Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

if you can't determine the number of installations, you can't determine how much you will pay, when the cost is based on installations. That's the problem. Installations do not equal money, so if they number higher than your sales, you owe Unity.

 

They walked nothing back. Everything in the "walkback" is exactly the same information as what they released before but in more positive speak. They have no way to know what an "initial" download is and they will still charge for re-downloads on multiple devices, so presumably if you fully wipe a phone or fully uninstall a game from a computer Unity will see a new "fresh install."

 

It does beg the question:

-How can they tell the difference between them? (without making us devs going through hoops to prove them wrong that is)?

This is mostly them saying what they think we want to hear, without actually conceding anything.

It's easy for them, since they can just stick us with the bill later and say "yeah we don't bill you for piracy, as long as you can prove these here 1M dls are from stolen copies..."

 

International company, international worktime, there ist no excuse, especially when this was already said hours before.

 

Valve runs Steam which means they would be responsible for distributing the distributables and in Unity's CURRENT wording could be liable for the fees charged. Unity likely will just change the wording ASAP so Valve or Microsoft don't step up to the plate because there is ZERO chance this legal and MSoft or Valve would knock Unity's teeth out and put the company six feet in the ground in court.

BUT, they are technically both statekholders in Unity Engine, in that they make A LOT of money off Unity developers on their platforms. This could hurt both Steam and Gamepass in very real ways.

 

This is intentional, to generate short term revenue gain for the share holders and then escape the ensuring chaos with your golden parachute. It's what everone expected when Unity went public, especially after they appointed Riccitiello the Hutt as CEO. And if you look, Unity's stocks are actually up after this announcement.

We can only hope the company and brand survive this blatant corporate raiding and pick up the pieces when these criminals have moved onto the next target

 

People were throwing numbers at him asking for clarification, and he provided that clarification with those numbers.

 

"Reinstalls will not be charged" sounds pretty definitive to me.

 

Give it a week and they'll back track on this for another awful but less awful model.

Just wait for the "We listened" post

 

Please stop being an idiot. Being angry about company policies is one thing, being abusive towards employees is not okay.

 

Starfield came out Sept 1 owned by Bill Gates, there's a good chance Unity Owners got bribed by Bill Gates for hundreds of millions to self destruct Unity. Electronic arts spent more on smaller studios to put them out. Sept 6 this criminality happened. Everyone tweet the Department of Justice, this is stuff that should send these guys to federal prison.

Seriously this was not well thought out.. Everyone tweet the justice department about this insider trading... The conspiracies of being bought out are possible, but insider trading crimes obvious.

 

dude, can we stop going there?

 

Idk. Just trying to help people with some info / trying to filter it a bit

 

Code (CSharp):

1. - Reinstalls will not be charged
2. - Fraudulent installs or "install bombing" will not be charged
3. - Automation / test installs will not be charged
4. - Charities and charity bundles will not be charged.

How can that even be measured? There's no way it can be accurate and some guesstimate for something that will be directly charged isn't good enough.

Also on the definition of "distributors". So Microsoft and Gamepass can be a distributor? What about Valve/Steam, Gog or the 100 other places that act as distributors. Is the term just muddied?

 

Sorry but the twitter post contradicts with what is in the original post:

 

It's trivially simple to detect on mobile platforms thanks to all of the data that your phone is collecting about you.

 

• How can anyone be tolerant of the idea of charging money from a developer with the possibility of going bankrupt depending on the uncontrollable actions of third parties?
• Who even thought of monetizing installations?
• Why does Unity want to receive this money, and not real marketplaces that send installation data traffic?
• How will Unity become more popular from these actions?
• Why put us in such a shameful and uncomfortable position of uncertainty?

I just saw the latest news and I don’t know what to say, but I definitely need to say something.
It's all wrong.

 

Everything Unity has said so far indicates that YES, you pay for those extra installs.

However, the latest update from the Unity PR guy says they rethought this plan and: "Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation": (see here)

But, they also claim they don't collect any PII and that all tracking data is aggregated. Which means it's technically impossible for them to know that your 'new phone owners' already installed the game once before. To do that, they'd need to store something that personally identifies the player. Which breaches so many laws these days it's not even funny.

So honestly, it sounds like even Unity doesn't know the answer!

