Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I have a serious concern that Unity conveniently seems to be dodging right now. Say as an indie dev I sell 1 million copies and just for ease of calculation my revenue was $1 million (not unreasonable if it was an app, some apps sell for only $1). So first off either Steam, Epic or Apple or whoever is hosting it takes 30% of my income on it. Fine. Then the US government (and most governments) want to charge me tax, which here is roughly 30% again at such large income values. So here’s the problem, you’re telling me Unity is going to charged based on that full $1 million dollar value even though my profits were only about $300,000 that year after taxes and percentages charged… and Unity is going to be taking an extra $160,000 (1 million - 200K threshold * $0.2 per install) from that?
Great so I get about 15-17% of the profits from my hard work and effort but here is the serious problem Unity hasn’t covered yet that could literally bankrupt me.

It’s several years later and most players have stopped playing my game. But wait, suddenly someone on twitch or youtube goes back and plays it again and it suddenly gets super popular again overnight. However most of the people who are playing the game already bought it years ago and they’re just reinstalling it. I happen to get a few more sales, just enough to put me over that $200k per 12 months, but that’s it, only about $200k total sales… But all 1.2 Million players install my game now. I lose 60% of that $200k I made this year to taxes and the distributor so I only bring in about $60k this year. But Unity now wants to charge me for those 1.2 million installs. So Unity is going to charge me (1.2 M - 200k * $0.2 per install) $200,000 when I only made $60,000? How am I going to make up that $140,000? What if I can’t pay such a ludicrous fee?
I would literally be bankrupt.

 

Bout to enter a whole new era of game dev where no one's using engines for fear of getting the rug pulled from underneath them. Not even past games are safe.

 

In that case, what stops Unity installing and reinstalling to make more money? Have you thought about that?

 

Like many things Unity does, they release things without properly thinking through all the details well enough.

2 years into a 5-year development plan and this gets sprung on me, ugh.

 

I mean David Helgason is still in the board of directors...

 

OK. The situation is 2,000,001 installations cpi 1$ and $2,000,001 in revenue. My income is still $0. Do I still owe 200,000k?

 

New installs is anything on a new registry... so, every single steam install. But not only that! But also EVERY SINGLE WEBGL LOAD. Every, single, WebGL loading is 1 new install. Did someone accidentally hit refresh? Whoops there's one more.

DId someone "accidentally" set up a botnet with a ton of fresh/rotating hardware keys and rotating IPs/IPmasking and throw about a few thousand+ installs of your games' demo and/or WebGL tester build? Well, there are a few thousand new fresh installs! Second you make over 200k you're now nailed with this. You are CRUSHED by this.

 

No, just no, what is the reinstall threshold ? what if a player reinstall 15 times ? this eats up to 3 € almost half my early access title final revenue, what actually make you think you are owned MORE than ONE unit of "runtime" ?, i can agree to say "if i have 200 000 sales, then you get 0.20 (or whatever price, you get the point) x 200 000" - which will net you ALREADY 40 000 €, what more do you want ? i respect the 200k € threshold AND install threshold, you want to eat more of my 1.400 000 ? SURE i can pay pro or enterprise at the point but that will not change the fact that you do arbitrary decide what is an install, i am sorry but if i see 1 million installs and i got 200 k thats 160 000 more euros owed ? you eat the whole revenue for 800 000 installations i am NOT responsible for WHEN selling 200 000 units of my GAME.

I do not even understand how and when this was tought, but this is a god damn stupid error, nothing adds up, no amount of technology of the world will make you mitigate trolls, hackers, people having issues and reinstalling many times, or you are not transparents, are installs between a week counted as 1 ? is 4 installs a month by the same user considerated one ? ONE IDENTIFIED PLAYER COUNTS FOR 4 SALES ?

This is the logic you forgot : we PC sellers count in sales, not on ads, this sounds like a dumbass multilevel marketing
plan for mobile and someone was stupid enough to think this was a good idea for pc.

For real, announce you need cash, that your IPO failed, that unity plus failed and propose us to help you, but not like that, right now you are thinking the most creatives minds on this planet that can invent elaborate games do not see you trough your plans ?

Dear zeus you do not realize.

Act. Now.

