Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Yes, you need to exceed both the revenue and installs to qualify, not just one. The issue would be if you started getting a lot of donations and exceeded the limit - your monetization model could not be ready for that if your game is getting a lot of free installs.
Or if you just cross the money threshold and a popular streamer then plays your game to cause a spike in installs.

 

honestly, he should start looking for a new job. I don't see unity surviving this mess

 

As a co-founder of an Indie Start-up let me comment this:

Our first will now also be our last Unity title. I can not boggle my mind around how you can do this to Indies which already have a tough time not falling apart at the start of their lifetime.

 

Currently I don't have a source, but if I remember correctly someone said yes.

 

Do headless Linux servers count as an install?

I've messaged everyone I know and have not been able to get an answer to this.

Many online games that scale on demand will spin up completely new servers to host games. Depending on the game, that server might be active for only a few mins and then closed down. so does each new instance counts as a install?

If so, install count is going to be extremally high for a lot of online games, from some of my models it would get to the point that its not viable to make online games using unity, which is a shame considering current efforts on networking.

 

I am in the same boat but it sounds like this isn't actually the case? They don't have install trackers in the runtime currently, so there's no way for them to enforce this or even take a shot at guessing whether you've got the right amount of installs

 

Unity dev team, if you need money maybe make and sell your own game ?

 

It is in no way a better deal than 5%
find your average revenue per install ... because they are making the cost per install 0.01

That sounds supper cheap ... till you start running some numbers
If your a F2P game then only about 2% of your players are going to monetize ... this doesn't count people who downloaded but never played just players so you have even more people that downloaded ... but it gets worse ... Unity is calling per install ... not per user ... for a F2P or really any game there will generally be multiple installs per user and the verdict is out on how updates, and the likes would work point is your going to end up paying more than 0.01 per user your likely to be paying 0.05 or more per unique user and only 0.02 are paying users thus you need to have an average value per user closer to 3 or 4 where I would say most of us have an average value per user closer to 1 or 2

 

Just wait until they lower the threshold to be 20k/year

 

I don't know if you're actually from unity but I don't personally see how this could be enforceable? There are quite a few games in this situation using patreon already. How could Unity ever know they're over the threshold?

 

Would you consider Unity again if they reversed this decision tomorrow? Or would the people responsible need to be removed from the org?

 

The issue for this is they ( Unity ) straight up said from their official Unity account they have a proprietary data model that is used to track and determine the data for it.

 

We should make a gofundme for unity

 

I have to turn off pretty much all non english speaking countries now, I can't afford to pay $0.02 from earnings of $0.008 (Indonesia).

 

Luckily most people ARE pushing back on this. This is insane... we are too late into development rn to hard pivot but we are in fact beginning the steps to start moving to GoDot.

This isn't even a shareholders thing, other engines do have shareholders and don't completely destroy or attack their developers like this. Epic Games have outside interest with Tencent and a few other investors they are responsible towards, so you CAN be responsible to your fiduciary duty and at the same time serve your stakeholders too.

Unity has just... I have no idea. This isn't even legal on the face of it? Changing the terms like this retroactively!? We, my dev studio, did NOT agree to this ridiculous pricing scam, and we would have used a different engine if it was on the table.

 

That's so frustrating, I have never wanted to move to Unreal as much as I do now.

 

I don't doubt it.

 

What an awful policy. What prevents the internet from spam re-installing to destroy indie developers?

Greedy grossness. Unity you need to rectify this AWFUL HORRIBLE IDEA/PLAN.

 

You are correct about this. In fact if you use Unity Analytics with the gaming services this exact config file data is sent over Analytic events on Unity Servers.

 

I hope if they reverse this, I am praying that they learn their lesson and dont ever try to pull stuff like this again. I mean if you get burnt once on the stove, will you put your hand back on it? If Unity does that, then the entire leadership has less intelligence than a toddler.

 

Proprietary method for counting installs? Getting charged for the same user reinstalling? Charging games that are already release fees? Wow. Those aren't even all the worst parts. What a terrible model.

I'm glad I'm fairly early in my game's development. I will be switching to Unreal.

 

We personally have, and we have MORE free installs/webgl players than they do... it is looking we have been downloaded and played over 600k times and counting. So my question... would we eventually OWE Unity our entire revenue? like, would we be in the red because of Unity? Just with these fees because we choose to have a free demo and webGL versions that spread all over the internet?

