Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I registered ages ago because I am a unity dev, but been relatively happy with how things are and had no real reason to chat. Now? Now that Unity is literally threatening my entire business and could kill my ENTIRE studio off? Yeah I have a reason to chat.

Like, no duh. Why is this even a question you have? Unity does a move that could kill every single indie developer studio using their engine. You think people aren't going to flock here extremely concerned? Not only that but their fans, consumers, people who just give a S*** about developers in general and understand our studios are already struggling!? Yeah, no kidding.

 

This seems to be a massive slap in the face to small indie developers. You mean, it's possible, that long after my game is still bringing in money, I could still be getting bills from Unity for "installs"? I am just starting a big project and now I have to go learn Unreal I suppose. This is very disappointing. I can understand Unity wanting .20 for a "sale". It is their engine, but to ask to get paid for an infinitely unknowable amount of installs is ridiculous. If you are not making any money that's bad enough, but now if you DO make some good money all you can look forward to is getting it siphoned away over time.
That's just crazy.

 

Is there a problem with old accounts of people that didn't need to talk before saying something?

 

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.

One of the biggest issues Unity isn't looking at is that, for now, people on game distributor platforms can review-bomb titles. Now, there's an added bonus of "download-bombing", by simply reinstalling the game hundreds of times to rack up a cost for no reason other than to hurt the developer.

This is very real, and I guarantee that when other people find out about the possibility of this, indie game developers are going to suffer the most from it.

If I don't like the way you made your game, I won't review-bomb you, I'll download-bomb you and get you where it hurts the most... your wallet.

This is one of the most idiotic ways to handle this, and I'm absolutely looking toward ways to move my game off Unity as soon as possible.

 

That'd be me.

 

You are completely correct, and it's definitely a huge problem. You can't just drop something like this and then have no one available to answer questions. They've been slowly updating the FAQs to make them a bit more clear, but of course it's still not... super clear. Like how they plan to really track installs, how they will track revenue, how will disputes work if you think your installs or revenue are wrong, what metrics they will use to count "similar games" that they are going to group together for revenue/install numbers... I'm trying to be objective about what they are doing and trying to correct wild or incorrect scenarios that people are putting out (both on here and on Reddit currently). Not saying what you were saying is wild or incorrect, but making sure everyone has the most information possible.

I am hopeful that Unity sees this and makes some adjustments (and not just "clarifications"). For example, lowering the cost per install, or maybe offering alternative solutions (like maybe a new license that has direct revenue share similar to Unreal). While I won't really have to deal with this stuff, and I'm kind of tied to Unity because Godot and Unreal don't offer the solutions to some of the niche things that I do (which is why I like Unity, the asset store is a real blessing if you need to do something niche), the reality is if the big players stop using Unity, then it becomes less useful for the little players, and then those niche solutions won't be created and then Unity won't be useful for us niche users either. So I won't everyone to succeed from the top to the bottom (including Unity), and this change just doesn't seem like it's going to drive success for anyone (including Unity).

 

This is a huge disappointment. If you are a small indie developer that doesn't make much money you are already in a bind. But if you do happen to develop a good game that people will be playing for the next decade all you can look forward to is having your earnings slowly siphoned away! I can understand Unity wanting .20 cents on every "sale", it's' their engine, but we don't get paid for "every install", so why should you get paid for every "install"? Who do you think can afford something like that long-term?

 

Unity developer for 10 years here. I read these forums a lot, but hadn't posted until today.

This change makes many of us in the silent majority angry enough to break the silence. This is our battlecry before having to undo decades of work switching to a new platform that actually cares about developers.

 

So let me get this right...

1.) When my F2P multiplayer racing game spins up a game server instance to host each race, that will count as an install? That means once over the threshold, I'm paying $0.20 per race session????

2.) For each game update, when the new version is downloaded, will that count as an install?
So if I have 100 000 MAU on mobile, and I release a game update, and they all install it, that update will in essence cost me $20 000 if I am over the revenue threshold???

3.) Every time I do a build of my game for testing, across various devices, that will be counted as an install?
So over the threshold, I'm paying $0.20 each time I test my game build on a device??

4.) Every time a free player opens the link to a WebGL build of my game it will be counted as an install?

5.) If a player installs my game on their PC, mobile phone and tablet, that adds $0.60 to that user's acquisition cost????

This whole S*** show is the most bone-headed decision I've ever seen from a software company, let alone from Unity, and will kill the profitability of any F2P game that exceeds the $200k annual revenue threshold.
Whichever 'working group' at Unity came up with this needs to be sacked.

 

Yes, and Unity will be the ones getting that money. How much incentive do they have to get accurate numbers of good-faith downloads?

 

Alright. Cool.

So I'm a technical artist, right? I work full time, but I've also been a leader in a club for game developers for the past couple years. Unity was my first engine - I've worked with it for coming up on 7 years now - and it's also the first engine most newcomers learn, overwhelming so.

