this forum. Its been updated with some answers.

 

Is there a good Unreal/Godot tutorials list on this forum? I'm interested.

 

I believe that developers must start to think about using another engine because Unity may disappear in 2024-2025.

 

The challenge Michael is that some people contract, I make roughly $250K a year contracting. Not in game development. How ever if I produce a "Free" offering for a client.. Unity in their infinite wisdom determines that I have exceeded their $200K annual income, so I charge a company $1500 to whip out a simple unity front end of rsomething, now they have to be prepared to pay me "in purpetuity" for each install of their "Free" software.

You can see how bloody insane this is right?

 

From what I understand, you are charged per month for new installs that happens that month. So you would pay for only 10k installs that month. Also someone installing your game on 3 devices means you pay for 3 installs...

 

then you have to pay 0.2 after 200.000, don't you?

 

Even if they walk this back, I think it's time to go. Godot looking pretty interesting right now.

 

Same here. I hate that this came just as I was finishing a 7 year project.

 

"Games or apps qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee after two criteria have been met: 1) the game or app has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months, and 2) the game or app has passed a minimum lifetime install count."

So as I understand it, if using Personal Edition:
YEAR 1: Say I earn $200,000 after 10,000 installs (Say $10 a pop on Steam). I still don't pay anything until I reach 200,000 installs by which time I've earned $3,800,000 minus (Say) 30% store fees = $2,660,000 minus Unity runtime fee ($40,000) = $2,620,000. THEN Deduct taxes. Still smiling (dreaming).
YEAR 2: Say I earn $1,000,000 for 100,000 (this is 300,000 lifetime installs, so the $0.20 fee applies for all these installs = $60,000 unity runtime fee) = $940,000 for the year
YEAR 3: I drop the price to £5. I get 30,000 installs = $150,000. Unity runtime fee for the year = $0. Still have to pay taxes though.
(Someone from Unity please correct me if I got that wrong).

 

Of course they will. These don't scale or adapt. They're fixed numbers. At some point they will have to change to adapt to inflation or changes in costs, etc. Who knows how much warning we'd get or what the changes would be. At least a % scales

 

The fact that all Unity employees that one should expect, based on all common sense, should flood this thread on Unitys own forum to answer questions is not here is scandalous and unprofessional. ...especially after such groundbreaking news. Given my experience from running large organisations with high revenue targets I am not only think this is unbelievable unprofessional and embarrassing I just do not understand what they expected and how they planned to manage reactions to this news.

I have been running large organisations with large revenue targets and had my share of bad news but I would have been fired if I treated customers like they are doing now. As a matter of fact these companies, some very well known, should never communicate this way.

My guess is that 1) this is driven by people that understand excels and not the business. 2) I do not thing appropriate people that should be present even dare to become active after this reaction. At least not until the internal meetings that I am sure is currently happening is done and an official answers will be communicated. The situation is not getting better given that media is starting to publish articles that is not so positive.

I think, as previously being stated, that we all understand that Unity needs to increase revenue and bottom line.

It would also be very interesting to understand their revenue recognition and compliance T&C's. ...especially given what have been said here about tracking etc.

Finally. WHERE DO WE FIND ALL THE UNITY STAFF?

 

They're all conveniently boarding airplanes and won't be able to answer our questions until an undisclosed later date.

 

From what I understand, it is per game / project and I think there was an employee quote somewhere in the thread about it.

Terrible communication all around from Unity... Effectively making sure no one will use their engine for future project...

 

"You're a F***ing idiot", John Riccitiello
I guess we are if we stay again and again after getting abused by this moronic company.

 

Why is Unity fundamentally changing the payment model for an existing LTS product? Many studios have invested their energy in the existing payment model and cannot change the engine overnight if they are not satisfied with the new payment model. Major studios should sue Unity on the grounds that Unity is required to maintain the existing payment model (with price increases within inflation) for the current Unity 2022 LTS product and support the product for 3 years as promised. And if Unity wants to change the subscription model, then they should do this starting with Unity 2023.

