Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

How is it inifinitely more expensive? Again if you assume 1 install per purchase of a game, Unreal is still 1000% more expensive on a $20 game. This scales. If your game is $60 than unreal is 30000% more expensive? The same user would have to install the game they already purchased 300 times.

 

guys, I’m sharing my company’s invoices for January 2024:
Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Unity Runtime Fee $5,600,000
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my indie studio is dying

 

This doesn't address how they define an install though.
1. What's to stop someone with a VPN and virtual machines spoofing fresh installs?
2. I play games I bought 10 years ago - are developers going to be paying for new users who install games after buying new PCs and moving house 10 years later? Even if it's a negligible amount, it's still a bill I'd rather not have to worry about a decade after my game's had its hayday.
3. What happens to developers who make a free game but rely on donations? The number of installs will be in the millions by the time they get close to the 200k threshold. And that's not addressing how point #2 compounds this.
4. How will Unity know if a copy is legitimate or pirated? Indie devs don't put much if any effort into anti-piracy features so it'll be indistinguishable.

Your numbers seem to be primarily based on the premise that you only get charged once per paying customer. This isn't the case.

 

Do you get a sense of pride for being the "calm" voice? I highly doubt you yourself believe this change is justified, but witty retorts to other developers doesn't make you cooler. And yeah, don't insult the Unity forum staff, but do be outraged.

 

And then for a tool to take that network communication and just generate new hardware identifiers with repetition of whatever it did. At that point, the runtime is entirely out of the equation, making it even harder to detect a background service doing it over and over again because of minimal resource consumption (i.e. ready for botnet). Again it's the measures vs. countermeasures thing. Unity will be like "we'll do this to prevent that" and someone will then be "oh yeah, well then we'll do this to get around that" and Unity will be like.. and so on.

 

Two million installations shouldn't happen overnight. If it does you're likely to hit way more than just two million.

 

Eat less.

 

No, you are absolutel 100% off your face wrong.

Most of these projects are early access, most of these projects are crowd funded on Kickstarter and Patreon.

This means they are putting our free builds, demos, updated builds, WebGL, CONSTANTLY. They could end up having LITERALLY a million+ downloads a year. That's what we have, that's what we have achieved, over a million downloads including our WebGL.Meaning we are sunk deep in the hole with $200k and then we will overblow that 200k downloads instantly.

We have to, too. We MUST have WebGL, we MUST have free demos that contain the whole game. It is unnegotiable and the majority of Unity developers have to do this too. We are the NORM. Our downloads are insanely inflated. So you are 100% off your rocker wrong, the amount of downloads we have end up hilarious putting us int he red... owing Unity all of our revenue and then some.

This is complete bullshit but it's exactly how their table works.

 

unity offers right now: +5yo features (experimental) that you can find on any other game engine that works better like water system xD, terrain tools, TAA xD, global illumination etc... But hey, the bugs are also +5yo so you have pretty old features and bugs to play with, Do you want more?

 

Godot has all of that?

 

As the unity employee said earlier the transition to pro is effective only the next month you will be charged full for the first non pro month

 

So, the problems I see:

1. New pricing is unclear. People here want to make games (and probably money, you know) and not solve math problems and legal charades to understand the pricing model. Any newcomer will end up in confusion either.

2. Unpredictability of the new pricing. Everyone wants the pricing model to be easily predictable. New changes make the pricing of Unity engine depend on user actions, not developer actions. Developers don't control the users. No way to plan the business.

3. Installation count cannot be tracked precisely. Looks like Unity changes this, but we don't really know what they will end up with. If these are purchases now, it fixes the issue, but looks like they still want to track installs on multiple devices, which cannot be tracked with 100% accuracy.

4. Possible legal issues. Install tracking may or may not break GDPR, COPPA etc. "We say that no law is broken" is not an option here. The engine can simply become unusable for many devs because of that.

5. Already existing games were planned with other pricing model in mind. They should not be affected unless these games will switch to a newer engine version.

6. Trust. A lot can be written here... The new pricing alone is a mess. How can we trust an IT company to make great products, if their top management can't plan pricing changes well? Penalizing already existing games whose developers did nothing wrong is another issue. "We make you pay based on our own proprietary install tracking system" sounds extremely suspicious as well. Having negative feedback from the community also affects reputation of the company.

