Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

The biggest problem is Unity is really making small indies significantly smaller - to the point they can no longer even hope to become a big indie studio, with this model.

Developers should NOT fall for any of their BS pricing changes considering the S*** they just pulled over the last week and a half. We would have to be pretty stupid to think they're trustworthy as long as the same executives and marketing strategies exist.

They need to make everything in reverse, happen. Give smaller indie studios a good pricing model, and bigger indie studios a good DEAL by sharing their revenue. That's IT. Not 2k+ a year to remove a BS splash screen, not tracking installs (legal/illegal)...pure and simple. Whether or not Unity is making money should NOT be the priority of this kind of business. Else they have to go the tough route and make their own god damn games like Epic did. Not leech off the developers promoting their tools and building assets to improve it.

Show not tell? Well SHOW us a good game if you're such a great game engine.

 

Yeah, seems there's all sorts of crap going on everywhere. I'm inspired to buy more Pathfinder products now :/

 

Today's announcement from the MonoGame team, might be of interest - https://twitter.com/MonoGameTeam/status/1704763681530150916

 

$200k is about the typical revenue for a small sole proprietorship architectural business here, unless famous, so I expect it to at least have a few employees before I can consider a studio large. Then again, this is a country where $50k a year is borderline poor (by today's exchange rate, and given city expenses).

 

Define "small". In my place $200K *sales volume* would be roughly enough to pay for a 1,5 semi experienced developers and a tiny office for a year. The company wouldn't make any money from it though. And go bankrupt with the new fees ofc.

 

yep i deleted my link to store and will no longer be purchasing from it.. and i was not a whale but maybe a large fish spending $300-$400 a year for the past 10 years..

 

Yeah taken in tandem with the sharp drop in the last hour yesterday on heavy volume, it's going to be an interesting morning for U when the bell rings. Seems 3pm yesterday may have been when Unity's "couple of days" were up according to the market.

 

i have spent almost 400k of my own money since 2019 building a game by paying programmers. It’s hard to imagine how difficult it is going to be to recoup what I’ve put into this project when it releases considering unity tax, steam tax, real tax, paying for servers, continuing to pay for programmers for bug fixing and optimization. Currently my project is private until i get closer to release.

making games is not easy. Finding competent programmers, dodging scammers, monitoring their work, coordinating programmers and artists. Just incredibly difficult. This whole debacle does not help.

 

These three screenshots don't paint a good picture. Ameritrade is now telling investors to sell and avoid this stock. Pre-market trading is already negative. And the chart with the little red lines shows that the only reason the stock hasn't tanked is lots of people thinking they're buying the dip. But what you see is less and less of that, as investors realize this isn't the dip. Not yet. Today will probably not be a good day for Unity.

 

200MB is the installed size, the download is under 150MB (it has to be, since that5the maximum APK size without using PAD, which we didn't have to use).

1. The game stream in new levels when the environment changes and we haven't smoothed that out yet. Mainly, the level generation algorithm is way too overcomplicated right now (we originally designed it for generating levels offline and rejigged it for doing it on the fly).
2. Mipmaps hide the max size of a texture unless it's in your face, so q lot of texture data is never shown, wasting memory. The artists worked on things without too much oversight.

This game is mostly a side experiment, which is why there are so many rough edges.

My point is that the executable itself is only 10MB or so larger than Unity. Anything above that is strictly assets. A texture is a texture, Unity isn't doing any magic there.

 

Found this while browsing freebies on Unreal Marketplace:

 

Some FLAX review by a dev "plus an opinion on some other engines" (0:39)

 

I agree with you. Some were waiting for an announcement and it never came. Unity might be waiting till Friday to make an announcement for a typical "end-weekend so people will forget" move. But this situation has so much attention that will not likely work. My guess is we either hear an announcement today, or nothing till next week. Just my opinion.

 

No change after the Pricing page update.

 

Ok they choose that. You are right. We don't need to help them. you are also right.
But if you don't want an Unreal monopoly (who will stop nothing to do the same think if a mnopoly) it might be in out interest for unity to not go bankrupt...

Also i would not say "greediness" with 1 b loss in a year...

They need money. it's not a charity... every business does this for money. It's a fact. If they will loose money i don't know when they will be in 5 years...

I don't defend the pricing (which is very bad), but I think it is in out interest for them to survive.