This decision does not value the growth of your new developers. To developers who do not seek to make money from their projects, all is the same. But for the students who want to grow, who aspire to build and release their own big titles or who see themselves working at their favorite studios, this only serves to shoot them in the foot. Whether they seek a profit or a career, they will need to jump to your competitors if they want to achieve their goals.

These people are the life of your community. Without them, it will be harder to find talent familiar with your services. It will be harder to get the word out about your product. This hurts everyone, not just those who make more than the install fee threshold.

In the short term, perhaps this will bring your investors more money. But in the long term, I hope you know just how big of a shotgun you've unloaded into your foot, and just how much it's going to hurt in the coming years.

 

No this is incorrect as I understand it. Just because you have over 200k downloads does *not* mean you start paying up. It's 200k installs (lifetime) AND $200k revenue over the last 12 months.

If you've never made any money and have 100 million installs, you pay nothing.

 

Sadly, this article is going to make a complicated issue even worse because of the incorrect statements.

 

I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said, besides just to add one more voice saying "Garbage! this is Garbage!" I've been evangelizing Unity for 10 years, never once regretted the massive time investment I've put into mastering the engine. I've not always agreed with every decision, sometimes strongly disagreed, but I know it's hard to make everyone happy. This is the first time I've felt like I don't have a place as a Unity dev anymore.

 

I'm a longtime Unity user who hardly, if ever, has posted here in the forums. I wanted to comment here to show my disgust for the recent exploitative pricing changes dropped on Unity developers. Back in 2012 I built my graduate thesis project in Unity. I have worked on several Unity projects for game jams. I was looking forward to joining the countless indie devs making a modest living off of their passion projects one day after doing my time in the game industry. Unity is the game engine I started with and over the years I've enjoyed growing with the engine. These egregious pricing models have made me realize Unity is no longer for me. I will pursue my passion projects with more indie friendly engines and tooling.

 

Given this change will cost even moderately sized mobile game studios a few million per year, we might as well all pour that money into building a competitor that's actually nice.

The last years have been an utter disappointment. Stability issues on Android, f***ed up LTS versions, ongoing crashes of the editor every 20 minutes on M1 Macs, horrible load and compile times, still not on .NET... I could go on. You are absolutely DELUSIONAL if you think you can get away with this unscathed. Your product is NOT that good. Is it worth 2k per seat and year? Maybe. But this? Oh boy.

If you don't significantly change the pricing model, expect to drop even more of the market share in a few months or maybe sooner: boycotting IronSouce and Unity as Ad Networks is a quick measure that can be coordinated in the industry.

What a stupid move... Oh well. It was "pretty mid' while it lasted, as the kids would say.

 

Just to be clear, this was for the licenses, which now have no revenue limit. So it's a bit different than with this install fee.

 

Yeah, 2016 account created. So makes sense.

See that UT? You even got the introverts out and about!

 

We've already given statements to the press about this, but I'm feeling like we're done. After 10 years of using Unity, building open source tools, and supporting other devs, there's just no reason to keep trusting this company with our future. This rollout demonstrates a complete lack of respect and understanding for their customers' business models.

I am not opposed to paying Unity more money. Unity was way cheaper than Unreal for successful games. But these changes have the potential to make Unity cost much more than Unreal in addition to the subscription cost. There's no world where this is acceptable.

 

Except the hammer still works and you don't have to go through painful version updates just to get a feature to work, again.

 

No, we get that on one game, yes. ONE game, but we have a free demo version of it. We have a free WebGL version too. So we make a revenue, but we also have a TON of free installs of the game. We get nailed for that because we make a modest 200K+ for our studio size... but then we have just thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people playing our WebGL builds.

Loading those builds every day, sometimes multiple times a day. People play our free launcher etc. It's insane.

 

so, correct me if i'm wrong (we are all confused) if i have a demo of a open world game with 3 cities but the demo is just 1 city and that demo was downloaded 190.000 times but the full game was downloaded 100.000 times the price of that game is 2,5$. Do i have to pay?
also, what if my game was downloaded 199.999 times for 1$ and the users (for any reason) reinstall the game, do i need to pay 39,999? (or something like that)

 

I wonder what about docker imaged unity server instance, would it be counted as install?

 

I can't with this impudence. They are like sitting there and saying "yep we want to steal your success and while doing so we will also expose you to install-bombing, piracy oh and just trust our system guys, they can never crack our system and send false install event to hurt you." What is this. They are like "yes we will just take it". So horrible news. Even if you revert this, we can never trust you... Party is over. 10 years gone just like that. Dust... Shame on you....

 

This has been one of the most horrendous things Unity have done in a while.
The lack of input from them post announcement shows a complete lack of care / preparedness. They have managed to completely destroy any remaining good will they had from developers.

 

Plans within plans?

 

Like I said before, you can be angry, you can pretend to be intelligent, gentle and say this is fair. Play the role you want.

UNTIL

They send you the first bill.
This is only the beginning...

 

good

 

if I bought 1,000,001 installs with a CPI of $1 and these users brought me $1,000,001 in advertising. My earnings are $0 and it turns out that I owe unity $200,000? Can you explain please?

