Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I wish, but why would Unity Technologies agree to this. They're a greedy failing public company that loses $200 million a quarter. Of course any sane person wants to lock in our costs and license fees. But it sure wouldn't be in Unity's interest to do that when they can at any moment announce retroactive fees and costs like this that will apply to every game ever made in Unity3D suddenly. Maybe they'll slap on a 5% suddenly too alongside these "install fees".

I'm sure we haven't seen the last of random retroactive license fees popping up too sadly.

 

Do updates count as install?

 

I can't help but wondering how quickly would Unity abandon Electron if they had to pay a per-installation fee? Anyway.

 

If your game had 500k installs then (on the personal/plus plan) and you made over $200k in the last 12 months (starting Jan 1 2024) then you would get hit with the runtime fee. However you said you made maybe $60 so there would be no fees.

For the free mobile game with 1m installs did you make over $200k in the last 12 months starting Jan 1 2024? If so then you need to look at what that will cost you for the installs made in Jan 2024. If not, then no there's no fees.

This is the misconception going around. The threshold is revenue + lifetime installs but the fees are charged based on installs for that month only (above the threshold).

 

this

 

So If I released a game in 2016. Stopped updating it in 2019 but it still gets sales. Anything past 100k installs I now have to pay 0.20c an install?

Smells like a class action to me

 

Good luck to the lawyers at Unity trying to impose this new cost into live annual subscriptions that have bound both parties to term and scope.

Mind you, I suspect they’ll have their hands full * for some time * trying to find a way they can charge costs for non value installs, particularly without rights to audit and associated data availability and disclosure. They’ll probably be working late nights looking for ways to allow the addition of run time costs to software released under previous versions of the terms of services agreements (with mutual obligations and consideration) that are no longer in force, only to realise that the fact that they are in the past hamstrings them somewhat.

Looks like a dead cat to me. Let’s see what the next few days brings.

 

I would gladly pay a 10K/year subscription tier to not have to pay runtime fees. It would hurt a lot less than being charged for a full userbase after EACH PATCH.

This is a dealbreaker unity. I can't afford that. I think nobody can.

 

if you mean unreal, Unity is not longer a competition for unreal anymore, they lost when lumen and nanite came out (some years ago now) maybe godot... that sounds like a joke but for years unity has lost its value on the industry at the point that even godot is more important xD and now this jajaja lol

 

Has any one heard anything from the companies that will actually pay the bill?

How will Valve forward the bill? If one product is on 3 platforms, will we be getting 3 invoices from 3 different distributors?

 

Like a realize that I'm shouting into the void here but the reason I've stuck with unity is the strong community of veteran developers this platform has. That's like disintegrating in real time as devs (who don't want to deal with fun surprises like this) flee to other engines that have companies behind them that are at least competent.

 

Oh wow. You clarified the major questions, and the answers confirm that it's as bad as we thought.

 

This news is "Unreal" haha.

Imagine doing a google search for "which game engine should I learn?" and how bad Unity is going to get ripped in every blog post for this. What disaster. Probably just killed the future of the community.

Not sure many people will want to risk their game becoming successful, meeting the threshold, and later putting them at risk for financial ruin... especially when there are other great engines on the market with simple no risk revenue sharing. At least there is no scenario where you one day wake up to a huge bill you weren't expecting.

I'm not a pro game/unity dev and haven't spent too many hours in it, but I certainly won't be spending any more.

 

Da bin ich vollkommen deiner Meinung. Mittelweile könnte m

For them, determinism is only important in the context of DOTS.

 

I've toyed with about every game development IDE and always came back to Unity, nothing could compete with Unity's workflow. I would rather stay with Unity, but if this is any indication of how the company is being run, I must ask, what is next? That being said I recently tried out Godot in the event that I needed to jump ship.

It's way more streamlined, it is meant for modules to be added. The interface seems a little awkward at first but not far into a tutorial it's feeling more intuitive.

In conclusion, Unity you better watch behind you because Godot is waiting in the wings to usurp you. If even 20% of the devs flock to it, it will grow into a formidable competition.

 

Getting a console license for Unreal Engine is a trivial process if you have a console developer account.

 

We made over $200k in licensing deal revenue which we have already spent on development of the game.

 

Valve will ban any non major Unity game before it comes to this.

 

Well, add me to the list of customers you just lost. I have a Unity Plus subscription. I won't be upgrading it to Pro or renewing it for the final year. I won't be purchasing anything else from your Asset Store either.

