Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I'm all for supporting Unity. I'm a shareholder and I've been a Plus subscriber for years, even when I was idle, because I believed in this product and its future. Unity's accessibility, its community, and its evangelists is what drew many of us to it. I've never felt that Unity was on par with UE, but it was a solid product that seemed to be closing the gap, driven by the enthusiasm and loyalty of its developers.

In my perspective, the reason the community is so upset isn't that Unity might need to raise more revenue- keeping the engine alive and prospering benefits all of us!

The reason I feel many of us are upset is that Unity casually and without warning, announced changes that might financially ruin large segments of the user base or render multi year projects unviable, with virtually no notice, all while having no PR staff ready to respond to the justifiably terrified studios that are in emergency meetings right now to see if they will have to lay off staff, scrap their entire project, or begin pulling assets from the web and publisher platforms. It smacks of desperation, poor planning, or someone at Unity desperately trying to hit some numbers-- at the expense of severely damaging the brand and reducing long term revenue.

All things that I'm sure will raise eyebrows for many stakeholders and regulators in the coming months.

Regardless of how this ends up, this announcement will go down as the example of how not to handle things like this. Unity could have had the best intentions in their pricing model, but this is something that should be done with a clear and direct message from the executive team, years of advance notice for budget planning and remonetizing of old properties, an appeal to the community to get behind their product, and assurances that fringe cases and abuse will be addressed.. instead we get radio silence, speculation (which is doing more damage that any amount of PR will undo), and by the way, we're cancelling Plus too, because.. well, losing all those $30/mo subscribers is a good thing for some reason?

I'm not going to pretend I understand these changes, but on the surface, it seems like Unity has another agenda beyond simply raising revenue. Regardless, I think I speak for many of us when I say this is completely demotivating to the user and investment community and will have a much larger impact, both quantifiable and otherwise, than the Unity team realizes.

 

Hey people I found a way to avoid the fees, link below:
https://godotengine.org/download/windows/#platforms

 

This is the biggie which is being glossed over. Yeah, to remove that screen we need to pay for Pro now. It's buried under this craziness which won't affect small time devs, but for console ports and no splash screen, now we gotta fork out, and that sucks.

 

For the most part you can swap to GoDot pretty easily... not fully but yeah. I hear you :/

 

Publishers are going to shy away from unity, jobs will dry up for mid range talents. People are going to start learning Unreal in school and in 5 years unity will be playing catch up again.

 

Dude you need to stop, for your own sake, if you can’t give actual answers you’re only going to put yourself in the line of fire, people will take your posts and use them against unity and you.

 

Ignoring Unreal Engine O3DE is a much more likely candidate for most people than Godot.

 

tldr; Unity is going out of business.

 

on an older post from a unity rep mike gieg.. they said they will be contacting apps stores for sales info.. so are you so sure about that ?

 

The funniest part of all of this is that fact that making games with unity is embarrassing and we have to pay to hide it.

 

thank you for being here, but we need yes or not anwsers, not "i'm being told, i believe..." or things like that, i know is not your fault and you are trying to help us, but we need someone with clear info, also, i made you some important questions too, can you please help me with that?

 

Excuse me, but how are you going to differentiate a situation when:

• a user installs a game after, say, formatting their drive and reinstalling their operating system

and a situation when:

• a user installs the game after downloading it from a piracy website

In another question, it was said that:

According to this video unity's "fraud detection" is a system for detecting fraud commited by publishers, not player piracy - based on the developer's ad stats (and it seems like it has a bad reputation of incorrectly accusing fair developers)

Excuse me, but how in the world a system made for detecting things like ad bots / device farms is going to detect that someone downloaded my game illegally from a site like steamunlocked or pdalife?

As far as I understand it's like trying to clean the dishes by repairing floor tiles - I don't see how one is supposed to help the other

 

I'm all for this too!
But I can't believe they could have made a worse decision to try and achieve this outcome..

 

Maybe we need to stop releasing updates and just release our feature updates as sequels, that'll get around the threshold.

 

Okay then, I'm still gonna wait for an official answer I think. I looked back in the thread and the way the guy from Unity spoke he made it seem like the revenue has to come from the game itself via sell or from inside the game. That's how I interpreted what he was saying anyways.

 

Totally unrelated, but I'm excited to launch my $14 steam launcher (not made in unity of course) that happens to grant a license to my free unity game.

