Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Because its sinking in that pay per install would kill unity for good. Their AD business is tied to the Editor and all logic goes to a place where this is really just a stupid and complicated idea.
It was turned down in Unity at first, but then they somehow just went ahead and still went public with it. Maybe they didn´t see another way to get fast cash.

Markets do not like insecurity and also dont like "The worst business decision in gaming history". Which this definitly was. "Unity the game company 50% of all mobile titles are made with - just shot itself in both feet".

Their CEO states "No matter how this would have went down, the enrage would have been the same". While wanting to implement a objectivly stupid and dangerous mechanism, with technology that wouldnt work and if it worked would be illegal. Basically turning their own engine into spyware, while communicating it in a way that threatens everyone using their engine to bankrupt them. Engaging people not to release games with Unity, not getting successful and not choosing business models that can result in heigher incomes.

Imaging being that bad at marketing, that you as a company release a transition into a new model, where the underline message is, that you better not use their product anymore, because in the worst case scenario it could bankrupt you and you could do nothing against it. And when people point that out, you call them "confused" and say it would only affect those that make a living of their engine. *image of facepalm goes through face*

Mental gynmnastics of tha heighest order

 

Ok, so Freya said she knew before we got told.. no one feel slightly bad about that?? Ive never heard of her before this thread, as a result shes never heard of me, and i wont be the only one.. so, how exactly can the favored few who were in on it, and got to go for talks really stand up for ALL of us.

 

No surprise, the ceo thought seriously he could sell reloads at 1$ in a fps... How out of reality do you have to be

 

No? Why would I feel bad?

 

Here is new thought I had: Why are devs charged for the runtime fee? A dev is not running the game at all, the end user is, also the end user now owns that instance of the game as they bought it, in that case the end user should pay for the runtime fee! Why the dev?

 

It's happened numerous times already, don't worry about it.

 

She's the creator of Shader Forge which was one of the earliest available shader graph tools for Unity.

https://acegikmo.com/shaderforge/

 

And? Goes with being an advisor. Why do you care she knew before you? What difference does it make?

No. Why would I?

That's your shortcoming.

What the F***?

They don't. They are advisors, usually with big following, so some perspective to the user-base. It is what it is. Doesn't make a big difference for you, it is not there to help you sleep at night, it is there to feed management with info. Again, they are advisors, not saviors.
And I'm pretty sure when you have done that much for the community as Freya did, you will be invited too to be the advisor for some ugly F***tard.

 

Because players purchase the game from developers and not Unity.

 

Unity Insiders are not representative of for profit Indie Developers. They are people who have a Unity related YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, Reddit or Personal blog account with enough followers. They are free advertising for Unity, nothing more.

A YouTube Influencer is far removed from a business.

 

It's like a VAT. Government of any country want to charge everyone consuming any goods. But they can't to that practically so they charge the producer and then producer will charge the customer which is consumer in the end

 

I can confirm that none of them provide you with the number of installs. Moreover, they cannot know it. They could know the number of times a game has been sold and/or downloaded. Downloads is a metric as bad as installs to calculate a fee. Number of copies sold could be used but the only metric which I think is fair is revenue (and the simpler one). And use percentages and not a flat fee. Flat fees are unfair. You could be selling your game for 0.1$ and Unity would be still taking 0.2$.

It's simpler than it seems: Unity copy what Unreal does and stop trying complicated methods to calculate a fee.

 

You might as well choose your own pronoun too, there is no implementation of nerf that run at 800fps with superior visual resolution, and is hardware agnostic, there is no way a DAG (neural network) can outperform raw particles field.

It's the evolution of nerf, it's usable right now, and everybody is shifting to it. Now I don't ask you to shift mid project, even though the workflow is the same. I'm telling you do the sensible thing and look at it asap. The only bump on this technique (3d gaussian splatting) is that you need to compress the raw point cloud, and it's not like we don't have techniques for that?

 

This whole "favoured few" rhetoric is looking at it in entirely the wrong way.

She uses Unity in her work. She has an interest in not wanting it to utterly implode in the way that it has chosen to. It's also not like she has nearly as much leverage as this whole "favoured few" nonsense implies; she can suggest changes and improvements to things, but her position doesn't give her sway in what the company decides to do, on its own.

