Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Seriously, these poor folks got thrown to the sharks. Unity employees, consider consulting a lawyer before wading in.

 

Q: How are you going to collect installs?
A: Making numbers up, if you don't include our proprietary trackers that will get you banned from every app store we will making things up and you will have some big surprise fees.

Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses?
A: We want to add the spyware tracker from the Israeli company we have merged with last year to every game. But google will not like it and so we will make things up if tracking is not possible. We will try to make it mandatory before google wakes up.

Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: HA HA HA, Yes off course it does And guess what? because we may not have the user data as we are sure you will do everything to remove the trackers we will add like 10 reinstall by default for each user we made up.

Q: If a game that's made enough money to be over the threshold has a demo of the same game, do installs of the demo also induce a charge?
A: What? Do you think a demo is for free? loloolololo YES off course You pay money! you pay money!

Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games?
A: Nothing. We assume your game is pirated and for each genuine user we multiply with 100 to account for the entire user base from Russia and china and south america. And consider yourself lucky we use only 100 as multiplications. What? How we can do such thing to make YOU pay for something you have no control over? Really funny. Remember what our CEO said? That unity devs are stupid?

Q: When in the lifecycle of a game does tracking of lifetime installs begin? Do beta versions count towards the threshold?
A: We assume your game never dies, decades from now people will surely still play your game so you bet we will come after you to get our money from you

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games?
A: Off course they do! Did you not figured this out yet? We are close to bankruptcy we need to get as much revenue from devs that are locked in our system because for the past 4 years we had few new devs. they all go to that unreal thing.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones.
A: YES YES, didn't you have read above? We know that new devs wil never agree to this system and they are going to unreal. We are trying to milk money from existing devs! That is the point!

 

But it applies to free games that make some revenue right?

 

To be honest I haven't had time to digest everything yet, and I don't want to form a final opinion until we have the license agreement in hand.

 

Thats exactly what people need to understand. You need BOTH threshold for it to happen. If you have 100k download in the month, but made 0 money... You wont pay a dime. If you made 200k out of your game in 2 year, thats 100k a year, you wont pay a dime even if you have a billion download. Its directly connected to the amount of cash you are making. Again, if you think your threshold of 200k is too low with unity personal, pay 2k a year, get pro, and now your up to a million $ a year you can make without paying a fee.

 

Leaderboards that show the user's selected name? Just spitballing. It's possible they would pick the same username across multiple installs, or it could be automatic if saved to the computer's registry. Maybe then you can show Here's the number of unique usernames selected before entering the menu of the game.

 

Well at least they announced before my renewal date. Thanks for the heads up, it's been a great 4 years!

 

Or just simply exit the Unity ecosystem and you don't have to deal with this S*** at all.

 

You should invest in telemetry regardless of this policy.

 

If this change goes through and does not get reverted then i need to learn gdscript because gadot engine here i come. Actually im sure gadot uses c# too so i might be good

 

1m for a game project in a year really isn't much

200k is very much small beans

those are gross rev numbers so before tax, platform and publisher split, salary, licensing, general operations costs ... 1m for a team of say 5 is best case scenario not enough to pay salary that year so hope you like noodles

Just accounting for platform fees ... not taxes, operations, licensing, etc. just platform fees and your down to 140k per head.
Add tax now, licenses and the general costs of doing biz and your down to around 75k per head ... that is what the company has

Now run payrol, pay PRSI or income tax, etc. and each employee is bringing home 60k ish if your running it tight

My point is simply that while this may never impact 80-90% of Unity's user base the 10% or less that does this for a living just got a foot blown off by this even begin considered.

It really comes down to your games value per install ... which is an insain thing to calc but is what is vs the royalty cost

Best case the cost is 0.01 ... so now whats your value per install .. not user, per install
If we assume 2% of your players monetize for an average of $10 ... then you are very lucky but the numbers are easier ... this means you have around 1-2mil total players ... if over a year or so users install an average of say 10 times per user really isn't much depending on how they calc "install" and right now its "trust me bro" ... so ya

but anyway 10 times right so 2 devices and 5 patches a year you would hit that ... anyway ease of numbers the result is you end up owing Unity a solid mil or breaking even e.g. 0 profit ... and that's before tax, salary, licensing, etc.