 

they are doing this fake news for view farming, and they are trying to hide the fact they are sliding AI into your games in the background to collect people's data ... since every1 will focus on the money problem.. they will reverse the money problem, but noone talked about the AI sliding in..
this is classic strats

 

I assume it would not. I assume it would count as 1 install. But, Unity will be making that determination. Also, how would Unity tell the difference between that and a dev selling slightly different versions of the same game? (like pokemon red/blue)

 

Y'all know this just confirms things are worse than people even thought this morning, right? Even if you reverse on this, the mass exodus is going to kill us.

 

Honestly, if this goes through we should organize a boycott and just stop all payments to Unity for EVERYTHING, come January (licenses, ads, services, all of it).

They won't have the money to fight thousands of little studios in 100s of jurisdictions, especially if all their revenue crashes at once.

Then we can see who buys the scraps. Hopefully Microsoft or some other company that actually cares about developer tooling.

 

Unite 2023 in Amsterdam (November 15-16) will be one hell of an event

 

I had the same reaction reading all the reactions and lousy answers from Unity.

 

I hope this is just some kind of support mistake because otherwise tomorrow there will be no users for this engine.

 

We've been given a reason to come to this post.

 

What is the other use for a forum?

 

Exactly

So hypothetically we've all accepted the terms of this plan. NOW WHAT? HOW are they going to implement such a wide reaching, non-specific program? And how are they gonna get all the billion dollar corporations that use Unity to go along with it? Unless they literally say "oh you guys don't count, just everyone else does"?

 

Exactly this. I'm usually on here to seek help with coding, or to search threads. Rarely do I need to post, because some good soul already asked a question and an even kinder one already answered it. But today it's worth saying our piece, because this affects us all, and our future with this program.

 

I agree, for some this is going to hurt and it sucks. I think it's a bad move by Unity and probably something that came from a corporate suit rather than someone with critical thinking skills. However people need to not get their panties in a knot and think things through, run the numbers. While Unreal 5% revenue charge is much more appealing, depending on your numbers and agreements with Unity, it might be cheaper. More often it might not, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater without taking a look at the scenario in depth. If the numbers pan out Unreal or Godot or something else might be better but businesses always change and not for the better every time.

 

Godot 3 has it, Godot 4 will have it soonish

 

if the game in question , gets an update , or patch for bug fixes , will the new version install be counted as a new install and will be counted?

 

Updates counts as a new install?

 

Imagine a situation where devs are afraid of success....

Stop imagining.

 

They don't even need to do that.

"All determinations, calculations of installs, and revenue related to the Unity Runtime Fee will be made by Unity in its sole discretion."

 

RE the installs:
For a game with dedicated servers and load balancing, will new VMs starting up server instances all day everyday count as installs?

 

Unity really dropped the ball here, because all of this is so confusing and not clear, and of course they've been updating things during the day and not everyone is completely caught up... and some of their updates have just added to the confusion or resulted in more questions/unknowns.

I will say two things about your first scenario - in that case you are much better off getting the Pro license for a $2200, which ups the revenue cap to $1 million and install cap to 1 million. Which means you would owe $0 (other than the $2200). If your revenue was that high today, you would be required to have Pro anyway, so in theory the cost doesn't change from today to this new system.

The 2nd scenario is a bit more difficult and honestly is the one that Unity really needs to address (re-installs specifically). Either way, in that case as it currently stands, you'd be better off doing the $2200 for Pro again. Note that since the revenue is on a 12 month rolling basis, once your revenue drops below $200,000 for that game, you can drop Pro and not worry about it.

 

Thankfully I use Unity 2.6, I aint payin' you per install.
I will challenge yall on that, if you try to make me pay per install.

At least until I make my own engine.
This is the most braindead decision I have ever seen be made to a product.

 

I believe they said they will get back with us on this

 

I don't get it. My game's store-page on steam was just approved. I guess I'll need to push everything back a bit, until I have confidence in this system.

 

PHENOMNAL video on this. Saw a codemonkey video on this and he botched it so hard and went "Well I will only make $5000 on my game so it's no problem for indie devs!"

Yeah, be a mid-sized studio that makes 200k but maybe you have a free WebGL or free demo. Now you make that tiny b ut decent 200k, but you get tens of thousands of demo installs and over 100k WebGL initializations... you now are actually going bankrupt. This can and will be killing my entire studio unless we kill our entire WebGL and Demo. Which we rely on for advertising.

