Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I'm over $20k in assets. Currently downloading all of them to archive and see what I can permissively finagle into Unreal.

 

So basically a "Just trust me bro!".

Why isn't this per sale and not per install? Does an install cost Unity money, why are you trying recoup money from installs. Such a weird decision.

 

When this change goes into effect they are removing the revenue requirements for Personal. So you can, as a large company, build with Personal. You just owe more per install then if your game is successful, I guess.

 

Did anyone get an email or something about this to explain, no, we are left to figure stuff out ourselves, by surprise.

 

Install threshold doesn’t seem worth it in the long run if a game is totally free bummer

 

I guess we'd better stop updating our games on Steam so we don't get hit with a charge after every user updates the game? Assuming new Unity version was used that generates a new exe? Can any of this be clarified? Madness.

 

When you say "prior to this" do you mean, today? Or do you mean for something else? The revenue for the license requirements was based on company/legal entity revenue. The revenue for the install fees is based on per game. This link for example says "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." Now of course, this could be... wrong, and that is probably my biggest worry, but currently it seems like it will be based on a per game revenue basis. Which means you could have 5 games that all make $199,999 and have 1 billion installs each but not owe anything. Honestly one of the biggest issues I have with their licensing requirements (and Unreal's royalty) is that it's based on all revenue of a company. I worked at a company that made more than the revenue required so we had to have the pro licenses, but our "development" revenue was actually a lot lower, because we did things other than produce software (we made videos for example, and physical fabrications). With this new system they could have theoretically switched to personal... but recently Unity started their "industry" license which that company falls under so they have to use that new license... which is even more than the pro one heh.

 

from https://unity.com/runtime-fee

 

Can we please just add an addendum like "Monthly runtime fees will not exceed 15% of total revenue for that month"? Then you can have your wacky pricing structure and we as developers never have to worry about not being able to afford it.

 

welp... the writing is on the wall.
Time to move on.

 

I am a Unity teacher and I work in several schools. (I also have a video game studio with 6 people)
Honestly, every year, I suggested to my students that they try Unity to earn a little money by making cool f2p mobile games with advertising...

I think I'm going to change my tune and strongly advise against Unity.

The risk is too great... If their game works well and brings for example 60M downloads but the advertising only brings them $1M, they will owe Unity $1.2M...

It's completely stupid and even super dangerous.

After 15 years on Unity, I was one of your biggest defenders.
That's why it hurts even more

 

because then they wouldn't be able to charge you out the ass for years to come.

 

Hi, dev from Escape Simulator here. I'm writing to voice my opinion. This decision does affect us, although not in a too significant monetary way. What's worse is how it has been done, going back on your agreement and applying this retroactively to old projects. That's a very shameful way for a company to act.

Future-wise, those are some bad signals coming from the business side. We've already had plenty on the development side: slower and more unstable editor, the pain of working with solid but unmaintained features, or developed but unpolished ones. Those combined give out some familiar Adobe Flash/Air vibes.

While I'm not an Unreal fan, it feels bloaty, and its pricing is still quite a bit more expensive. We'll have to re-evaluate it for our project in preproduction. It might be worth it due to its working networking, proven high-end graphic solutions, and stable business environment.

Even if this decision gets reversed, it isn't enough to have peace of mind for basing our future projects in Unity. A change of leadership and a clear vision (other than bandwagon-jumping) would be cool to see. But that's an unrealistic expectation since we're dealing with a publicly traded company with a core product that doesn't scale well.

 

It's seriously like Elon Musk is in charge over there.

 

Now indie developers will be afraid of success for their game. This is extremely sad and funny

 

over 200k download + 200.000 revenue... if your game makes 0 money you have to pay 0$ even if you have 5343154325413543 downloads

 

LOL, come on Unity, lock this thread!

 

Ah fair, my fingers went faster than my brain there. Apologies my mate. But yeah our own situation this just murders my entire studio. We won't have money to reinvest, hire out, contract etc This will eat our margin completely. And it's so messed up, this was made because of iOS/Android games or gacha games like Genshin which rely on extreme monetization policies.

We don't want to nickel and dime our users, and our games are CRPGs... we rely on per-unit install. This is just... astonishing. The GoDot port is started right NOW, if we could manage it we would do Unreal but we have less chance salvaging stuff for it. We need to get prepped now because holy crap... how can we, how can any mid-sized indie game that doesn't do Gacha/Microtransactions, how can any of them even begin to afford this? Especially if they have demos or test builds etc. Our WebGL we need to kill NOW and it's such a vital part of our marketing...