See the issue here
The issue is since its not a % based model its absoltly possible for the royalty fees to be a large chunk or even greater than your revenue meaning this will kill some devs

 

i hope you are right, now, it looks like you are the one here for now, can you explain to me, what happen if:
my game on android gets 200.001 downloads and my game is 1$ game but then, 50.000 players get new phones and they get the game from their accounts, do i have to pay 10.000$ even if i'm not getting any money from them?? (because they already paid the game, they are just re-installing from their accounts)

 

correct answer!

 

He's an administrator of the forums not someone in a position that can make a statement that isn't opinion. If it were as simple as that to get a lawsuit going most companies would be bankrupt.

 

A lot of unity games will go offline by 1 January 2024 if this pricing remains like this.

 

There is a C# version of Gadot ... we have a Steamworks integration with it

 

A lot of people seem very confident they're going to make over a million per year (or over 200K and not get a pro license for some reason). Heh.

Anyway, this is a mess one way or another. They need to change this, no question.

 

Thank you for your reply.

 

Does this new model imply that Unity is now sending information of users to Unity? What is the scope of the data being sent to Unity with each installation?

 

Well you can go with unreal, they take 5% royalties once you reach a million. That's 50k. As much as unity want.

 

Gotta love the unity people popping in from time to time just to post super vague one-liners/short text and then disappear. Got a flight to catch I assume?

 

So the install tracking is based off of a purchase, eg. App Store paid app receipt? Meaning F2P games are exempt? This really needs to be clarified.

 

no.

 

Unitys revenue should scale proportional to our revenue not independent based on installs, that may bring us no money.

Take a % cut of our revenue like epic does.

But with this solution you can make us lose money.

 

Even 5% royalty could potentially still be more of your money than this new "plan". COULD, that's the thing, that's why most of us are so upset. We have no idea what this plan actually does, how it will effect actual numbers. Maybe that's by design. But with a predetermined % royalty at least you know upfront what you owe and can plan for it. As opposed to this plan, you don't know the numbers until Unity literally hits you with a bill

 

Of course!
How else is Unity going to make money and please their shareholders??

 

If you have a free demo of your game available on Steam, for instance, will the install count of that apply to the per-install fee threshold for the full game? Or are they considered different products due to the difference in content and functionality? If the answer to the first question is "yes", here's a scenario I'm curious about:

• A developer's full Steam game costs $10 per unit
  
• A free demo is available
• The developer is on the Personal/Plus plan from Unity
• 1 million people download the demo
• Of those 1 million, 30,000 people then purchase the full game
• The gross revenue is $300K
• The net revenue to the developer is $210K, after Valve's cut
• Since the download count and revenue are above the thresholds, the per-install fee kicks in
• The number of installs above the threshold is 1,000,000 - 200,000 = 800,000
• At $0.2 x 800,000, does the developer now owe Unity $160,000 even though the majority of the demo users were not paying users?

 

This price policy has to be the most asinine piece of decision-making I've seen in a while. So the TLDR;

1- Unity will now charge you each time an eligible game installed. This is not a one-time fee, its a forever fee.

2- To be eligible, a game only needs to hit 200k installs (not sales or downloads, but installs or install attempts long enough to trigger the connection) AND hit 200k gross revenue (so before you deduce taxes, store fees, publisher fees and expenses).

3- They actually don't care about piracy or anything else. All their communications on the matter so far indicate that its the developer who has to demonstrate that there has been an issue or a fraud. After they bill you for thousands in fees. ...Lovely.... This is a moronic stance by its own right, and it just comes to validate how ethically bankrupt Unity really is.

To offset this very predatory move, Unity offered the following set of "solutions":

a) You pony up 3x the value of Plus and go to Pro, so that you are able to raise the limits to 1M Installs and 1M in revenue

b) You sign up for a bunch of their other products, thus effectively become more under their thumb and ponying up even more per month or per install or per whatever they decide it makes sense at the time.

Regardless, you will still be forever paying them fees over any games that hit the thresholds. It will never, ever stop.

Let that sink in for a while.

Finally, contrary to Epic, Unity will not put the specific terms and conditions applicable to each game that is eligible in writing/contract. As such they can change the ToS whenever they want and we are all supposed to rollover, or else...

Also try to keep in mind that this is a company that has no issue with using strong-arm/ shakedown tactics to bully you into compliance to whatever they want.