 

Got it thank you.

 

With Unity Plus being dissolved, does that mean we need to spend MORE money on a higher payment plan to remove the "Made by Unity" splash screen? Because I'd be embarrassed to keep it at this rate.

 

I've largely lost track of where everything is. It's a screenshot of a Twitter conversation so it's impossible to search for.

 

Yeah, just financial ones.

 

Except the runtime fee is only based on the installs for that month, not lifetime installs. To reach $640k he would have had about 3 million installs in Jan 2024 alone (after the policy kicks in). Not out of this world, but not the same as the full install numbers.

 

Patreon is still revenue. Kickstarter is still revenue. PayPal donation buttons are still revenue.

If it's < $200k per year, you're golden. Beyond that, all the terms apply.

 

This is right. Up until now you legally had to get a Pro license if you made more than 100K so I can't see why anybody grossing 200K would ever not go with one, making the 200K threshold irrelevant (and more likely existing as a way to encourage people to go Pro).

If they want to damage control this their best bet is to remove that part. Just make it so you have to have a Pro license if you gross over 200K, and so the install fees only kick in above a million. Same result but sounds much nicer.

 

Alright no problem. Thank you for answering me at least.

 

welp time to learn blueprint and c++. duces.

 

Freshly released on the Asset Store!
Meltdown's 199999 game install detector that stops further players from enjoying your game and making it unprofitable!



Special price of only $9.99 for the first 200 000 customers!

 

Exactly they don't know anything about making games!

 

I'm convinced Unity execs think today is April 1st.

To any Unity employees reading this, whether you're a programmer, marketer, advertising person, sales rep., whatever, please get together with your coworkers, grow a backbone, and tell the executives who are making these decisions that they will kill the company if they go through with this. Not only will unity lose significant revenue, market share, and users, but the company will also likely face significant litigation.

 

Thats part of the 4D-chess game being played here.

Make the Unity brand so toxic and hated that the ability to remove the 'made in Unity' mark of shame becomes priceless

 

Nah, they already learned everything they had to learn with Project Gigaya, all of our pains and everything

 

Ok, let's imagine you have a studio with a Pro license that does 12 million installations and makes 1 million profit. The first year. The second year you do the same and every month you have 1 million installations. How much money do you have to pay Unity at the end of the second year? 720k dollars

 

I believe it was the Phasmaphobia dev that was telling us about his communication he was having with Unity. It in this Unity Forum on one of the pages

 

"Please wait while we purchase Unity Pro I mean uh scale up capacity."

 

no no i think he should keep posting
this is all very interesting for my lawy--- my friends

 

Imagine yourself selling glasses made with a kiln you paid for, and having to pay a tax to the kiln manufacturer every time someone who bought one of your glasses drinks something with this glass...

 

I am not at all from Unity. Just repeating and trying to understand myself.
I think when it comes to reporting revenue, the unity plan shouldn't be any different to any other engine with a revenue share license? I'd imagine if you had Unreal with their revenue % share, your Patreon would still count towards your revenue there too. It's up to you to correctly disclose whether you are over the threshold.
If I understand correctly, the key issue with this plan is that the amount you pay to unity is based on installs, so you could get all sorts of situations where installs aren't linked to revenue. And the ratio of installs to revenue could fluctuate unpredictably. I know nothing about publishing, but I'd imagine a game that's heavily monetized via donations is exactly that case.

 

Just for maintaining a current product, but won't put one more penny into this disaster. I have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars with their decisions. NO MORE!

 

This is a shameful, stupid, short-sighted cash grab that is not worth defending any further. Knock it off and apologize, and maybe show some gratitude to the people screaming you down from the ledge, even though you deserve to go under for even considering this.

 

For the past three years I was the black sheep asinine ignorant forum user that was very critical of unity.

I want to have my small moment now and say:


I told you so!

 

Seeing as we are still tallying our free downloads up... we're at 600k from OFFICIAL sources. Just looked at a Russian piracy website and our thread has over 900k views, and that's just ONE source. We could end up owing Unity more money than we make... that's not even a joke, it's not even out of the realm of possibility. It's probable at this point, if we continue as we are with a free demo version of our game etc, we're dead.

 

The hero we need

 

Absolutely horrible idea. I honestly regret learning unity at this point, being several years in. I'm not a mobile focused game dev myself but I feel for you guys especially