Killing off our WebGL is going to lose us that 10-15% conversion and the advertising/views otherwise we get on Newgrounds, Itch, etc.

 

Unity is likely just going to store a hash in Local Storage and cross their fingers that the user never clears their cache.
And if they do? Well, tough luck, developer. That'll count as a new installation.

And for those developers banking on IAP in WebGL games and who've surpassed the $200k mark in the last 12 months, January 1st is shaping up to be your very own, surprise bankruptcy day.

Hats off to Unity for its sheer brilliance.

 

I can't believe I lost my time and money investing in this circus. Time to migrate to something else, I guess.

 

Somewhat confusing press release, difficult pricing model, subject to unpredictable changes in the future.

Doesn't seem to be the end of all things, and the backlash might be a bit more harsh than necessary. However, considering I haven't successfully made any money to date, I am not the target of these changes (yet).

In either case, it does appear (at least on the surface) that Unity is money-hungry now, driven by shareholders. Given that the last 2+ years of Unity updates and features have been short of enjoyable, I'm going to commit and dedicate my next project to GoDot.

Good bye for now Unity, it was fun for a while!

 

Probably isn't necessarily the price itself, but that you can't predict the price for any given month, and that it's open to exploit from malicious actors (we all know gamers with vendettas will absolutely use this against developers). With revshare, you know exactly how much of the pie you get to keep. The proposed Unity model is charging you every time for the prospect of a pie (after thresholds are met). This is a deathblow to free2install games that rely on IAP and ads that are not guaranteed revenue. Games that are what Unity is mainly used for.

Also, as others have said, you'd have to deal with disputing the invoice that Unity sends you every month Unity sends you, since you will VERY likely not agree with their numbers. In other words, the relationship isn't symbiotic. Who needs that headache on top of the other tasks it takes to create a successful game.

 

You're crazy. This will kill unity development instantly.
Anyone can make bots for basically draining unity game devs for all of their revenue.

 

This is in such bad faith and even if walked back, trust has been lost. Way o change something under the noses of thousands of dev teams that are part way through their cycle on a game built with unity

 

Funniest part of it is Genshin Impart not being in the same boat as us, as it is considered as a "gambling game".
Write a simple script which spoof your HWID + IP, and boom you can bankrupt any indie game now, no matter what they're so called "anti-fraud measures" are... This is complete bs

 

Unity have lost their god-damned minds.

You expect developers to pay a bill you will hand them that has been generated via some "data model" voodoo, that you refuse to elaborate on because it's "proprietary"? And you are also planning on attempting to bill developers for games that were released years ago on old builds of Unity which were developed on the existing terms and conditions of the time? This is literally the game engine equivalent of that scene in The Simpsons were Homer tries to revisit everyone who previously had a ride on the elephant and charge them his new grossly inflated prices.

You people are insane and I am so sad that I might have to abandon an engine I like working with. Just charge a flat fee or a percentage of revenue, why this convoluted, intrusive nonsense?

 

I wonder if the founders like Joachim Ante support this.

 

@kristoof hahaha thank you for this, i needed

 

Now to define "substantially similar". Is a sequel aggregated into the same count, or would it get a reset on the free installations?

 

EXACTLY.

We saw Unreal pushing 5.3 full of new features. Only features.

At the same time Unreal pushes this with only new restrictions.

 

I'm not surprised that they posted this in the same day as the apple event.

 

Whats up with all the accounts with only a few posts suddenly talking on the forum?

 

Godot fans.

Joking aside the forums normally only consist of the most vocal developers. What you're seeing are the people who wouldn't have commented in the past but have been given a reason to.

 

2 years ago. So of course you could be correct but what kind of company makes this kind of announcement with no details to back it up and just waits to see where the chips fall and then come back to us and say "OH you all misunderstood what we meant by bend you over and drive a pool queue up your backside"...

 

it is an excuse, like:
"imagine you are playing an fps game and you are surrounded by two enemies but you are out of bullets and the only way to get more bullets is by paying real money, like a microtransaction, you will pay because you need the bullets"
kind of things (literally)
the runtime thing is nothing for you because you are not even using it

 

This forum is going to start needing a "crying on shoulder" button

I can think up some very evil ideas, but they all involve becoming one of *them*.

If they're going to need a team to count installs, they might as well pay for a team which does revenue accounting instead and charge a flat percentage fee. Drop the cost, drop the tiers - one engine, one percentage.