I've been developing a game for the past 2 years and this news makes me regret choosing Unity. I won't be using Unity for future projects. I'll also be looking into porting my current game to another engine or framework unless there are some serious changes.

You guys are burning away all your goodwill with the community. Retroactively changing the terms like this is unprofessional and unacceptable. People won't forget being treated like this

It doesn't even make sense. Don't you guys make most of your money through services + ads + asset store sales? You realize if people leave Unity, that means less people will be using your services and the asset store right? But what the heck do I know? Maybe you'll increase your profits massively with this move. Good luck with this gamble. You'll probably need it

 

Your math is incorrect, you would need only a million installs over the threshold to be slapped with a $200k bill.

For a F2P game that has just hit the $200k revenue threshold, that is highly achievable, and very 'scorched earth'

 

with the plus model gone does it mean you need to pay 4x more to remove splashscreen or will that feature be moved to personal?

 

i'm literally on the same boat, i do not want to go with godot, but if i need to work with a basic/featureless engine like godot, i think that is better than unity right now

 

This can't possibly be legal can it? Unless my knowledge of software licenses is completely wrong, when you create something in an application it is only bound by the terms of the license you were under WHEN YOU MADE IT. Microsoft can not suddenly decide that it wants to change you 7 trillion dollars for an MS Paint drawing you made five years ago. If Unity is saying they can retroactively change the terms of the license you agreed to at any point with no warning, then what's to stop them from just randomly picking some random person who released a demo once five years ago and deciding that they want to charge him a million dollars for no reason at all? The only way this seems legal is if Unity snuck some seriously insane clauses into their EULA saying they have complete rights over everything made in the editor. Please tell me they did not already do that.

 

Yes

 

And now publishers, even ones known for taking risks, will turn down projects because of this.
https://twitter.com/devolverdigital/status/1701685282129539485

 

Congratulations! You get 2 million downloads over a couple of months, making $200k in revenue. You have a pretty standard little mobile game ARPU (average revenue per user) of $0.1 USD. You’re done! You owe Unity almost double the amount that you just made. You have 1,800,000 installs above the threshold. Using Unity’s pricing, you owe them (* $0.2 USD =) $360,000 USD.

 

One person getting screwed over by this is one person too many.

https://twitter.com/danidevyt/status/1701650631948214393?s=46&t=0H8p5auaUAvOJfsYXjhh7Q

 

Right, except the revenue is based on the last 12 months to get you over the threshold and the installs are for the month. I don't know about your situation but things like games that made $500k in 2019 wouldn't qualify to hit the threshold (as others are saying in this thread). Also the revenue is the revenue from the game, not your company in general. Lots of stupid details that muddy the waters.

It's all confusing and the last of clarity and participation from Unity officials isn't helping.

 

That's not how it works. You only get charged for installs of a prior month, if the prior 12 months have had revenue for that specific game, over $200k or 1m depending on plan. You're not going to get charged 10 years down the line while the game is only selling 10-50k sales maybe.

But the system is still terrible for a host of other reasons.

 

I'll have to pull our freemium game from every store that doesn't pull in ARPU $0.02, there goes most stores.

 

Then why would a reinstall count as a new install? How would you even detect that? Normally a reinstall would just put the same files in the same place - impossible to detect.

 

It is enough that they are charging for a metric that we do not get paid for. Installs are not sales.

 

After some reflection, I think the new pricing based on installs is a negative decision for developers.

My company currently is Pro seat tier, but I think unless this is reverted I may seriously consider leaving Unity after my current project is complete

Best regards

 

Hello Tautvydas-Zilys,

thanks for answering. How EXACTLY does Unity know if it's the same player or not?

 

I'm fairly sure those are completely free meme games with no DLCs so there's no revenue.

 

Thank you. That puts me a lot more at ease. And yes, I think it did read like that, at least for me who was searching for this specific bit of information.

Thanks again. I know you can't be having an easy day today. Take it easy man.

 

It is incredibly upsetting that Unity would take this route.

I have used Unity for personal and professional projects since at least Unity 5. It's not unknown among developer groups that Unity Technologies has repeatedly failed to demonstrate integrity and reliability in its own engine to a degree that could only point to severe lack of management direction inside the company.

Years of Unity's development have been rife with confusing developmental decisions, questionable asset or company acquisitions, half-baked functionality, and failure to support some of the most basic functions of this own engine or provide obvious features that have to be supplemented by other asset creators. Many Unity developers work with the software begrudgingly, instead of excitingly already.