It's only because of the extraordinary circumstances that have emerged that she's basically become the intermediary that people look to, in lieu of a response from Unity proper.

 

Yes, but why the easy way when you can waste thousands of man hours, lawyer's fees, and good will?

 

So this whole policy was DOA. I wonder if it is just detachment from reality, incompetence or deliberate.

 

It creates digital doubles ..textured meshes...from video or photographs in a few seconds using nVidia tech. Go ahead and do it your way but look into using charge fields instead. We know how to math those into higher dimensions and the maths are stable and understood, the training takes less time and results are faster to obtain.. I live in the US where a bag of groceries cost 100 bucks, I have contracts on my desk and must work for money or my family and my pets live under a bridge or I go make one of those videos about building a dugout cabin in the middle of nowhere.

 

Well this is not different from what I have seen in other companies. People managing a company and investors usually do not have technical skills to know what can be done and what is impossible. If there's some technician in the board they end up being ignored because they are a minority. And nobody wants to ask development staff their opinions because developers are "freaks" which know nothing about business and are always complaining by default. In summary, for this people money talks.

 

i'm not sure they even had a chance to fully stand up for anything. there must be some sort of "line" what you can tell and what is considered "inside information", which could be used in stock market or whatever. they probably didn't have full picture what was going on, and especially if something was decided already or was going to be decided and when.

even what they were told could probably be considered as inside information. or maybe they really are "registered insiders", i have no idea.

 

This is so, so dumb. These people's jobs rely on people wanting to use Unity. They have as much to lose as anyone else.

 

Gave me a good chuckle

https://twitter.com/AenderLara/status/1704918236930711888

 

The point is "not wanting unity to implode" can be solved in many ways

To be honest, if we all stop protest and just surrender to this digital feudalism, unity will profit and rise up for us being their slave. It can also stop imploding in this way. But that was not the way we want

However, is that in the benefit of insiders? Which side the insiders will choose? Convince unity to make unity change their way to be healthy relationship even risking some deficits. Or convince us to accept the new plan and go along with Riccitiello?

Even though they can't told the full information by contract, will they encourage us to protest and go along with our narrative. Tell us that the plan still not be in our favor so don't stop fighting. Or telling us that the plan will only a bit worse so it will not hurt to accept that ?

I am very frustrating that I truly feel she really is respectable person as developer, but in this case she seem to compromise with them in the latter case

I really hope I am wrong in this case, and the plan actually become better and acceptable. But from the sound of twitter, even from some other insiders we could get, it seem like... not at all

 

There are other engines out there to make content for. For example Samyam is jumping from Unity to a mixture of Unreal and Godot. She's choosing two this time because she doesn't want to get caught out again in a situation where the sole engine she focuses on loses popularity.

https://www.youtube.com/@samyam/videos

 

So I charge more, hmm, that will go well for the end users!

 

Ha, they did not import the hdrp components, it'll cost at least 0.2 cents and they are too tight for that!

 

IMHO, it is not that dumb. Unity cannot call every customer to ask their opinion. On the other hand, if we are here complaining is because we want to use Unity instead of other tools. We are in the same place. For a lot of people, Unity is the tool they use for a living and changing that tool, depending on the circumstances, can be traumatic.

We are abandoning Unity. But we were lucky because our current development progress is about 30% only which allow us to migrate the code without big delays. But at the end of the day, we would agree with a % of our revenue over 1M or something similar. What we cannot accept is working with a company which decides to change the rules of the game whenever they want. That's unacceptable and a big risk for anyone using Unity with the intention of producing something to be sold.

 

The difference is that Unity is basically trying to charge for each person who walks into your business, even if they don't buy anything. If your business is a movie theater or a museum that charges per admission, you can just raise the ticket price and move one. But if you're a shopping mall where people can freely walk around and not necessarily buy something, what do you do? Add a toll gate?

 

I think they figured it out. If they just change "run time" fee to "walk time fee", or better yet, "frolic time fee", it be accepted en masse. They just need to make it palatable their target audience and for these people, the magic is always in the presentation. ;-)

 

I don't think the "insiders" have nearly as much power as you think you have.

The way to protest this is to move on to another engine. The bad thing is already done, barring a miracle, I don't think Unity can put the rabbit back in the hat.

