Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Just here to reiterate the points I've made twice before. Once at the announcement, and once after the backtrack on reinstalls tweet. These things are non-negotiable bare minimums for me still:

1) Self reporting of sale/install numbers
2) Exemption for titles released before the announcement
3) A cap on fees below 5% (I don't need this personally but my mobile dev friends have reasonable concerns here, and it's good peace of mind besides)

Anything less and this might be my last Unity project. Meet these requirements and all I might do is invest in other ecosystems as a matter of safety. Exceed them and I might feel better. That gaslight of an apology on Twitter wasn't the best of starts though. :\

 

People focus on the wrong aspect in that article.

The article said that Elon is thinking of doing that because twitter lost 50% of their revenue from Ads. So yeah, twitter and Unity are definitely both, provably, mismanaged. Can we stop talking about Elon now?

 

Are you guys just trolling us at this point?

 

Hi,

Is there any update on the status of the next announcement with the changed and more clarified version of the fees ?

Would be great to have a more official word on the 4% cap and how the numbers are expected to be reported by the developers.

Thanks

 

Don't gang up on Unity employees that dare post something here, they are probably as angry and disgruntled and worried and disappointed about the future as the rest of us.

 

i think they are not allowed to say something at the moment

 

Revenue cap doesn't mean anything. The numbers are all from their "accurate" system. They can say your "accurate" revenue is at $x when it isn't. So in the end, you can be billed higher than that x% max of revenue.

 

well, at least i have something to see (this thread) while unreal is trying with all its heart to install my test on my mobile -.- it is like 20 minutos now jst for a test -.- so...

 

https://x.com/AlexRoseGames/status/1463382338189115392

 

C# as a language is standardized (ECMA-334, IL code as ECMA-335), and can be implemented by anyone, which was also done by Mono.
Runtime, compiler and the standard library (since .NET Core) is open source.

 

Capping it to 4% I don't care how they count anything they want to use tea leaves, chicken bones, revenue reports (what I would use) or just literally a finger in the air

My issue with install count was based on it being X price per install with no % rev cap ... so it was possible for it to be 20-50-120% whatever

adding the 4% cap that resolves that
How they count their chickens is between them and data regulators
I won't tolerate spyware in my engine but if they want to guess at installs based on some obscure maths ... fine ... as long as it can not eat my lunch e.g. as long as it has an upper-level cap

Yes counting installs is stupid but its the sort of stupid that only effects them so that's fine if they want that ... that's fine

Its when that stupid leaks over and impacts my revenue that we have a problem ... like not having a % rev cap

Now I can simply assume that UE = 5%, Unity = 4%
UE = trust worth, Unity = crazy

you decide if 1% savings is worth some crazy ... or if some measure of trust due to specific verbiage in terms and track record merits 1% more


Course none of this matters to us for shipping games
We would need to see Unity demonstrate how they will never again pull some 90 day retroactive BS again before we crawl in bed with them to do another game.

 

Some of the responses here are just silly rage-baiting and unnecessary aggression toward the people who are not responsible for the decision.

 

This.

Right now, they need to make some hard decisions and decide what they want to be. Its either an ads provider or a game engine as this point. Everything else is a failed market for them or little to no value. Most if not almost all the recent acquisitions should be sold (Looking at you, Weta). UT has been eating and eating and is dangerously close to a heart-attack. Time to get on a treadmill.

I can only hope they are actually listening to all the uproar over recent decisions and somehow, against all odds come back to their senses. I don't think upper management even sees the company as a game engine provider anymore.

They can't exist with a 7000+ headcount, plain and simple. That isn't sustainable.

 

Still better monetization story than fee per install....xDDDDD

 

you are totally forgetting the fees from seats, which can be considerable. you may have to pay a lot even if you don't release the game. or you get zero revenue.

 

FWIW ... Blender has become my main 3D DCC suite. And not out of necessity. I seriously find it pleasant to work with - much more than in Maya or Modo, by now. I also support Blender and Godot Financially - and I do it gladly. Blender is still quirky and has a few very sore spots but over the years I found very sore spots in every program I've worked in. Thing with Blender is - I can directly see the status, where the hiccups are and even openly talk to the developers. Just like everybody can in fact. It's open.
And it does not install any weird DRM and activation crap on my machine.

 

My plan to save Unity:

1. Unity Free: 5% revenue after reaching 200k USD threshold
2. Unity Plus: 4% revenue after reaching 500k USD threshold
3. Unity Pro: 2.5% revenue after reaching 1m USD threshold
4. Unity Enterprise: 2% revenue after reaching 1.5m USD threshold

Revenue threshold is a sum of past 12 months - usual practice.

+ Pro and Enterprise licenses will see a 33% cut in price.
+ There will be zero differences in engine feature set - yes including the splash screen.

Other steps:
1. Ask every c-suite member who had anything to do with install fees to resign and apologize to community.
2. Reduce overall workforce by at least 30%.
3. Consider ditching IronSource or make it a separate subject.

Would this work for you?

 

I hope you guys are taking care of yourselves, stay healthy

 

"Talking with the developers"? As far as I see, they are threatening them, blackmailing them (AppLovin issue).
Good point with "Confused".
Stay upright! Do not give your revenue as a tribute to a company that is so afraid of making a game themselves with their engine and put it on sale! Unreal does that with Fortnite! These Unity cowards can only think that we are fool enough to accept their tribute for a fund raising activity!

 

The Bloomberg leaked new fees seem to drop the 1 million installs cap, right? it just mentions 1M USD in revenue.