 

@Tautvydas-Zilys

It is very important for us to understand whether there is already a clause in the terms and conditions that affects current projects (from January 1, 2024)

and/or if this only affects projects in upcoming Unity versions

 

https://forum.unity.com/goto/post?id=9295451#post-9295451

 

Count me among the people who didn't have a reason to post on the forums before. I now feel like the last 3 years I spent learning Unity might have been wasted, and perhaps I should have invested that time in a different engine instead. And I've been enjoying using Unity and have been so excited to finally release a few small games on itch.io, too!
This change has so many glaringly obvious holes in it, I don't even know what to say. It's genuinely hard to believe this is a real decision made by a real company with years of history in the industry.
Yeah, I have a long way to go before the fees would apply to me, and I would be very lucky to release a game successful enough to reach the revenue and install thresholds, but now that prize is poisoned from the get-go.

Let's say after reaching the thresholds I sell a game for $2. If the user reinstalls it just 10 times (even without malicious intent!), with a $0.2 fee per install - I've earned nothing. If the user reinstalls more than 10 times, I'm actually losing money now. So each sale generates a finite revenue, but potentially infinite costs. How can you do business in these conditions? Who came up with this? Was anyone with any understanding of game development - or even basic economics, for crying out loud - in the room?
And this is just one of the issues. The potential for install-bombing, the questions about how the installs and revenue are calculated, the possible need to be always online, etc., etc., etc.
"We believe [our own proprietary data model] gives an accurate determination" - sorry, I don't believe "we believe" is good enough here.

So if developers of such a game that's been out for years stop selling it in response to this change, will they still have to pay the fee for any future installs done by users who have previously bought it?
On a a similar note, is the "name your own price" model even viable with this change? If you give the players an option to get your game for free, you still have to pay the fees for their installs.
I sincerely hope UT will change their mind before it's too late and don't implement this change, because frankly, this is insane.

 

Or create a single "game" that contains all of your other games in one binary.

 

unity CEO has dumped shares prior to this announcement. market is waiting to see what is going on but now is clear devs are majorly angry about this and the share will drop tomorrow

 

Do this for all your newer versions for all I care, but Unity has no right to apply this new pricing model onto the existing versions and games that have been released!

 

I would *very* much like to hear an answer to this.

persuant to this, as well, given that anti-fraud efforts are seemingly based on anti-piracy efforts, which have have been a rousing success </sarcasm> I'd be interested to know what assurances one would have that a bad actor with a cluster couldnt install bomb someone.... and if your answer is "we think it's unlikely", rethink said answer...

 

If Unity goes out of business we can keep using it for free right

 

Don't jump to conclusions. Do the numbers for sure and decide what to do or how this is going to affect you but just counting lifetime installs is only part of the picture.

1. Determine if you're over the threshold (for personal/plus over $200k in 12 months as of 1/1/2024 and 200k installs, $1M/1M for other plans)
2. If you're over the thresholds (both) then starting 1/1/2024 you'll pay a runtime for the installs *that month*. So look at the installs in October/November/December 2023 and that might give you an idea of how many installs you'll be charged for the month of January.

It is not lifetime for the fee (as far as I understand) so just because you have 1 million (or 10 million) installs over lifetime, it's only the installs that month you pay for (e.g. 10,000 installs in Jan 2024 under Personal/Plus would cost you $2k).

 

Read the post again, he is accounting for 28million installs across 2 games for that year, so 14 million installs per game and has provided the total payable for that year.

 

at least we have good jokes xD

 

Microsoft would likely swoop in and purchase the company.

 

Fair.
I'm not actually sure how you would handle e.g. a case where you have a Patreon for two games, only one of which is Unity. Or if you have a Patreon that is for a game, but you also give your patrons educational videos on the game development process. It wouldn't be clear to me how much of the $10 a person pays you is for your game or for something else.

 

Ha, I didn't know that. Amazing - that's going to be SO MUCH WORK for them the amount of current unity projects on various app stores, plus having to track that against whether or not the user is paying, and doing it all manually - platform holders aren't going to appreciate those data requests lmao. This is an absolute S***show that has been thought through by zero people

 

Beautifully put.

Ultimately while the 'multiple installs' thing is a total mess and impossible for businesses to plan for, it is otherwise a better deal than Unreal Engine 5's 5% cut. What Unreal's cut is, though, it simple and honest and possible to account for in advance. I feel like somebody high up thinks of this like a royalty check when a song gets played.

 

you are putting too much thinking into this. they will make numbers up

IF dev pay then they will raise the requests for the next cycle. IF he complains they will say "sorry my bad" is 10% less ok for you? Yeah? No? Maybe 15% less?