7. Social consequences. Some indy devs mightstop making games with Unity because of the above. Some studios might avoid using Unity engine for their new projects. As a result, some amount of Unity devs might lose their jobs in next 2-3 years.This is bad for both Unity devs and Unity itself.

Now, an example of how pricing changes have to be done:

"Starting January 1. 2024 we will charge extra fee of N percents for the games made with Unity Engine released after January 1. 2024. This will only applies to companies making 200,000 U$D and above in revenue.
Also, Unity Plus license is no more available for purchase".

Additional payment added, no current dev harmed. No negative feedback. Everyone's happy.

Looks like Unity Technologies were spending too much this year or somehow lost a lot of money. And now they simply want us devs to pay for their faults asap.

 

Careful, everyone. Unity wants not only a monthly subscription fee but also royalties. They want it all. Do not be happy now if Unity backpedals and introduces royalties like Unreal, because they also want that monthly subscription.

Either royalties or subscription, but not both, and this is an engine that advertises itself as having "no royalties", so the only good solution is going back to how it was before. Want more money? Increase the cost of the subscription and be done with it.

 

Unity is a monthly fee, Unreal is a Quarterly fee. Also Epic only accrues for sales (not installs) so there's a 1:1 relationship between sales and revshare and they start counting at 0 when you hit the mark. Unity will bill you for the whole thing retroactively, so when you hit 1.000.001 M, you will pay for that whole 1M, in epic you only pay for the one.

 

Maybe besides health care bills, Indiegogo can have a second purpose: financing indie game developers so they can pay Unity's bullshit fees.

 

Devs are idiots according to the CEO. Oh wait, only if you're not as money hungry and short sighted as he is.

 

How can you claim that paying Unity $46k extra come Jan 1st 2024 is 'a good thing' compared to how it is today where you don't have to pay Unity anything extra at all?

I could maybe understand the claim if you accept Unity needs to make more money AND this only applied to new games created with Unity 2023 LTS, but NOT when it applies to any game, made at any time in the past, with any version of Unity.

The only reason Unity are getting that extra money from you is because they said 'give me more money', thats it, they offered you nothing new, gave you no new feature, drove no new sales, nothing, nada. The only thing they did was create a new T&C that says 'give me money'

 

I just wrote a script that stands up a VM image, installs steam and installs Tabletop Simulator, then purges the VM, and repeats. It takes about 6 minutes per cycle (and can *definitely* be optimized). and I've got a rack of 20 machines that I can deploy this to.

by my math, I alone, can cost Berserk Games about $1000 per day in "new" installs if I so choose.

Edit: To clarify: there is no way to differentiate "installed for the first time ever" and "installed on a new machine for the first time"... Arguably there's no way to know if I've installed it for a second time on the same machine if I make sure it leaves no files behind *and* I cycle important identifiers like my MAC Address (though, at that point, its easier to just bomb the VM and start over).

Second Edit: I was trying to reply to your previous message, not this one. This forum's gotten crazy to use.

 

guys, they want us to distribute our source project and have the players build it

 

1. I agree, it could be a problem if people figure out how to use it maliciously.

2. You would need to install a $20 game 10x per user to match the cost of Unreal.

3. Not sure donations would be counted as revenue? It's only really an issue if Unity catches you, I assume people will come up with all kinds of ingenious ways to report $0 revenue on their games. Unity doesn't actually know how much revenue you make until they investigate.

You can still have inifinite free downloads if you're under the revenue threshold.

4. Good question. I'll assume Unity says it's "super secure" while it's not. Then they'll appeal individual cases. Some developers will get destroyed by this process, as unity will falsely assume pirated downloads are legitimate.

 

After wasting all of that money buying tools NONE of us could use, and now you're trying to recoup that cost by doing this BULLCRAP!!!

 

So only be purely being malicious can you make it more expensive...

That's true of any multiplayer game.

 

Then you need to eat food with negative price

 

I've gotten money from a Class Action suit against an employer.

