Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

You are literally charging developers based on other user's actions.

There is absolutely no way in hell this is legal in any way. I am not responsible for someone F***ing installing an exe onto their computer.

Literally destroying the last TEN YEARS of me working in this engine, goodbye.

 

I've been looking to get back into game dev with Unity for a while now and was going to do so, but this decision has got me thinking about other options. Of course I get that Unity is a company and companies need to make profit etc etc. But charging per instal is a non-starter for all the reasons that have been mentioned.

It seems to me there are 3 choices.

1) the proposed charge per instal method.
2) Revenue share over a certain amount.
3) Or the subscription method. Payable yearly or monthly.

If I didn't have to think about paying per instal or what I'd had to pay if my game does really well, then I'm happy with option 3, presuming there's also still a free version to get started with.

Luckily I haven't started development yet, so if Unity stays with option one, then it looks like I'll be having to look at other engines, which I really didn't want to do.

 

except these are numbers made up by you. There is no indication on how unity will calculate the made up numbers of how many pirates play the game or how many people downloaded a demo from your personal website

 

Very good question. @Tautvydas-Zilys What happens in that case?

 

You guys really gotta improve your internal communication and coordination (maybe why this change was greenlit in the first place?) You should not be personally interpreting posts that (insert name) from marketing/PR posted on Twitter. And if it's not your personal interpretation, but approved by legal and some other department, that would reveal a lot about the state of Unity as a company right now. Again, relay the message.

 

I know I know. It's a mess.

I do this for a living and have done for 10 years, never made more than 200K in a year let alone a million.

I still wish I was grossing enough for this to be a problem.

 

This is a very important question.

 

After 200 you should be using pro and have 1m threshold. Not sure what's the reason for anybody to pay fees with personal plan.

 

As long as your Patreon doesn't exceed 200k a year, you wouldn't pay anything. If you make over 200k a year, you will have to pay for any installs over the threshold.

 

If the distributors are the ones invoiced then imagine you as a developer being invoiced by every pirate APK site on the web after each of them gets invoiced by Unity.

 

Do not buy UNITY ASSETS

PROTEST BEGINS NOW.

 

I'm not one to typically post on Unity's PR disaster blow-ups, but this is probably the worst of all of them and the first that is forcing me to actually take significant action.

The biggest issue for me personally is that there is no constraint on the size of the fee relative to revenue. I simply cannot budget for this fee relative to revenue. I don't care if in practice it would end up being affordable, it is unusable without any sort of revenue percentage cap guarantee, even if that cap is conservative.

I hope something is done to address my particular concern, because if not, you just lost a critical member of the community for one of your newest and most progressive technologies.

 

He's showing you the math for determining what you pay not the math to determine how many installations.

 

What is wrong with you people? How can this even begin to sound like a good idea? Just roll it all back if you even want to pretend you can save face. God you people are just genuinely malignant.

 

I've always been a die hard Unity Dev but this is a gross decision.

 

But the Patreon income is not linked to any individual game...

 

https://dotesports.com/business/new...n-comes-mere-days-after-ceo-sells-2000-shares

your CEO is dumping unity stocks? is this inside trading? It sound highly illegal

Edit:

dumped 52.000 shares!

 

That is very impressively optimistic.

 

Is this an official answer from Unity? Because this doesn't seem likely as the wording in their faq doesn't seem to align with this?

 

Arrggghhhh

1. Lifetime installs mean everything, since any game released in the past that exceeds the lifetime installs have already hit one of the targets. If that game happens to have also made more than the revenue threshold <in last 12 months> then come 2024 you immediate start paying Unity for each new install - for no good reason - seriously why should I suddenly start paying Unity when nothing has changed?

2 What if they were only up to $190k of revenue in last 12 months, but a streamer plays there game and they get a $35k purchases? Now they are suddenly over the limit that requires Pro, but they don't actually have Pro, so they are stuck on the lower tier thresholds!

3. It may be less than he calculated but still more than half a million for each game - we have no idea if he has the profits to cover that and again, this is money going to Unity on old games for no good reason other than Unity just said give me money!!

Edit: Added clarification < >

 

I think that topic it is covered on the FAQ. Unity will try to accrue every cent your game makes, regardless of source. (short of people sending you money or checks in envelopes )

This will of course have a compound effect with their process of "eyeballing it", thus leading them to bill people of outrageous amounts and leaving the poor sods to figure out how to prove them wrong.