 

are you sure? for what i know, that engine is a mess (also based on a mess) i'm kind of happy with Unigine, it looks a better alternative for 3d pc games

 

So wait, if I put up a game in steam let’s say, and I then make it free once it hits like 190k, then “take it down” until the start of the next year, until it again reaches 190k I won’t be dinged for installs because I’m under 200k?

 

See - Changes to pricing and Unity plans 2023 FAQ | Unity and search for 'Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024?'

Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024. For more details on when the fee may apply to your game, see When does the Unity Runtime Fee take effect?
​

Which to me reads as

it is for any game released using any version of Unity that exceeds the number of your Unity subscription thresholds.​

 

Everyone should be mad at this criminality.

Its like UNITY CEOS

Air gap your dev comp.

Never pay Unity a cent.

They breached contract so none of their contracts are valid.

A beautiful protest for the mid-big players.

 

I understand your pain, but I wouldn't worry about it until they define what 'revenue' actually means. It's entirely possible that, in your situation, you could argue that your backers are crowd funding *you*. So it's not direct revenue the game itself has made.

Or, of course, Unity may just rub their hands and say "hand it over".

Sadly you won't know for sure until you see the final license terms but the writing isn't on the wall just yet.

 

The funny thing is there are people trying to be civil, and taking a "I'm just here for info bro" stance. Doesn't matter how much info you get on S***, it's still S***. No need to attack the messenger obviously, but there should be no mercy for Unity as a whole. Do not let them for a second think this will just go away and that they can increase the bottom line even with this fiasco (cause that's all the finance guys running the ship think about).

 

Oh yeah I know its going forward, but we need to assume we'll hit these numbers again... like to not assume that is just putting ourselves in danger because if we did it once we're going to do it again.

We are looking at every option to get out of Unity now, like... just completely bail out of the ending, GoDot, Game Maker, Unreal etc. When we hit steam I can't even imagine how many free installs we'll get or WebGL's if we keep those going.

And the funny thing is we get a 10-15% conversion every webGL we cannot afford to not have those free versions that's where we make almost all of our new revenue from! But again like, why can they even do this? They can't, they are changing a contract without consulting us or having us agree. We should be able to use the versions we licensed for free like this makes zero sense legally.

I might start talking to legal representation because it would be worth it, it'll probably cost us less in the ln run.

 

Thats what happens when you install a goofball so disconnected from the product. You can say whatever you want about Tim Sweeney from Epic but he is a hell of a CEO who actually cares about his products. He knows what he is selling and what they re building so he will act in interest of the company and product. What prop CEOs usually do is fill their pockets and then retire playing golf for the rest of their lives. We need a CEO that is connected to the product. Right now, none of the management truly knows what the hell they re even doing. Its very apparent. This new CEO is treating the engine like he is treating a new FIFA game with fees and new schemes to hike up profit. At least put someone in charge who knows what the hell being built. someone who has technical experience or skill. We need a Tim Sweeney for Unity.

 

Thank you. In that case any monetized game on any(?) store will be become an uncalculatable risk beginning Jan 2024? This is huge.

 

Thank you for posting this. "Unity runtime does not do tracking". I've been trying to find proof of this, people keep telling me there's built in (invisible) telemetry/tracking and I just simply didn't believe it.

Okay, grant you I'm sure they'll be some dogpiling here since you're a Unity employee and people will say you're just saying this but this is still good.

It does concern me about how you're going to change your tracking so it would be good to have very specific information on this in the future. Steam installs, itch downloads, etc. is going to be a slippery slope since that's not in any agreement I know of already, but could be wrong.

 

Oh not to mention we are patreon so we put out regular new builds which get regular fresh installs.

 

I think the per-install approach is highly problematic in itself (to put it nicely) for multiple reasons, but I'm not sure if the unclear and ambiguous announcement made it sound better or worse now because the new details look pretty bad.

Like the "Standard monthly rate" is still super confusing. They now say it's just a monthly evaluation, fee is "one time", but then why does it say "rate"?

So if you have 100,000 "new" installs one month, and only 5,264 "new" installs next month, you don't pay again until you hit another "new" 100,000 in one month or over several months???

And this is all calculated by Unity of course, which makes it that much better...

 

New update dropped!
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten

If this is to be believed, Microsoft are on the hook for game pass "distribution" - surely the same would apply to Steam/Apple/Google/Sony/Nintendo/etc then? So it doesn't actually affect anyone lmao

 

It's a big pile of BS.

 

Honestly, every dev affected should be taking legal advice about this in their own jurisdiction.

Contract law, privacy law, all kinds of issues that there is no way Unity have considered for all the global regions they do business.