Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Yes. And it applies to all unity games. Even ones released years ago.

 

Ya, that's 1% of 200k. I already pay 30% to steam and 15% to android. And that 2k upgrade covers all games up to 1 mill in revenue, each.

 

I find it astonishing that a company of this size would make such a poor decision of this magnitude.

I'm equally surprised that the stock prices haven't yet taken a hit as a result.

 

What are you talking about? I'm not talking about a hypothetical, I'm talking about a real game that makes over $1M in revenue over a 12 month period and has over 1M installs. We've had Unity Pro licenses for over a decade.

We will now be charged tens of thousands of dollars a year out of the blue for something that costs Unity $0 for just this one game that was released in Early Access in 2015 and 1.0 on Steam and consoles in 2021.

 

Yeah that's the big, giant, obvious red flag.

Their employees are putting out what they're told by Unity execs, but to us developers who have a good idea on how this would be implemented and the limitations involved in detecting legitimate from illegitimate installs...yeah we see the PR BS a mile away.

Which unfortunately erodes trust in the actual employees that have to get out in front of this meaning at the end of the day, we cannot trust anything any Unity employee says, but only what the actual terms of the updated license agreement say.

 

I agree. The only way I'm willing to start new projects in Unity is if the leadership that was responsible for this decision gets replaced. "Walk backs" and/or apologies are not enough

When I purchased a subscription, I did it under good faith that there would be no surprise hidden fees like $0.2 for every install past some random threshold. What's stopping Unity from raising that price even further or changing the thresholds? Why should anyone trust Unity when it's so easy for them to renege on their own terms?

Is Unity going to announce more surprise hidden fees at a later date that will apply to all past Unity games?

It's mind boggling that someone gave this pricing model the greenlight

 

Spend a bit of time around here and you'll start seeing more of them.

 

The game came out 7 years ago and still makes over 1 million every 12 months?

 

I'm reading demos are excluded as long as that demo is not capable of continuing to the whole game. In other words, no loopholes.

 

https://github.com/Anthogonyst/UnityToGodot

 

That just cant be legal. Not only that, what if you remove your game from the market, but unity is still detecting installs, will Unity hound you down for the rest of your life now? WTF.

 

"Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee."

 

Great, glad it's probably legal for you to do it in some jurisdictions. Congratulations, hopefully people move away from betting their livelyhood on Unity3D because I can only see more bullshit fees and costs popping up as you try to stop circling the drain quarter by quarter, -$200m by -$200m. Effective immediately I will never recommend Unity3D to anyone ever again because I cannot trust this software not to dramatically change retroactively their pricing. To be honest, after the past 5 years of development of Unity3D as an engine I found it difficult to continue to recommend anyway. DOTS is worthless, SRP has been an unfinished disaster still and hardly anything has improved. Certainly not the terrain system! Not even close to enough compared to competitors. Basic features and functionality have been left in a medicore state while others continue to invest in helping make developers successful like Epic Games. What is $500 million in revenue every quarter even being spent on at Unity Technologies??

Truly ridiculous situation. I hope everyone, including myself when an exit is viable, leaves Unity3D to safer pastures. I knew one day this would all go downhill when it went public and turned out only burned money. I wish I could leave today but it's just impossible to port such a longterm huge project to some other platform/engine. Beware all, this is only the begining of the fees they'll come out with I imagine.

 

Yes. https://store.steampowered.com/app/337320/Paint_the_Town_Red/

 

ok so then you understand that revenue doesnt typically mean net income (unless they clarified it somewhere i havent seen) in your case youre earning 55% per unit sold, not counting taxes. that skews your 1% of 200k because youre actually paying a higher % after you account for everything that chips away at your sale.

 

You've seen what the lawler said, the people at Unity think they can just bend the laws like clay.

 

Unity is dead, UE is in power, and the world is prosperous at the age of sixty.

 

Unreal or Godot, which one is easier to learn for Unity devs?

 

@IllTemperedTunas
I know, I was trying to suggest a compromise. One that would be less confusing and worrisome as hell.

 

This is at least desktop, so imagine the vast majority of your downloads will have a new purchase that goes with it. If you have this on mobile or webgl as a f2p or something, you might get slammed. I do wish they would take into account the store pages take.(Steam/Android)

 

hahahaah xD

 

Just wanted to sign in and say a hearty "Get bent" to all of the soulless husks running Unity. You're not fooling anybody with your weasel-words, and your contempt for developers is clear.