 

Just to be clear, if you have multiple games, in order for any one of them to be hit with this install fee, you would have to have over $200,000 in revenue FOR THAT GAME, and that game has to have over 200k installs (assuming you are using Personal/Plus). If you have Pro, it goes up to $1 million in revenue and 1 million installs. This means if you ahve 5 games and one of them has $250k in revenue and 100k installs, it's not subject to it, even if you have another game that has $250k in revenue and 150k installs (that game won't be subject to it either). You could in theory have 100 games with $199,999 in revenue and 10 billion in installs EACH, and not have to pay any install fees.

Of course, Unity can "combine similar games" and count their installs/revenue as one... but in that case your revenue for your entire company would basically be over $200,000, which means you are already using Pro (or should have been using it...) and the limit is now $1 million/1 million installs, so you should keep Pro (or start using it) and then if your revenue/installs are over 1 million... figure out how much it's going to cost. The biggest issue seems to be webgl builds since they don't seem to clarify what an "install" is for those, and that could quickly eat into your install limit.

 

What the heck is this new personal edition online version stuff, what's next.

 

This is changing, you can earn millions and still use the "Free" version.

 

Correct, also the revenue (to trigger the fee) is for the last 12 months. So if you had 10k new installs but 0 revenue (and you were *just* over the $200k revenue figure the previous 12 months) you wouldn't fit into the threshold and thus not be charged.

Even with that and (slightly) understanding this it's convoluted. Unity needs to take a page from Epic and just say "over $1M revenue? give us 5% please" and call it a day.

 

we're all pissed off.... I haven't ever posted here before, I never saw much reason to come to the forums before, but the unity twitter said "hey go check this out on our forums" and we all found out our accounts have access and yall were already complaining and comparing notes and trying to figure things out so ... hello.

 

Unreal imposters!

 

I’m going to guess forum users are a minority of Unity users and the HUGE NEWS finally brought us here to discuss?

 

What you sadly failed to have worked out is that today Unity turned around and told you ( based on your numbers)

Unity: Hey you know that game you made 5 years ago, with 2 million copies, and just hit $200k sales, yeah well for the month of Jan, the next 100k copies you sell, you are going to pay us $20k for that month. K, thx, bye.

You: What, why am I suddenly paying you money? I didn't make a new build, use a new feature and Unity did nothing to get me those sales, why am I paying you again?

Unity: Just cos you know, we want more money. k thx bye.

The above is fact, you will now pay Unity for future installs of an old game that is above the thresholds, just cos they said so!

By the way the numbers you provided mean you might even be bankrupt at this point, since you appear to be selling your game for $0.1. so only made $10k on those 100k copies


Below is somewhat speculative, but based on Unity's behaviour today, really isn't far-fetched.

Unity: Hey developer, its us again, you know you paid us $20k for 100k copies last month, yeah well we checked our 'super secret magic install estimator' and we think you actually had 500k installs. So please pay us $60k instead [ I think that's a figure I've seen for roughly 500k copies on worst fee ]

You: No, I have my steam and Apple sales right here, I only sold 100k copies. Here let me dispute this and send you my numbers.

Unity: Thanks for your dispute, we had a look and nah, you still owe us for 500k copies. Oh and if you don't pay up we will cancel and ban your account and put blocks on the project ID. K thx bye. Love U.

One Year Later

Unity: Hey developer we see you got a lot of new installs, time to pay us again. Oh but we've decided that due to inflation, the orbit of the moon and that my cat is sad, that the fee per install is now $0.3. K thx bye.

You: But I didn't increase my prices last month and now I've got to pay you even more?

Unity: Yeah, sucks to be you.

Literally nothing stopping Unity from raising prices, or changing the rate bands or anything really.



With regard to changing Unity Subscription - congratulations, yesterday you were good on a lower or free tier, today, again for no reason but Unity decided to say 'give us more money' you have to go and buy Pro or enterprise and give Unity $4k + a year for people buying the game.

Look in general you can discuss the finer points of the fees, but that just part of the problem, the bigger issue is that Unity just turned around and said 'give me more money' and gave you absolutely nothing in return. Even for a new game, where I guess you could make an argument for them to start charging a fee, they are literally giving you nothing more than you had yesterday and demanding a cut of your revenue ( not profits, but revenue ).