The only thing up in the air right now is how weird the next months will be for those that have half finished Unity projects they can't afford to abandon / port (which includes me). Other than that, there is no battle to be won, IMO.

 

Sure, they could have done that. But making more money off of new customers isn't going to get them the influx of cash they seem to desperately need right now. Their original plan was carefully constructed to enable them to extract huge amounts of money from big names like MiHoYo who are already using Unity, effective immediately on January 1, 2024. It's why install counts were lifetime and retroactive to the game's launch, why the revenue total was a rolling 12-month sum, and why originally every install, including reinstalls from the same user on the same device, were intentionally being counted separately. All "powered" by a proprietary algorithm that could realistically spit out any number they felt like they deserved without any real recourse for the companies being hit with the bills.

The plan they originally unveiled was designed to inject large sums of money into the company on an extremely short time scale, because they've spent the company into the ground trying to "look good" to investors and chase absurd fantasies about film production and tech fads like AI. Every part of the plan, from the install-based runtime fee to the removal of Plus to the "discount" if you switch to their ad platform, is a stick. The whole plan is all stick, no carrot. They clearly didn't give a single damn about whether anyone actually using the engine would find anything beneficial in what they announced. They wanted those Plus users to pay up for that splash screen removal, and figured they'd make more from those who did than lose from those who refused.

It has to be absolutely killing them to have to walk things back, even the tiniest bit. The fact that we're 9 days and counting into this clown show without any indication that they plan on acknowledging the hole they've dug for themselves in pursuit of maximum revenue in minimum time is a pretty damning sign that they need this, and that they've made a lot of financial forecasts based on it. Every step away from the plan as announced is another $0.20 they're not leeching out of the market. Changing things to the extent that they're actually workable and reasonable and fair would clearly be financial suicide. The tight deadline of January 1 just again drives home that they need this to start making substantial amounts of additional revenue immediately, so even just taking the step of "we F***ed up and broke your trust, we're not going to change anything until we can work out something that is acceptable to all of our users" is probably off the table, because that creates a huge uncertainty for them on whether they'll actually be able to realize their projected income boost starting next quarter. So what we're left with is a bunch of execs huddled in a panic room trying to figure out how to extract gold from S*** with increasing amounts of desperation.

9 days. Tick tock.

 

Do people seriously talk about monogame after unity? It is like 15 years behind, just look example of putting sprite on the screen.

Code (CSharp):

1. protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)
2. {
3.     graphics.GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue);
4.  
5.     // TODO: Add your drawing code here
6.     _spriteBatch.Begin();
7.     _spriteBatch.Draw(ballTexture, new Vector2(0, 0), Color.White);
8.     _spriteBatch.End();
9.  
10.     base.Draw(gameTime);
11. }

 

"A couple of days" turned into "A few days" and unless I am mistaken, in 4 hours it will be 4 days since that tweet. Come on, Unity, you can't do this.

Here is some help for you, people at Unity.

-Leave alone all the people still using Unity up to 2021 LTS; we accepted a ToS with no royalties attached, and invested heavily in your project. Of course you can still increase revenue from us by removing Plus, that is your right as a business providing a service.
-For Unity 2022 and forward: forget about "installs", forget about flat fees of $.2. That will never happen, nobody is going to pay you and you will eventually lose in court, at which point your company will crash badly. Instead, ask for a revenue share of 4% for studios over 1M threshold, and obviously lower it for multi-million studios or include some kind of cap, because otherwise no large studio will ever consider Unity.
-Regain our trust. Fire the people that devised and communicated this pricing policy, because they have blown it. We need to see how a retroactive ToS is not going to happen again, and the only way I believe that is seeing the ones who tried being sacked.

I don't know why anyone would need 4 days to write that... which may very well mean you are going to stick to the ToS retroactive change, and just remove the flat install rate, replacing it with a revenue share. A sad move that would mean the inevitable decline of Unity, which in 4-5 years would just become irrelevant.

 

Wow, 10 days and still no changes to the announcement.

I just hope they’re taking so much time because they want to get it right.

 

There is only one correct solution. And we have been shouting it collectively for days. I.e. fair price, tied to editors, not retroactive. So they must know what we want and what is right.

But the fact they are not offering it, while taking so long to say somethings means yes, like you said, either incompetence or deliberate sabotage (shorting the stock or some other scam as an exit strategy).