 

This is the reason why I'm not panicking about this.

There is no way a court would side with Unity on retroactively changing the TOS. It would set a precedent that would nullify every contract.

It's like these though exercise about "what would happen if every oxygen atom disappeared". Fun to think about but irrelevant because nobody would exist to witness it.

Unity will likely have to settle on us being grandfathered into keeping the previous TOS on the latest release. And since the engine and editor aren't evolving anyway, we won't miss anything.

New users might not be so lucky it this will be the start of the end for unity as we know it.

 

The announcement will come just before the stock market closes, followed by a gap up on Monday to catch sellers off guard.

 

That's what you do when you want explosive growth, you spend way more than you make and you borrow money, so that you can grow and grow and increase revenue. For a lot of public companies it is considered bad if they have money on hand, why aren't they spending it (and more!) to make the company bigger?

This mess is completely their own doing. They shouldn't survive, unless they significantly change course and become a private company again.

 

Remember stock-based compensation is an operating expense. And Unity had $1.410B in the trailing last 12 months. They are paying a lot of people, not just executives in stock. Which is risky. Because employees have no way of knowing how much they are being paid.

 

The only sure at this point is that this situation cant improve.

 

It is they're own doing and they should change
But we also need to be flexible and accept that some price changes will be.
They of course need to be fair for developers.

 

I mean, if their prices no longer make sense for us (regardless of whether they are fair, or retroactive, or whatever) we will leave, Unity should be ready to accept that too.

 

Yeah - 4% premarket is baaaad news for them. That is institutions only. In 32 minutes the public can sell too. Gonna be a very red day

 

Market does not like uncertainty. Their silence is causing this.

 

don't worry. they will survive. they may need to make some cuts if this attempt is not successful, but they will survive in any scenario.

 

I hope so

 

and europe being their biggest market, i'm not sure if EU will swallow all this bs, if asked not to.

 

I just noticed this 2-day-old article : https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/18/23879029/unity-pricing-model-change .

The most interesting bit by far is :

I think that the big actors refusing to comment even several days after the initial announcement confirms what we have said on this topic since day one : they are lawyering up big time. (that's what I'd do instead of posting here, if I had 1 billion $ )

 

Seems like a good time for an hostile takeover bid ...

 

...or they've already secured waivers/exemptions behind the scenes via their account managers, which are probably dependent on an NDA or something.

 

It is notable how all the players big enough to have an on staff lawyer have been radio silent. The Creator of Cult of the Lamb made a public comment, then later retracted it (claiming it was a joke, but let's be honest, do we believe that?), and they would be big enough to have at least a lawyer on retainer.

So in this case, I don't think you have the tense quite right ^.^

 

I would use charge fields for faster trainer at higher D with determinism. But for getting field scans of objects it is the ticket. I had a client wanted to use it for various dog breeds. Thing is..yeah ..I am a good programmer..I am building the multiplayer right now for a space shooter. But the NeRF can be tested..and..if you have not specifically tested their implementation based on the few seconds parsing that nVidia does with their implementation then you cannot speak to the speed of it.

 

I saved money to go to Unity again but then all this happened and I feel it will be kind of a downer. We went to Austin, had a great time, my team is my family and such a good experience for us all. We have good memories. Maybe someday in the future. Missing Amsterdam....big sigh.

 

That's pretty much the point gadflies have been making in this thread. Ping your FO/accountant, lawyer, and then your Unity rep. Not jump on twitter/reddit. Too bad most have already been banned for being too pestering against the consensus.

 

Yes, we believe that, because obvious jokes are obvious and even with fees, Cult of the Lamb is still very profitable. There's no way they'll destroy their livelihoods based on a principle. None of the big recent Unity successes are disappearing or being ported to other engines, with a few exceptions. Among Us might port due to their mobile business model and it's not that big of a game technically.

 

Im leaning on the side that its better for them to take their time with the follow-up. Better to refine a response/adjustment/reaction and run it past the proper channels and apply feedback (As they should have done with the first announcement) than to knee-jerk rush something out and have more egg-on-face. Plus im sure there is a ton of legal stuff involved too; and they notoriously take forever to sign off on stuff.