If that's the case, I'd rather have their fees from a week ago... A 20 bucks PC game (our target) can reach one million USD by selling 50K copies, so they just made it 20 times worse than it was. It would be just like Unreal, except we have to pay for Pro as well. Neat.

 

this is not official -.-" why are you talking about that 4%?? and even if that is true it does not solve the big problem

 

Yeah... I would NOT make a good example of some guy who fires 70%+ of the workforce , and put the others work 80 hours / week . just saying...
How is that when some people complain of overtime on some companies, people are furious, and then we make a good example of a guy that did just that?!

Maybe Unity really has too many empoyes , but my guess is that all those people really work. The problem is that they focus too much on the wrong stuff (services) and too little on the engine itself. They should change that, not just fire people because elon does this and it worked (at least for not).
also it interesting to see how many people see elon as a good guy... if bill gates did 20% of what elon did it should be works CEO of the milenium...

 

Show me then exact Unity employees I can legally blame.
Decisions made by employees and for this to happen you need not only CEO spaghetti will.

Want them or not they are all part of this big trouble called "Unity". Again, awful decisions here not for the first and not for the last time, it lasted for years slowly going in such direction. Also Unity services is total BS.

 

i can't see a scenario where license fees and revenue shares live together. it's either one or the other.

 

I set my location to Vanuatu, which got rid of the always irrelevant suggestions. In fact, I have no suggestions there at all now. So clean!

The stream gets a LOT of ads for the same products, posted by different blue-ticks. I rarely see a tick post anything useful, so I generally block them. Using a hashtag is the best way to find something relevant, so #unity3d or #unreal gets me to the engineverse, ready for me to inject my snark. But I don't use Xitter often - I mostly end up there when I get a DM, which has happened more since the takeover for some reason.

 

hahah yeah, it looks like the "silent" did work, because everybody is waiting for a 4% (out of nowere) + plans without thinking about the TOS and the big problem of that for the future of their users xD

 

Seems like we will have to get F***ed because of freemium trash per player revenue games.

 

Those F2P games are 95-97% of games. You can't ignore that.

 

I hope your higher-ups land on something sane, because I'm currently dodging all the people I recommended the engine to

 

i'm happy to pay for something useful that let me create my games without being depressed for their random changes

 

Nah, that wouldn't be comparable. It would only be comparable if Elon requested a fee from you for every person that reads one of your tweets.

 

exactly. they leaked their 4% to bloomberg to test the reactions without committing to anything and to see if they can get away with it. this is silent negotiation and some are falling for it. remember, their job is to negotiate, and they are good at that.

 

Both per seat fees and revenue % is insane. The way Unity would get more money from bigger games was by getting more subscriptions, since bigger games would have more employees -> more seats. Now it's scaling up twice (more seats, and revenue).

In the meantime, those that are in the 200k to 1m range, (which I think is a significant amount of people) they have to pay potentially up to 1% of their revenue per seat, which makes scaling up extra difficult.

I've said it before, we have an external contractor do the music and sfx and I would love for him to be able to open the Unity project and maybe wire some of the music and sfx on his own, but neither we nor him can justify 2k per year just for that.

 

I agree. The UI refactor in Blender 2.8 adopted industry standards. It's now heads and tails above Max and Maya for ease of use. I was a stalwart Max defender for ages, but Blender is now just better. It's not quite up to zbrush for sculpting though, but that is improving constantly. I've been really impressed with it, now that you don't have to relearn everything in order to use it.

 

Can't tell if this post is a joke or not. Unity and Twitter have the exact same trajectory on adding 'features' and about the same success rate as well. I know this is a Unity forum but their feature list is pathetic in comparison to the competition and most of Unity's employees are in the business of advertising... or at least I would hope so. Both companies also seem to be massive money pits that desperately seek to monetize their userbase to little success. But you're right in that Twitter and Unity could cut down massively on their engineering staff to save money. Unity wants to an ad platform that piggybacks on sucessful developers anyway.

True but that Unity employee did fan the flames lmao.

 

I'll have to try Blender again then. I tried it 2 times in the (distant) past and the interface was so alien to me that I couldn't handle it. Something like Lightwave but worse lol

 

I was told I can renew it for one more year, but then it's gone.

 

Someone, please call Elon Musk.

 

Can you pls finally make DOTS Animation, DOTS Audio and DOTS UI before punishing us?
I mean all this years you were doing dumb S*** for who knows who... but not for DEVELOPERS!
I am agree you need money and i am ready to support you in it but please... no, PLEASE make unity great again ffs
You have "over 9000" (meme number) employers and ONE PURE MAN did some crusual assets before your team did.
If i must pay to you with money can you pay to us with BETTER ENGINE?

 

In case anyone didn´t notice that, they RAISED the price on Pro license by 20%, removed the price on Enterprise, created a new "Industrial" license

and removed stuff from the personal license...

https://unity.com/pricing

 

He´s probably behind this stunt...

 

What was removed from personal? Anything I should worry about?

 

Also there's a Humble Bundle right now for C++ books: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/game-programming-with-c-unreal-packt-books

 

The Godot lead is even on Twitter specifically laying out a roadmap for how he'll help make transitions smoother for Unity developers. Bizarro world complaint.

 

Unacceptable. Nobody, especially now, wants to show the Unity logo in their game, even with a 33% cut. Bring back Unity pro or make it free to remove. They know people don't want to show their logo so they are forcing us to pay 2k to remove it now.

 

Well, i do not understand the "extended LTS support for 3 years" isn't LTS supported for 3 years already? o .O

 

No 2 years.

 

I have paid thousands of dollars to Unity over the last 10 years, and I have come nowhere near the proposed thresholds.