That's not even counting piracy. Unity is bs'ing us saying they have piracy factored in but at the same time they require US to prove suspected fraud.

 

Coming back to check and still nothing from Unity higher ups, what a garbage fire of a day. Only plus side Unreal is installed and I've found most equivalent plugins on their side to replace all this, so assuming they continue to hide from responding to the mess will be porting my assets and closing down the Unity S*** tomorrow, way to go guys! At this rate they should sell to Musk so he can rebrand it U to go with X <_<

 

Yes but did you ALSO make over $200k in the last 12 months? If you did then you need to look at what might be on the horizon but that's a big IF.

 

Let me spell it out for you geniuses one more time:

Any game in the 5 cent to 50 cent ARPU range no longer has a business case.

This is most of the 20+ games I have shipped in my career. 150 million installs at a modest 7 cents ARPU for one of them, across a good 10 years. Unity fees would have crushed our spine year after year.

 

So... if i never make a cent from my games made in Unity, no matter how many install my games have, i dont qualify for the fee charge? Did i get it right? its hard for me to read legal stuffs in a non native language.

 

Good luck on the changeover... we are looking at GoDot atm, but we have so much tech/plugins we personally made ground up for Unity that it's going to be VERY hard. Our custom quest/dialogue editor, our custom lighting model, shadows/fog of war etc.

Also not to mention them changing our license is illegal in France where our programmer is based. Maybe that's something we can look into.

 

This violates any trust (if any) that is left between the developers and Unity. It doesn't matter if I am within the revenue & install count conditions or not. This deal is not trustworthy! There is no such thing as detecting fraud %100. The more piracy, fraud etc the more the developer is affected. Unity not even seeing this or not caring about it for whatever reason is major red flag. This new pricing plan is shady, to put it politely. Making games is already a business with high risk and this adds more vagueness and uncertainty.
I have spent years learning and using Unity. I have invested a lot of my time and energy. Sadly, now I will have to consider other options to switch to in a serious manner. This is not a "unity sucks" meme situation anymore. And a "oh we reverted back" will not make things ok after this at this point.
This is not a angry "I'm leaving" tantrum, I am genuinely upset and feel left out in the open.

 

Didn't the owner like, sell off a bunch of stock before this announcement?
Like, isn't doing this kinda crap illegal?

 

... congrats unity you killed your platform to sneak AI into the engine... oh no whatever will we do while sitting over here using Godot and unreal.

 

While that’s true that may be an option, what if you didn’t subscribe to Unity Pro thinking your game was basically done and you weren’t going to make much more money. Then suddenly Unity slaps you with an Invoice for that $200k? Can I retroactively pay that $2,000 to subscribe to Pro and just eliminate the fee? That would be a serious problem, like how long do I have to stay subscribed to avoid this potential edge case? My whole life?

 

Well played Unity, you are making more devs switch to other engines.

 

Bro, you can't save the brain dead people. Let them keep drinking from this poison well. We've tried but ultimately they have to wake up.

 

2,000 shares on the 6th, for a total of 50,610 this past year, (this is just a quick google search however so take it with a grain of salt.

 

Assuming you have Personal/free, it would be 1.8 million installs (the installs over 200k), at $0.20 per install, so $360,000. If you had pro, it would be 1 million installs (the installs over 1 million) and it would cost $60,000. Pro has a different cost per install based on the number of installs, so it goes down as you get more. Pro is $2200/dev/year, so if you have 10 devs it would be another $22,000, so $82,000 total.

 

"Do you guys not have phones ongoing revenue models?!"

But seriously, these changes are really bad all round, and I fear for the future of the community and platform as a result of this announcement (even if it ends up ultimately being reversed, which should happen for the sake of sanity).

 

All of this nonsense just to avoid charging royalties like its competitor.

 

Unity has begun its downfall and now it is killing indie games (and itself). I'm OUT!

 

It is April fool relax everyone

 

Is there official post saying every WebGL load is an install? Rather than say every WebGL load from a uniqe IP or fingerprint?

Thats got to be the most insane thing I've heard yet, in a day full of insanity. Surely not?