 

Believe me, it's the first thing on my to-do list after this episode. I'm starting tomorrow. Even if this horrible idea is walked back I can't trust the company not to try something else that can completely destroy the plans I carefully laid out for my future in game development. I was foolish not to have started learning years ago.

 

If you are making over 200k, wouldn't you just upgrade to the pro plan? That's only 2k a year and you are clear until 1 million revenue. That's only 1% of 200k, that's not unreasonable I think.

 

Because Unity increasing their operating revenue is good for indie devs who are never going to have to pay a cent on an install.

 

I know that was meant as a joke.
And that salary missing on that list is probably a oversight.

Yet, as a fellow Indie Dev, I felt that.

 

And a fun tidbit there is that it will be Berserk Games' responsibility to prove fraud. Unity themselves said that.

 

It doesn't look like it...

 

Yes, in a civil law dispute, its balance of proof.

Unity says x number of installs and has proof, you will need to say y number of installs and have proof.

 

I don't think it is retroactive? That makes no sense, otherwise developers would de-list there games when it hit 999,999 downloads.

Again, per install is cheaper than % revenue share in cases where you make more than $0.93 per install.

 

They don't have any consistency in their responses

 

I'd like to address some issues that are also related to me. I have a mobile game that has reached nearly 40 million downloads. However, due to poor monetization techniques and the decisions made by my publisher regarding scaling the game without meeting revenue targets, the revenue is negative, ranging from $300,000 to $400,000 when subtracting the advertising expenses.

So, do they have to pay 0.2 cents per user for the non-profitable game?

Another point to consider is that one of my other games was pirated by a Chinese app store market, and approximately 50,000 new users are appearing every day. Their data is still accessible through my analytics service. How will Unity determine that these users are pirated and won't be charged?

 

So you've made over $1,000,000 in revenue then? $0.01 per download seems reasonable.

Remember you pay nothing if you haven't hit the threshold.

 

That is incredibly short-sighted.

Unity are showing their colors - they are aggressively monetizing in a way that will actively harm a subset of devs and drive them away.

Just because you aren't in that subset THIS TIME, be sure that they'll be back for more, and maybe next time it will be your turn...

 

They can't long-term. The entire history of software proves you can't stop a motivated actor from exploiting it.

 

But why charge people again at all? I've been paying for Pro/Plus for years. Suddenly that's not good enough anymore? What's Unity's justification for making these changes?

 

wrong a user can install multiple time your game on multiple devices that make this system unpredictable and dangerous in lot of cases

 

Publish it in Asset Store let's battle begin )

 

I mean yeah but 1 mill revenue could happen in a year once we hit steam, not even that unlikely. At that point, Unreal would have been immensely cheaper for us. Not to mention we were Unity Pro+ and we AGREED to the original stipulations/contract. It is literally illegal for unity to change the terms like this.

Hopefully, before we start hitting 1 mil we can port over to godot and F***ing junk Unity. We've developed a ton of bespoke plugins, tools, etc... we have actually pioneered some tech that others are just now copying. All that, we're having to junk and leave behind.

 

You should have had this done before the announcement.

 

Yes you would have to pay 20 cent per install even if you're losing money but generating revenue.

 

This is clearly a greedy arrogant move. They think they got us by the b*lls.
The funny thing is that Unity still need us for them to make money. If we all leave, they won't make a dime.
@Unity, remember there's Godot that is prob more accessible now than current state of Unity and Unreal that has outclassed you long time ago! Do not play with fire.

 

But there is technically no way to track this. And that’s it.

 

Yeah that's a non fixed % revenue share. Just do a revenue share and not this nebulous black box install count nonsense then.

 

No, that's the exact illogical conclusion that is the problem here. A million installs does not mean a million in revenue.

 

The retroactive deal and the install bombing risk though is the worst. You can't just say "well okay, I'll just not use Unity from January onwards", because this bullshit still puts everything you did before that time at risk. There is no way they will get through with this without lawsuits coming from every direction, it's a borderline end-user ransom tactic.

 

Wait is it based on what unity tier you HAVE, or what unity tier you HAD at the time you made the project? If I did everything by the book, and paid full price for unity while I was developing, and then moved on to something else, I'm going to be evaluated and charged as if I am a unity personal user? That doesn't seem right.