 

and you asked, and they responded that english is not their first language, so you continuing to badger them is unkind.

 

Steam is tracking the number of hours you play. All they need to do is see if it's greater than zero.

 

As pissed as I am towards Unity, this doesn't make any sense. Starfield is out, it was a smash success... unity had zero bearing on that.

 

again: setting aside the fact that it's impossible to know a first installation from a subsequent installation.
installation fee changes depending on tier, right? installation fee is supposedly paid by the distribution platform right?
how the hell is steam gonna keep up with my current unity tier subscription?

 

Any clarification on how you plan to handle developers with many downloads but low monetization where even with the PRO plan they would be paying 50-100% of their revenue to Unity?

 

What people often forget is making engines isn't very profitable, this is a very deep hole:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/U/unity-software/net-income

Epic makes most of their revenue from Fortnite, not Unreal Engine.

Unity only made their first profit in Q4 2022.

If Unity doesn't do something like this, they might not survive so it's either this bad option or no company long-term.

Crytek would never survive on engine licenses, they make the Crysis games and they've had to shut studios.

This kind of business model is deceptive and it plays out the same way every time: offer services at low or zero cost so people invest a lot of time and have their pipelines tied to the product. Then make it profitable by raising prices when it's hard for people to change.

For a dependable future, I think an open source engine is going to have to be the way to go. Even if this updated business model gets changed or reverted, it should frighten every game developer into realising that this can happen at any time.

Godot performance is terrible just now but there are other options, the following is based on CryEngine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_3D_Engine
https://github.com/o3de/o3de/

The problem is the devs all focus on the engine and forget about platform support. 2 years without build instructions for mobile:

https://github.com/o3de/o3de.org/issues/478

This new business model likely wouldn't affect most Unity devs in the near term but it still feels like moving to a different engine is best, even after I've invested over 8 years into Unity/C# game development. There are lots of things that bother me with Unity development like having to constantly upgrade the engine and handle so many package conflicts, I've wasted days of time just getting projects back up and running. No rush, I'll see how this plays out in the coming weeks.

 

can you explain that please?

 

Considering I've worked with literally every platform I think I do have a very good idea, but you're not a reasonable person and are just here to troll everyone. Congratz on getting a response, but that's the last one you will get.

 

to be fair Unity is being abusive to us

 

There is nothing fair about what you've just said. Unity's forum staff are not responsible for this.

 

Not this one dude on the forums.

 

And after he called devs f'n idiots for not monetizing, he needs to go. Unity abandoned its original vision and it needs to go back to that.

 

I don't think it's unreasonable for Unity to charge more for their software. Unity games generate billions of dollars, probably even close to a trillion, all for just the cost of a Pro license, which I'm sure could've been easily sidestepped through technicalities all these years. This is especially true when we all want Unity to grow and give us nicer stuff to work with.

That being said, none of us were expecting a revenue stream THIS evil...

 

So this sounds like in practice, it would be very hard if not impossible to track with ANY degree of accuracy.

Even regardless of how insane the decision itself is... This doesn't seem to even be possible in practice.

Why would anyone choose to do this over a tried-and-true rev-split model which is simple to audit and doesn't make everybody set the place on fire?

Honestly, it's just not a good plan, no matter how you look at it. Even if a rev-split plan turns out to be more expensive for the developer on average... I think most would prefer it just on account of the transparency. Better to pay more for something you can at least _calculate_ ahead of time.

 

Reported. This thread is about a serious issue with Unity the company and we want to talk about it not about your hate of immigrants.Stop derailing.

 

Unity yes, @Tautvydas-Zilys isn't. Please make the distinction.

 

Wasn't Unity's original vision to just make game development available to everyone?

 

It is, unfortunately quite legal for the same exact reasons your utilities can increase their rates with you without requiring you to sign a new contract.

Contracts of adhesion (Unity's general license agreement) are generally legal. The only people who'd have a real leg to stand on are the larger companies that negotiate individual contracts.

To add insult to injury, the unity license includes a forced arbitration clause, jurisdiction clause, class action lawsuit clause, and a severability clause...which means even if you have a case, you can't sue. You must go through arbitration in a jurisdiction as specified in the license agreement instead, and arbitrators aren't bound to follow case law...or even the law in general (at least in the U.S.).