Keep in mind that they don't actually have access to your financials, so the process most likely will be:

1- Game hits 200k (or 1M) installs. Someone gets an notification to investigate further
2- Someone goes through all your web presence, borderline doxxing you (or stopping short of)
3- They decide if it looks like you hit the revenue target and thus, to bill you or not.

Imagine this very scientific process on mobile games for instance....

If you were a Unity employee tasked with charging these fees, what would be the most obvious path? You, having all the power and no consequences, will bill the devs and let them figure it out (or just fold and pay to avoid the trouble). This becomes even a more viable course of action if there are bonuses involved for good collections.

 

Also, if we use "development build" for beta or early acces, would those also count as installs?

 

and your migration will kill everyone else who sticks it out. Part of why indie game dev has been sustainable up to this point was the rich ecosystem. This is a very sad day

 

I hate to even predict this but this is Unity we're talking about, it's not going to be retracted. It's going to end up as 'just another disaster you have to put up with if you want to use unity'. AKA, there are less and less and less and less reasons to use Unity the longer Unity exists.

If they weren't smart enough to figure out it shouldn't have happened in the first place...

 

I have summarized it several times in this thread

In short you can boil it down to needing to find the average value per install for a gamer

So
this is a stupid metric but the one they chose

The average value of a gamer for a F2P game ... will vary a lot but lets be very generous and say the average paying player in a F2P game is worth 2 USD ... probably less but hay easy numbers

now lets assume 2% of players that install the game and play it actually monitize
So how many installs is that? well a portion not insignificant will download but never play ... and many that do play will install multiple times, either updating, coming back after a patch or for multiple bits of hardware ... so lets just piss in the dark and say on average 5 installs per player

so if we make 2 USD per user and hit 1 mil gross rev we had 500k paying users or 25mil unique users or 125mil installs
so at 0.01 per install that is 1.25mil in royalties owed

We only made 1mil so you can see we are screwed ... but wait ... it gets worse
THe platform will take 30%, the publisher will take at least 30%, tax will take a cut lets say 20% and unit wants to take 125% royalties off you ... you owe 185% royalties e.g. you are in debt for 850k now ,... o and you haven't paid salary yet

Now these are just some quick dirty numbers different ones than I used last time and the time before that the formula is the issue not the figures

The formula is a problem because the cost of Unity royalty is based on per install as opposed to a % rev or % net rev

 

This is a terrible decision that has completely destroyed any remaining trust I had in this company and its product. Incredibly disappointing.

 

I just had a thought about the USA not liking this.

How does this affect things like oh you know COPPA laws?
Tracking installs and data like that goes against COPPA legally.

Does Unity just want to kill educational institutes using their engine? A lot of grants given to nonprofit organizations provided by the government require COPPA guidelines to be met. This would make Unity going against the USA Congressional law which would be a nice federal level law suit in many forms.

 

Be nice. This lone employee did not make this decision.

 

i was a diehard unity fan until today, even after all their other weird decisions and mess ups

simply put :
the actions of others are not My responsibility,
I CANNOT control how many times others install my game

this is just engagement farming and they will roll it back cause it literally is not a possibility according the the rules of
REALITY

dude, they dont even understand REALITY

 

The math, while basic is just ridiculous to read. Imagine the simpler alternative revenue * royalty%.‍♂️

 

5% on the revenue above $1M. Revenue, ya know, money that actually came in. Installs != guaranteed revenue for free2install games.

 

How would you be able to operate like this?

Currently that whole thing feels like getting into a tiny submarine and just hoping for the best

 

So serious question for Unity. If you roll out this abomination of a licensing agreement come the January 1st 2024. Will the data that is collected be GDPR, CCPA, and COPPA compliant? How is it compliant?

Talk is cheap these days IMO. Hence the last question.

 

How does Unity track that a game is earning revenue?

There are multiple payment solutions for F2P games, i.e Xsolla, credit card, etc etc.
The same game could be free on one platform (i.e itch.io), but paid on Steam or F2P on Android/iOS.
How do installs track in those use cases?

 

Last we were told a number of pages back they're estimating installations.

 

Hopefully job hunting. Even if somehow Unity can manage to exist with a model like this (I mean size and install base alone will get them 10 years), would you really want to be working for them?