Today is the last day I'll ever use Unity.

 

I think one of the things that’s getting lost in the dollars and cents comparisons is the psychology of running a business. It’s all about risk management and trying to get to something you can try and forecast. Even if this change is guaranteed cheaper for everyone than a revenue share (which I’m not arguing that it is), the psychology of it is brutal.

Let’s imagine two examples of having a contractor renovate my kitchen in my house.

Contractor A does great work, but comes in 15% over estimate when it’s time to pay the bill. Maybe there were some unexpected problems, some bad material, whatever. Am I delighted to pay 15% more than I expected? No. But I get it, and I’m happy with the work, and some things have expected bounds of costs. I can plan for that, and I’ll probably use them again.

Now let’s imagine Contractor B. They also do great work, and when it comes time to pay the bill, they let me know “We’ve made a new policy. Retroactive to existing projects, we’re charging you 10% of the money we had to turn down from other projects because we were busy working on your kitchen.” The total price over the estimate is only 8% higher than the estimate, so you paid less than contractor A… but you’re probably furious!

And when it comes time to build a deck, who in their right mind would ever go back to Contractor B. As unlikely as it is, what if they turn down a million dollar renovation because their busy working on your deck. How much would I be charged then? Who could accept that kind of risk? I’ll stick with Contractor A, prices may at times be higher than anticipated, maybe even likely higher than contractor B, but the risk profile is within bounds I can accept. Even if contractor B backs down from that extra charge, the size of the miscalculation of our relationship would make me think twice about using them again.

 

Guess I will loose my job now<
Thanks Unity

 

As an indie developer, it's a huge risk to be thrown out on the street. Imagine doing 200k in 5M of download... then unity fee begins. You then make another 200k in another 5M downloads, but this time, you have to pay Unity $280k which you don't have! The risk of finding yourself on the street because of unity is real. It might happen, so it will happen. Stay AWAY for this fraud!

 

My lawyer replied:

That's only, like, your opinion, man.

 

Unity's legal team should consult ChatGPT more. It's already shown to pass the BAR exam with higher scores than most humans do anyways.

 

Well ya, but epic charges based on revenue, so it's kind of the same stuff really.

 

IANAL, but even I can see that there are a multitude of ways to attack this scheme.

There's a very strong argument to be had that the only good faith understanding that "Unity may add or change fees at any time" means that they may change the subscription price, add or remove tiers, and other changes along those lines. Especially problematic for Unity is how aggressively they marketed themselves against Unreal for being free of royalties. This is a double whammy that hurts them along both consumer protection and contractual interpretation lines. I think pretty much any lawyer could argue that Unity is barred from retroactively adding anything that even looks like a royalty with these facts.

And Unity certainly would not have the right to add unreasonable fees. They cannot, for example, say that you now owe them a flat 50 million per month. That would never be enforceable. So another avenue is to argue that the fees are not reasonable. Edge cases where a developers can end up owing more than they bring in are almost certainly unreasonable, but the most likely scenario there is that those edge cases get patched up rather than the whole thing being voided. The whole "trust us bro" aspect of counting installs could be argued to make the entire scheme unreasonable, I imagine.

 

Scumbags.

 

Yes, of course there's certain types of games that this affects way more than us. Regardless though, this is an obscene overreach out of the blue. Some people might see a company with a game making $1M+ as being able to eat these costs, but for some companies after store cuts and expenses the profit is not necessarily anywhere near that original number and this unknown mystery monthly bill will genuinely affect our business going forward.

If they were only asking for this from future games and gave 1-2 years advance warning that would be one thing, but all existing Unity games? I still can't wrap my head around this decision after several hours.

 

While they can count the number of install and put a price on it (since you are showing that price somewhere on your website or steam), how would they determine you got in game store item for microtransaction and how much you made out of it?

 

Welcome to the fray, Benji. I believe that is *EDIT: inconsistent* (wrong), according to all prior communications from Unity: Marc Whitten, Zilys, and Geig.

At this moment that, what is being non-desired, is not possible Benji. Apple has made install > uninstall > reinstall a no-persistent-data-available situation. Unity will need to lobby Apple Inc to change its OS for this billing non-desire.