 

My English is not good. I have decided to express my anger in Chinese. If anyone can read Chinese, please help me translate it accurately.

中国也有很多Unity的独立开发者，如果Unity官方决定实施这样的收费政策，我会号召所有独立开发者抵制Unity。
就说这么多。

 

Have you seen any details on the definition of the word "reinstall" in this context? Does it mean "the same user reinstalling the game on the same device" or does it mean "the same user reinstalling the game on another device"? Like, if the user buys a new desktop PC and installs the game again, do I pay the fee? If that user gets a Steam Deck, do I pay the fee a third time?

 

even if they reverse all of this. the fact that they did it in the first place is what makes me think twice about making another game with their engine. the damage is done.

I work in commissions for developers whose revenue comes from patron/subscribestar/similar crowdfunding applications. those devs have teams of +5 devs/artists. so they barely make a living.
with this, they are capped at 18k earnings per month, otherwise they will be trapped in this non sense pricing model. (18k x 12 = 216k)
and because every 3 months they release updates of their games. and their games get pirated since it is a patreon/subscribestar/itch.io release, their games get easily leaked.

to put this more clear, they make barely more than 18k per month, which is more than 200k a year. and their player base count surely is more than 200k, since they update the same game more than 4 times a year.
with a player base of 50k, updating the game 4 times a year, results in 200k installs. and guess what, they update the game more than 4 times, meaning the install numbers are way more than 200k. and the game gets pirated/leaked since it is a patreon/itch.io release, so the player base is more than 50k per release, surely.
75k x 4 = 300k x 0.20 = 60k.
60k just for updating the game. (not counting steam sales, because yeah, they also sell their game on steam)
this is just insane.

As I said, I work doing commissions for alot of devs that work in a similar situation. this new pricing model takes them out of the game.

Paying for every time my players install their game? really? how is this ok in any way?. it is like paying a fee for any time someone drinks from a glass I made and sell.

What do we expect from a CEO that once proposed charging for the ammo used in videogames.

 

they don't fully understand what is going on, as english is not their native language, but we see you. We are all angry, but at the Unity execs who are taking our livelihoods, not an employee who has no control and is trying to help.

 

I'm surprised it took this long for the spammers to get involved.

 

It was to "democratize" game development.

That all went out the window when they went public and got their current CEO (the former CEO of EA). He's really good at... extracting short term profits, but his track record with the long term finances is uh...not great, to say the least.

 

It was only a matter of time but yeah, you would think it would have happened 10 pages ago.

 

@Mike-Geig @LeonhardP Based on the replies in this thread and on all social media, what everyone would actually like you to do is internally advocate for the reversal of this policy.

 

So Unity had a reliable way to monitor illegal copies of unity games all along, but they choose this business model instead of selling that incredible feature?

Sometimes I wonder if they're aware that we're devs and that we're the last people who will believe them.

 

Yeah, because this dude does?

I hate to be that guy, but...

edit: sorry, I lied, I love to be that guy...

edit-edit: oh and one more thing... English isn't my first language either...

 

"After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)

He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.
But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC."

Unfortunately, it's not possible for Unity's system to know it's an initial installation or not. It's trivial for someone to work out (manually or instantly with a tool) what files/folders are added/modified, what registry entries are created, what services are started, and just dispose of it all between iterations of an attack. Also trivial on some platforms to randomize hardware identifiers. Also trivial to automate the process and throw it to a botnet and/or USB, have it running silently on a bunch of computers wherever, maybe just loading up the computers at the library, school and so on. And then trivial to share that tool like "Unity Developer Bankrupter Pro Version 1.0" available to anyone who knows where to look.

Even the fact that this approach to monetizing installation opens up a "measures vs. countermeasures" infinite feedback loop of effort is ridiculous. I also wonder how much money Unity's legal department will have to be shelling out, because it's not like they'll just ignore everyone that ends up without having a choice except telling them to go f themselves.

 

Why would I trust Unity to correctly count only genuine, unique installs? There's nothing to be nice about. This model is just not workable technically. Nor financially for a lot of games. These clarifications don't mean anything. Proposing something ridiculous and ambiguous just so you can "clarify" that it isn't as bad as it could have been does not mean you're still not shafting those affected by the proposal. This was predicted early on in this thread already.