But there is a third option... They might be in such bad financial trouble that doing the correct solution/offer would bankrupt the company and so the only way for them to survive is doing some crazy, high paying scam like they're trying to pull with this install rubbish.

 

I

I believe the core of the game is c# and decoupled from unity very well. So migrating it to another c# platform is pretty easy.

 

Vocal protestation plus the stand against the ad service should be enough. Share price continues to decline so investors are losing confidence. Unity have to do something that will appease devs, and they know they can't just do whatever they want. If they come up with fair terms this time around in their monetisation restructuring, you can be confident they won't change the agreement like this further down the line because they know it just won't work. Even less chance of a bad deal being accepted next-time than this time because devs are going to be more cautious with their game, keeping one eye on porting, and the alternatives will improve and make porting easier.

Other companies have crashed their reputation (sometimes even involving people dying!) and recovered. Unity isn't dead yet and it doesn't need all users to move to other engines for Unity to be inspired to make meaningful changes that support their core audience and money makers.

 

LOL. It makes remember the first time I programmed something with DirectX. I was like "batches? WTF?"...

 

Dunno if already posted, too tired to keep up with this thread but the runtime fee page was changed to an "oopsie": https://unity.com/runtime-fee They are also "updating the runtime fee", not removing it.

 

Exactly. Install fees make absolutely NO sense except as an excuse to keep charging the developer well after a game is sold. The only acceptable metric for post-sale fees is revenue actually earned from the sale, period.

And this doesn't even address the issue of double-dipping — charging for a subscription and then charging again for some sort of revenue share. Pick a lane.

 

Moving on to another engine isn't about inspiring Unity, it is about each gamedev doing the best thing for themselves.

 

Market closed, today Unity stocks down 4.71%, maybe this is the most weird episode in the game dev history.

 

guys please don*t waste time with this company , please lets work togther and find easy solution how to convert our codes to other engines

 

Yes more than one time.Its time to stop talking....maybe then the exec´s awakening.

 

Monogame is not an engine though, it's a framework to build upon, so no editor and barely any tools, not comparable in my opinion.

 

Problem is it's not about just the code. It's about the S***-ton of assets that everyone has purchased. Everyone who has purchased anything from the asset store is not permitted to use or migrate those assets to another engine. You can read the EULA there, for what it's worth. Unity may break the rules, but are you willing to break them too?

EDIT:
The more you have invested in the Asset Store, the more effed you are. I have used a handful of assets, in which for some, I cannot replace in as timely a manner as me simply purchasing them for use. I truly feel sorry for all the Asset Store authors, and those who have invested in using them. Finish your game with Unity ASAP and then move on.

EDIT2:
Don't listen to my lies above. I'm very sorry for the confusion...

 

The CEO mentioned during that hands on meeting that this is pretty radical change. I'm surprised they did not have any alternate pricing strategies approved and ready to in case of such backlash.

Since Sep. 12 it has dropped 18.57%.

 

yeah even though a % revenue share would also have given them cash. maybe not enough, they also wanted to force everyone to switch to their AD service by risking to bankrupting them, or cashing in 50%+ of their revenue.

if you look on their financials they were not net positive, but not that bad.
in the last 3 years they took in 3 billion debt while doubling their employees. all after the ipo.

i dont know what they are doing. a company where 50% of mobile games are made with. its impossible not to have a golden goose here. but they seem to manage to kill it

 

As far as I know you can use the assets outside of unity. Only Unity provided assets must be used in Unity.

Edit: What I mean is only assets that Unity itself provides (usually for free) have to be used in Unity.

Edit2:
Q: Does Unity own the assets on the Asset Store?


A: No. Unity owns assets that are published by Unity. However, the vast majority of assets and tools on the store are published by third parties. When you download those third-party assets, you are obtaining a license directly from the asset’s publisher.

 

They're in a dominant position in high end mobile space, which is specifically targeted with this change. They didn't need any alternate pricing strategies because Genshin, Raid Shadow Legends and all the other multibillion franchises of similar scope can't pivot from Unity. They're massive GaaS games made on the Unity tech stack and can't really be ported realistically. These games could also easily live for 10 years or even more. There's no risk for Unity, only lots of money.