 

While debugging some issues with our own API with fiddler, I did notice Unity runtime performing HTTP requests on startup to grab "configuration" data, sending a lot of information in JSON. Therefore, this is a patently untrue statement.

 

Please let this be civil. For a change the complete silence has been broken and we started getting some answers. Don't need to be rude. People may not like the answers but that's better than pure speculation.

 

Do you have an exact quote for this? I have read a bunch of stuff on the sub reddit from various people but cannot find Unity devs saying this.

 

This could bring a new era in gaming.
Send money through envelope and get the game delivered in CD/DVD/flash drive.
Some people will appreciate again good old time envelopes, stamps and post offices

 

Unity's install fee only kicks in after $1 million gross, so close enough. The 200K threshold is redundant because you're gonna get a Pro license at that point anyway. Unless people install spam, it's a better deal than 5%.

The problem is it's so impossible for any accountants to forecast and plan for. There's no predicting how many times a person installs a game per purchase, this will put a lot of big publishers off of this engine and that is bad.

 

I almost never comment on the web, but now I feel obliged to do so. What is in question here is the trust between Unity and the Devs.

I remember a few weeks ago when I saw the wave of layoffs in Montreal, I was talking with a friend about the future of Unity. We wondered what would happen to our projects if Unity went wrong, if the Editor was abandoned or if the company closed... we first talked about switching to other engine like Unreal and Godot. And today we are being told of a radical change in prices and new rules...

I think that even if you go back on these new prices, you are breaking this trust between you Unity and the Devs who rely on this game engine. Who tells us that in 1 year you will not come back to the charge with new higher prices? Or with even tighter conditions and constraints? The philosophy that you show us today and the vision of the future of development with Unity no longer correspond to me.

It's going to be painful, but personally I'm almost sure to switch to Godot. Unity clearly missed an opportunity here, instead of positioning yourself correctly as an alternative between Godot and Unreal, you are simply giving way your place to Godot. I think that in the short term you will win big for sure, but I think this move will be fatal and unrecoverable for you in the long term.

 

Biggest load of S*** I've read in years.
Absolutely 0 of this is legal in any capacity. It's a massive, reckless money grab from the former CEO of the most reviled game company in existence. You're causing legal issues for everyone, because now hundreds of Unity devs have to go to court to contest this absolutely, unambiguously illegal decision.

Thanks for clarifying that the worst possible interpretation of this is, in fact, going to be the case.

 

First post on this thread.

 

At this point why wouldn't they add those fees for *all* games regardless of engine?

 

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Yeah just charge me a god damn flat fee, 4% to undercut Epic... nah just even 5% with some minor perks. It won't potentially bankrupt my entire damn studio at least. Legitimately we looking more into it get over 400k free players of our game, install our demo, playing webGL etc... that's ontop of our normal base, and we JUST make the 200k. Meaning we are going to be CRUSHED by this. This will mean we can't afford to eat or pay rent etc. I am serious on that. We're banking on a steam release to eventually fund us fully but the generous crowd funding we get now allows us to BARELY skirt by.

Unity is proverbally kicking us out of our homes, taking the food from our mouths.

 

Even if this policy gets rolled back this move has really damaged my trust in Unity.

This brings into question whether it makes sense to finish our years-long project in Unity, or if we need to investigate porting to a different engine.

At this rate, it seems like its smarter to start down that path now rather than wait for Unity to continue sliding downhill for another several years.

 

if it took you 4 billion copies to earn 199,999 you need another 4 billion for you next 200k which means instead of earning a bit under 400k like any reasonable system would result in you instead owe unity $600000000. The system does not account for price models that require large numbers of players and earn small amounts per person in the slightest. Also HOW THE HECK does this effect webgl? is each individual *page visit* considered an "install" since that's how browser games function?

 

i find this fanboyism funny.. the issue for many including myself, is the retroactive contract that now applies to older versions of unity.. where they say they can and will change the contract details whenever they want... this year its 20 cents next year its 30, next year personal is only 50k.. etc.. if Unity 2024 had this agreement and we all had agree to download it thats much different than.. your unity 2019 game has to now pay new fees cause we felt like it..

Sorry but ive been a 10 year plus unity user with $1000s spent and this will end that.. not sure the direction i will go from here but, trust is lost, at minimum even if they back track this now.. i know its coming in the future..