They already do this now on licensing tiers. They don't have any factual data, however someone at compliance decides that your studio is on the wrong tier and that's all she wrote. Either you pay up or get suspended, unless of course you jump through a Kafkian inferno of hoops to prove them wrong (which by the way is a very relative thing, since they are biased from the start)

Now imagine this non-sense with thousands of dollars from fees of alleged installations.... forever. Imagine constantly having the concern about pirate installs, about repeat installs, about fee changes, about your modestly successful game becoming a money sink (unless you subscribe their protection... I mean Pro Tier...). Its an unnecessary amount of added complexity into the already complex business of making games.

We already had committed most of our devs to Unreal. With this, we will spin a couple of Godot projects to see what happens to the few we had in Unity. I for one, refuse to pay them forever fees for using a tool that I have paid for already many times over.

 

Are demos really that common? I think I could count the number that I've seen on one hand.

 

Revenue cut please!
Dont charge per install!

 

Basically required on Steam these days.

 

Not true. Unreal is not counting installs (for that matter)

 

How will distributors forward us the bill? What stops them from slapping on additional 'managing fees'?

 

Yes, despite the amount of people clearly not understanding what is happening, a lot of us do. In practice the money is not a problem if you do not fall within one of the edge cases like high install count mobile games. It's not actually that bad, in a vacuum. The real issue here is how Unity is creating massive distrust by rolling out barely thought out retroactively applied overhauls to their monetization, and this is not the first F*** up either. This is a clear sign of a sick company and nobody in their right mind would not think twice before investing years of effort with Unity in an attempt to start a business after something like this.

 

Half a million in royalties with a game that has 28m installs is still WAY to much
if lets be generous and say 2% of those monetize and that the average value per paid user is 2 USD then gross rev for that game is 1,120,000 ... so Unity is taking 50% royalties?

The platform will take 30%

Publisher will take well varies but lets be nice and say 30%

So people are looking for 110% of the royalties and we haven't even talked about tax, licensing, other fees from other systems gouging ... I mean charging similarly and then salaries and you know living

This cannot be a serious model Unity is considering

 

The only rational reason for you not to learn a new engine is if the people responsible are fired. Reversal is not enough. If Unity reverses course for now, but no effort is made to fix the culture that created this mess, then there's no reason to believe they won't just come up with other schemes that screw you over in the future. The only way to remove the sword of Damocles involves major surgery to the org.

 

Except Epic only takes if you have income, Unity takes regardless of income. Install has implications.
Second: Unity's appeal was that we didn't have to deal with post-release S*** like this. If these are equally inconvenient, Epic's offering is lightyears better. But I probably won't end up in Unreal (will see), I will try O3DE, will see if it matured enough for a game or two. And F*** mindless corporate monetization.

 

I will only follow the ToS that Unity 2.6 (My main version) uses, don't care lmao.
At least until:

• A Unity-Compatible engine comes out that is free
• I finish my 2 engines before the deadline
• I do Godot
• Never, ill just not pay any fees.

 

What is going to happen to developers who distribute their game for free and rely on donations?
Any such project that reaches the $200k milestone will have millions of installs.

 

Thanks for your reply! I wanted to ask one more question if that's possible. If there's no tracking in Runtime as of now, how exactly would developers be billed retroactively, if even approximation is impossible due to lack of such tracking? How would that affect people who aren't upgrading Unity version and stay with current versions?

 

So it's really as bad as they say. You're putting people on the hook for potentially all the revenue they made if the downloads are high enough and the revenue is low enough, even enough to put them into debt in an extreme case. And you had the gall to say it doesn't apply if the game is "free"....which everyone here well knows is a vague statement when freemium games are a norm.

Add to that people who want to work, or already work for studios that make over $1 million a year, and have an inkling as to their studio's finances. This is about way more than solo devs dreaming about being the next big hit.

 

Can you share the math?

 

This situation is already causing devs to consult lawyers. You can be sure of that.

 

In fairness a "free" game isn't actually free

Such a thing used to exist but everything either monitizes through MTX, ads, DLC or some other model ... a truly free game is something you basically only see as a hobby or passion project and even then they often have ads or some form of minor monitization attached

 

So I hope this doesn't get lost in a sea of angry comments but say if I make a free game I.E all revenue for the project comes from Patreon support (as quite a few games do at the moment) what does this mean for me as I would never cross that threshold for paying?