 

well. someone with brain could divide this into 2-step process.
1. Discard the Runtime Fee policy
2. Introduce new proposal

The first step shouldn't involve a thousand-employee company working over 10 days with the involvement of the legal department and this is what we are asking for. I bet that no one would be bitching about waiting too long for the second step.

 

If that is the case I would have put out a statement to that effect. Saying it's going to take a while longer.

 

If you Google run time fee all you get is Unity news. This is literally something only they thought up.

 

I am going to buy up stuff on wish list because many of the developers are my friends and even those who are not my friends. I realize it gives money to Unity but I still want to use Unity and I do not support their behavior but there are a number of us that are just waiting for things to cool down. I am not using another engine.

People tell me use this use that, I read about issues with other engines. And then get the people who tell me it will be okay, and wait and see, don't panic. We are continuing to work and make our game and I even will put my asset up finally.

What I know is that Unity wants me, who is under the threshold to pay for installs. I do not mind paying for installs, I like the 4% better. I have concerns about privacy but I have a feeling that is going to be going to court.

This is not directed to anyone here, but i am tired of others
telling me I am foolish and should switch to an engine that we do not want. Or we should just give up. Nope, not an option. My autistic son learned to code using Unity and he is very good, not just saying that because he is my kid. A daughter who extremely talented modeler. Her UVs are perfect. My younger son is already looking at demographics for our game. They are more skilled than me. I am not taking what we are away from them. We all have to make our own decisions. I guess I am a whale. lol

 

Well they delay response, they get crap on, they give fast, but crappy resposne, they will get crap on...but they brought this situation on themself .

 

Loads trying to push Godot but from the looks of the games made with it so far is it really up to any real 3d/graphically heavy work? I fear the Godot side is just trying to grab as many resources as they can while Unity keep all there users in the dark.

https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/

 

Purely speculative based on internet users wants.

 

Hey we're kind of in the same boat minus the fact that I only have two kids. lol
But my older son (17) already codes in Unity while the younger one never will (mentally disabled).

 

Everyones situation is different. I would finish what you currently have especially if you're deep in development. If Unity licensing will not favour your model you'll have options. You can take your game off so not to cross d/l limits for instance, for a while. As for the kids, modeller will not be effected, only game programmers will. It's not bad to get kids to learn new skills, especially since kids pick things up quickly. So if Unity is grinding your earnings you can introduce them to another engine (whatever it is). If not they you can stay. To each is own. Ultimately you have to decide how much you trust Unity going forwards. Until this I thought that Unity was awesome (not perfect) it allowed me to implement things that I would not be able to achieve in the same amount of time. Now I don't know if I can ever trust them again. I'm in similar boat, I can't just port what I have to another engine at this point. But the next project, I'll be reconsidering my engine choice.

 

Ok, but 'Introduce New Proposal' is the equivalent of the 'Draw The Rest Of The Owl' meme. You need to properly audit the new proposal first through many people to make sure its air tight and avoid the chaos of the original runtime fee announcement. And its better to have them as a combined announcement (one source of truth!) than to have them seperate and split messages.

Yep, the comms team aren't great at giving useful context for the processes.

 

Nearly all if not all of those games are made with Godot 3, which was pretty bad for 3D. Godot 4 released recently and has improved a lot in 3D space but it's still very new and is not battletested yet so graphically heavy 3D work is very risky in Godot right now. There are some very nice looking demos but that's pretty much it. devmar is one example of a WIP game in Godot 4: https://www.youtube.com/@actualdevmar

Also, Godot folks are not grabbing anything, they haven't done a single thing besides existing when Unity F***ed up.

 

I just saw this video about Unity from some random investment advice channel. Decently knowledgeable take and it's somewhat interesting seeing a perspective from that sector:

I don't think this has been posted in the thread yet, apologies if it has. Just something to pass more time while we wait.

He's somewhat hopeful it could have a positive outcome if they perhaps force current management out and if this lights a fire under their ass to figure out a solution to their financial situation that doesn't screw developers over. Easier said than done.

 

It's not all rosy on the other side of the fence. One of the reasons I still use Unity is that Unreal is just hard to use on my Mac. And as far as I can tell, they have no intention of ever changing the way this is designed.

For reference, this is the issue. And this video is 6 years old!

 

Ya, saying they’re low on funds, need more money, in the red, have to become profitable… all while buying up billion dollar companies to snack on & handing out bonuses and raises.