 

On piracy and fraudulent installs: "we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team"

Cool...but...I still gotta pay you right? You put invoice on hold or what?

 

Yea, 3 months to do what? Do it by the beginning of 2025, fine! Give your customers at least a chance to react.

 

Ok so let's recap:
1. 26 pages and still no news about if drm-free/offline installed games will be even able to exist with this new policy.
2. Unity will go always online (you will be able to use it 3 days before it will not work anymore offline).
3. Unity will decide how many download using some method that they will not share.
4. Reinstalling a game count as installation (it was said the opposite in the beginning of this thread by a Unity Tech mod).

The system is the most absurd thing you could come up with. The only logical conclusion for me using this as a hobby is to move to Godot or Unreal Engine. It won't be easy because some scripts aren't exactly trivial but it will be better than staying here waiting for things to change for the better and risking one day finding myself with a game that instead of making me earn something makes me lose money. The only thing I'm sorry about is, I had just supported a game on Kickstarter that uses Unity, who knows if they'll be able to finish the development now... moreover, it's not really clear how all the games already present, for example on GoG, will be treated... Personally speaking, if I were someone who has a payment method connected to Unity, I would disconnect it... just in case they manage to take money without there being a valid reason.

 

This is hardly germane to the conversation at hand but the Gloomwood demo was so damn superb. Waiting for it to leave early access before I play it, but I'm excited for it.

 

I think this will bring our Unity adventure to a close. We distribute free software. Not F2P, just 100% free. We have no ads or anything. There is no way we could afford to support this licensing model. Especially if we have to pay for installs. We would be losing a lot of money. If this doesn't change or get better clarity we are going to be moving on as well. Even though we probably have so much money invested in assets, and licensing we have paid over the years. For a small studio this is a death sentence.

 

Also, if you have free games eg on steam which might get lots of downloads will the dev have to pay for that, but they don't make any money? That is absolutely crazy! The person downloading the game should pay for the runtime fee.

 

Let's not forget that it includes early access and betas which will naturally consist of a great deal of installations.

 

To add, the same goes for mobile game etc, it nuts!

 

They always seemed to be focused on trying to onboard users by adding new bells and whistles. Is it, now they have enough users invested in projects that it’s time to start gouging them this hard? Knowing it is not so easy to simply port to another engine.

Perhaps are they trying to weed out small devs and focus on larger/enterprise level? No more plus subscriptions, so need to run with $2k annual for pro or higher.

Hyper-casual devs who rely on bulk installs for marginal ad revenue for each. What’s to stop major HC publishers from install bombing smaller devs?

Is there going to be different runtime tiers per platform, eg mobile vs console? Charging same rate for a F2P HC mobile game as a full-on console game? AAA console studios will absorb this fee far easier than the little guys just getting over the payment threshold.

Is Unity struggling behind the scenes? Why has the CEO sold off 50k stock this passed year, and bought none back? Are there other internal factors at play here?

The tracking under the hood, this needs to be clarified for privacy assessment. Even with editor analytics off. Am I currently risking my Apple Dev account for tracking I don’t know about? I would assume, at least, that the App Stores are directly aware of this?

I love Unity, but oh man, always doing things half baked.

*Edit: So we get directed here from Unity's Twitter(X) post to air our concerns, and they address none of them. Just goes to show the higher ups utter contempt for their community. FFOS is the future.

 

This new policy means a small studio may have their revenue capped at $200k.

 

It's also essentially impossible for us to determine fraudulent installs as well. This is not something that can be done in most cases on either side so it's a moot point. There's no real recourse.

 

If you are doing Freeware, no ads no nothing, you are safe (for now).

 

Is this correct? Because everything I'm reading says a developer would get charged for every individual installation, not for every sale. Charged per sale means if I make money off a user then I owe Unity a cut. Fine. Charged per install means any one user who gives me money is going to keep costing me money in perpetuity as long as they have a reason to run their installer again. This is me continuing to owe money without making money. Why is this any better than a straight cut of revenue?