 

That does sound like a horrible situation. I would recommend this developer switch to Enterprise licensing to cut their costs in half.

 

Only new instals after the threshold

 

The policy is unpredictable. I can't reasonably estimate how much paying $0.20 per install would cost me, because installs are only loosely related to total sales.

Maybe this is actually cheaper than just giving Unity 5% of my gross revenue -- but I have no way to intuit that.

This is a terrible idea that falls apart like a badly-made soufflé the moment you apply any scrutiny to it.

 

Exactly this. Unity has been consistently putting out mediocre products with bugs everywhere and incredibly lackluster support. There's no way unity will be around for long if these changes are actually implemented. Every unity dev is currently looking for alternatives (i was even looking for alternatives before this news).

F you unity, this will sink your ship.

 

Let's say i have a game that also have DLC that people can buy. Are all of this considered an install each? Like i make a bundle, i got 5 DLC + the main game, thats 6 install by user one shot?

 

im not even close to this revenue limits/ but i see that ecosystem is breaking/ if big devs change engine -> no unity job ->no asset makers and buyers of them and etc/ plus everybody will say dont use unity

 

You should really revert this situation.
I was planning to aquire Plus, but now I'm putting Godot option on the table.

 

What's to stop Unity from increasing these charges to $1/install in the future, if the floodgates are open to just retroactively declare a fealty tax?

 

Yes but there are many games that make 1-3 million installs a quarter and 250k USD a year and these will be extremely highly taxed.

I once worked as CTO for a company whose bread and butter were 5 games of that caliber.

 

This is what you get when you hire the CEO of the Worst Rated company in the world (EA's old CEO). Unity needs to be trying to hold onto every developer they still have while Unreal is dominating them, this is certainly not going to help. This fee per install is going to be abused so bad by trolls and spam. Unity is just going to waste even more resources trying to fight this. What a bad move.

 

What if I am planning to release a game with multiple executables, which are separate Unity builds? For example, one Unity build is the game launcher, and then from there, you can launch one of a couple different builds, which are technically the same "game," but each have different settings? If someone downloads the one game, which contains those multiple executables, do I get charged for each Unity executable?

 

https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform

 

Just so we are clear, according to the FAQ. If someone want's to grief or troll me, they (and some friends) can just install and uninstall my game over and over again millions of times, I would be charged for those millions of installs.

 

They posted on Twitter that this was the place to discuss it.

 

[

Unity be like, nuh-uh, your CPI is actually $1.2 bozo. Better raise your revenue per user if you wanna stay in business.

 

So now that this has been out in the air for a while and people have laid out all the major concerns, which are gargantuan in scale and complexity, how are they honestly going to pull this off? I just don't see how. Did all the major publishers and store fronts get to analyze this plan and then all went "looks good, we'll help you/allow you to use your proprietary algorithms on our proprietary platforms to get all this download data"? Like, there's just no way Nintendo and Steam are letting Unity into their stuff.

And has Unity already made special behind closed doors deals with all the major publishers who already have 9 figure (or even higher) grossing Unity games on the market, with more presumably to come? ALL of them? Or are they all just gonna go along with this without a fight like the rest of us rubes?

Personally, I'm continuing with my Unity use. I love the engine itself and the people behind it. And this seems SO F***ed up I honestly don't see it coming to fruition. By the time I'm ready to self publish, something or someone is going to reign this S*** in. It just DOESN'T MAKE SENSE, even disregarding how greedy and dishonest it is.

 

We're all a bit confused and I can't say I have all the answers. But I think, based on the FAQs they have out, a demo of a game and the game itself would count toward the same revenue and install limits. So if the demo was downloaded/installed 190k times and the game 100k, the count would be 290k, so 90k over the install limit. If you sold the game for $2.50, it would be $250k in revenue, so you would owe install fees. I think in this case, if you had personal edition (the free license), you would owe $0.20 x 90k = $18,000. However, it's important to remember if your company has revenues of $250k in a year, you should already be paying for the Pro license. So if you kept the Pro license, the limits become $1 million and 1 million installs, which you haven't hit, so you'd end up paying no install fees. This means you'd go from paying $18,000 to $2200 per developer. So assuming you have 8 developers or less, it would be cheaper to just get the Pro licenses. If you have 10 devs... might as well stick with personal and pay the $18k heh.

As for the 2nd situation, if you sold 199,999 copies of a game for $1 each, even if every person installed the game 10 times you would not owe any money because your revenue is under $200,000. If you sold 200,005 copies and $1 each, you'd owe $1 (one dollar, $0.20*5 = $1).

Hope this helps clarify a bit... also note I'm American so I'm using periods instead of commas for the delimiter... hope that's not too confusing heh.

 

So ludicrously, farcically ill-considered that this can't possibly go ahead. Surely? Anyway, work has been lean so I'm booking out time to freshen up my Unreal knowledge.

 

YEP

 

dont worry, Unity themselves will be botting your games to rack up the install #s

 

Cancel this idea, give the option to remove splash screen to personal users, compensate all this mess please. Prove what you are made of, Unity.