Another point - if a user migrates their apps across devices, all their dozens of Unity games will incur new $0.20 fees, for games with over 200k lifetime installs .. a bonanza for Unity. Another pro-Unity-profit side-effect is "lifetime installs" will be dramatically inflated due to the commonality of users owning multiple compatible devices.

 

For users who called me a Troll, for saying, Unity would run it into the ground, due to Greed..... and lack of experience.... can I say I told you so?


So glad my main game was in Unreal, and I spent the last 20 yrs using Unreal... I used Unity since Unity 2, and my only regret was, that more people didn't listen and some lives will be ruined.

Sad to see that.. California, is known for this behavior, so this is prolly why the company was moved there.. The rest of the country does not condone this in the US, so for people making comments about America.. this happens only in places like California... Which is why that state is so full of homeless people.

Unity sad to see you do this to people who supported you from the start... Unity 2.. my kids where learning Unity and UE.... but they won't be releasing anything with Unity now, with this type of business practice..

Free mobile games will get hurt the most and smaller indies.... 200k downloads... for free games, will eat there little profits... Just like the 3 rendering pipeline madness, a ton of people jumped Ship.... This will be even worse..... alot of us long time users of Unity have said no one is steering the ship and this confirms it even more... Sad to see.

Sorry for you users who did not listen and to those who will be effected by your lively hood... So glad I didn't pick Unity for main current game.. . I dodged that bullet...

 

It's so incredibly disappointing to see this. We (your customers) feel so betrayed by you. We championed you. We gave you time and patience to catch up with engines that offer so much more value. We BELIEVED in you. And you let us down.

 

So let's say I made a game in Unity, and uploaded the build to itch.io to sell.
There's no DRM or purchase verification. A player can buy my game and copy the files ad infinitum, hand out copies to friends and whatnot.
How in the world does Unity detect this "piracy"? How is it even theoretically possible?
(It's not.)

 

The backend engineers that worked on this forum deserve raises. Surprised there's been no interruption of service lol.

 

I think if people want to be angry about anything, it's the lack of communication/clarification & short notice. We could have started this conversation a year ago and collected feedback and made clarifications. Maybe some grandfathering might have helped some of the mid size studios that might get crushed by tight margins + this.

 

This is the most brain-dead thing I've ever heard.

 

The EU forced Apple to change to USB-C. They are going to eat Unity alive.

 

Assuming each individual game is still making over $200k a year.

 

How did you get to that number of 46k?
Because assuming you met the threshold, of 1 million downloads, for the other 1 million downloads you will have to pay the fee, but it's "new installs PER MONTH" so assuming your game gets 100k downloads per month (1.2m year), with pro plan that is $.15 per install = $180k per 1.2million installs a year. With bots downloading your game, piracy, players reinstalling your game multiple times for any reason, updates etc. lets say you get an average of 5 installs per sale, or 500k installs per month, that will be $.075 per install x 500k x 12 months= $450k!!! for 1.2 million copies sold

 

No thanks, not me. I choose to be angry about this thing they're doing and not how it was communicated.

 

past the first threshold it isn't required to get 200K per year you will get charged for every new installs ad vitam aeternam

 

This new pricing plan is a nightmare for free-to-play games.
And most of the players of these games are free players.
This means you have to pay for a huge number of installs that you don't gain any money from them.
I think many free-to-play game devs will change their engines from now.

 

I wouldn't be so sure. Both on the strength of their claim, the enforceability of what they are trying to do, and also the element of chance, the lawyers and judges involved, etc. that most lawsuits have.

I don't imagine there's any jurisdiction where, say, a legal team on the caliber of Bethesda's wouldn't at least have a good crack of the whip (at the very least).

 

The file that executes their anti-piracy algorithm is named "Trust_me_bro"

 

I can't imagine this is how it's really supposed to work. That would be insane.

 

Unity could lobby Apple or Google or Steam to take DOWN your game.

 

This is why I been saying as a long time Unity and Unreal user, I said for other devs to learn other engines, never put all your eggs in one basket.... Companies like Unity I seen this coming for years, I have said this many times on some Discords, for users to stop relying on just Unity as a developer, because they have no idea what they are doing, they do not make games, or have the experience to run a proper business, they do not care about developers who makes games.... Epic has supported even Unity devs, which is why they give grants, free plug ins and much more....

Many users switched engines, yes it will slow you down, but UE, is alot better engine over all anyways.