Unity developers have grown alongside other engines too. We saw competitors investing in useful, thoughtful, and sometimes groundbreaking updates, supporting and enhancing their existing feature set instead of announcing a new branch of features that may or may not see support even months after their inception. Some of these engines do so while developing openly so as to improve the product jointly instead of building more upon the questionable foundation of Unity's black box, which now extends to its profit mechanism.

Healthier developmental relationships alongside growing competitive feature-sets and communities have shown many of what we're missing in engines like UE5 and Godot, creating useful new releases and drumming up tangible excitement. This is while Unity has sit in stagnant waters, making long-term promises that did not pan out, and taking absurd amounts of time to implement even the most obvious and highly requested features while deprecating parts of their codebase without any appropriate replacement for function.

Now Unity's pricing is changing for the worse and there is a very unlikely notion that the commercial foundation driving this engine's development has any interest in maintaining a healthy developmental relationship, supporting progressive development standards, or fostering a thoughtful developer community that truly made the major difference in using this engine over others, even despite delays and technological shortcomings.

My heart goes to the hardworking people that have made Unity an engine I enjoy using and the teams working through the years on features that likely had their hands tied by upper management, but I'm left to determine this company is no longer trustworthy, and question the entire worth of partnering with a tone-deaf entity like Unity Technologies for any future endeavors going forward.

 

What are the options for developers who don't agree to the new terms, but have games that are already released and/or unreleased games that are already multiple years into development?

 

Oh, so as long as I don't make $200k, I don't pay? Well, that's a relief! I don't do ads and my IAPs are like maybe $0.001 per user, so I'm good forever.

 

It has some IAPs. It might still be a meme though I don't know. I just know there's a Twitter post about it.

https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/1782210/

 

Its good to hear, but if thats the case, why would you consider WebGL loads as new users. Many users refrsh their cache a lot. How can you distinguish one and not the other?

 

Is a free (to download) game without ads but with IAPs considered a "free game" here?

 

It's a bit more convoluted I think. First, if you read the last sentence, the distributor will be billed only for the new downloads (if rev and install limits are both true). Seconds, it's not the software you made the game in...That's Unity Editor. Here, we're talking Unity Runtime. License wise...two separate things.

I'm still super curious though...how will the distributors (Valve, Nintendo, MS etc. who are the ones that will be billed as per Unity FAQ) will respond to this.
The costs of managing all this fiscal bullshit, will have to end up in them increasing the overall price. No way will the distributors manage this S*** for free. The fees for the developers will be probably higher than this.

And we might get 4 invoices each month if our product is on 4 distribution platforms? What if we add GOG, Epic store? Will Xbox and Windows purchases count towards the same distributor (MS)? Or are they separate? What the hell is going on?

Stop arguing about the prices...start asking how the hell is this going to work first...

 

How?

 

Yeah, I’ll be honest, as somebody who’s been on Unity a long time, this change is terrifying. I’m a single dude who doesn’t want to have to do complex math to figure out if I’m going to owe money to Unity each month based on a data point that I have absolutely no control over (installs) and no way to predict… rather than just from money I’m making.

This seems like a death bell for Unity as a mobile/indie platform. We need stability and predictability, not whatever on gods earth this is.

I would much rather have a simple, flat, predictable, revenue based system (even if it costs me more in the long run). I don’t have the resources or time to track this.

This is beyond disappointing. Under the right conditions, this seems like it could absolutely take more money than you make (millions of F2P installs, and barely making over $200K, such that you trigger costs that exceed the profit).

Yeah, not happy.

 

He said that they made some money from game pass deal

 

It's worse than that. It's also a metric that we do not control and cannot predict.

We would be better off being charged according to how many birds live in a 100m radius from our companies. It's as random but at least it very hard to weaponized against us.

 

I can't say it's 100% correct as the details of the original post are not there but it all depends on the subscription they have (personal/plus/pro/enterprise) and the revenue for the past 12 months (starting Jan 1 2024).

The revenue threshold is for the past 12 months and the install count (over the threshold) for the billing is based on that months installs. So a million installs would put them over the threshold (assuming a personal/plus subscription) but it's the number of installs that month, not total, that would decide on the fee (@ $0.20 per install).

So to get hit with a $200k bill they would have needed 1 million installs *that month*. Yeah I mistyped when I said 10 million but it would be 1 million installs in Jan 2024 to get that kind of bill, not 1 million over lifetime. Apologies for the 10 million mistype.