Edit:
I may regret saying this, but I almost feel like if these new rules only applied to new games released starting 2024 it might have been alright. Not great and the fees could do with being adjusted, but maybe acceptable, as at least now I would have a choice on whether to continue with Unity and support them with this change or not. Further more I could actually see such a plan giving real meaning to those higher product tiers or Pro, Enterprise etc as it links your earnings directly to the version you pay for, pay more upfront for say Pro and pay less fees.

The problem is Unity didn't do that, they went full scorched earth.

 

"The Unity game engine launched in 2005, aiming to "democratize" game development by making it accessible to more developers."

Seeing that now you may charge the most abusive fees over the Personal and Plus licenses, used by the smaller developers, it looks like Unity abandoned their ideals.
This might be the saddest moment in Unity history.

Those fees also make Free-To-Play and Freemium, some of the most successful revenue models in the Game industry, unfeasible for games and apps made with Unity.

This just makes it much harder for new game developers to thrive.
What happened to the "democratize game development" idea?

 

Code Monkey (

) says that Unity attempts to call back home to report an install - but - if it fails (firewall rule?) it's ok, it will still run.

Hmm... readme.txt with info how to run a game, are about to make a great return!

 

Yeah! And the documentation Unity put out its up to us to report suspected fraud. Their bs copy pasted response on twitter says they have systems in place to detect fraud... if I know anything about anything, it's that the malicious botnets etc will happen and will be the new "review bombing +" and Unity will charge their fee UPFRONT and require you to prove fraud.

Putting the onus on us is just nuts. Even having to pay that fee or just budget for a random botnet attack could bankrupt a company in less than a few weeks. How long will Unity take for arbitration or to get back to us? Lapse on 2-3 months of payments and your studio is in actual bankruptcy. People think this is an exaggeration but no it is literally that short, even shorter in some countries with extreme employee protection laws if you miss payments in as few as 3 weeks they can take you to labour boards.

Imagine being in a situation where you cannot pay employees, mortgage/rent, subscription fees, energy etc... you are dead in the water waiting for this to get cleared up from Unity's end.

 

I'm a hobbyist so this doesn't affect me immediately but there has always been the possibility that one of my hobby projects would eventually get published "just for fun" and hey, you never know, sometimes you make Flappy Bird and become an overnight sensation...

This concerns me mostly because this kind of move where you "change your pricing" - and not just raising existing prices but coming up with "a new way to collect money on the same stuff" - is usually not a sign of a healthy company. It's something I associate with dying companies that are desperate, and often companies like that, if they don't fold, are about to be acquired.

Everyone is raising prices right now in every industry and if Unity said hey, we need to raise our subscription prices then I think most people would be fine with that. Every streaming service like Netflix and Hulu are doing this. Amazon has raised prices on Prime more than once. This is normal and expected.

Charging a new fee for every install of games especially if you're also counting ones that *are already released* is shady as hell. It just screams "money grab".

Guess it's finally time to check out some other engines.

 

or app has passed a minimum lifetime install count. Wow

 

That was my understanding as well.

Financial Thresholds:

• The Financial Threshold for Unity Personal is US $100,000 for the most recent twelve (12) month period. To be Tier Eligible to use Unity Personal, your Total Finances may not exceed US $100,000. If your Total Finances exceed US $100,000 you may not use Unity Personal at all, even for internal projects or prototyping.
• The Financial Threshold for Unity Plus is US $200,000 for the most recent twelve (12) month period. To be Tier Eligible to use Unity Plus, your Total Finances may not exceed US $200,000. If your Total Finances exceed $200,000, you may only use Unity Pro (including pursuant to a Unity Plan that includes Unity Pro).
• Other than for Industry Customers, there is no Financial Threshold for Unity Pro. Unity Pro may be used by anyone who is not an Industry Customer.
• The Financial Threshold for Unity Pro for Industry Customers is US $1,000,000 for the most recent twelve (12) month period. If you are an Industry Customer, to be Tier Eligible to use Unity Pro, your Total Finances may not exceed US $1,000,000. If your Total Finances exceed $1,000,000, you may only use the Unity Industry version of the Unity Editor.

For clarity, unless otherwise set forth above, these Financial Thresholds apply whether or not you use the Unity Software as part of a Unity Plan.

By using the Unity Software, you represent and warrant that you are Tier Eligible to use the tier of Unity Software you are using and those being used on your behalf. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your Tier Eligibility and you bear the burden of proving your Tier Eligibility if we ask.


Quoted from https://unity.com/fr/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software