Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Does it will suprise you if it was the case? This is what I understand the mechanism of "Unity runtime fee threasholds" if you have a 12-month window with more than 200K$ profits it "validate" your eligibility to the scam

 

Ha ha guys, guys, wouldn't it be funny if they were just using us to secretly focus test what sort of price increase scheme we would be most okay with, and started off with something outrageous to generate maximum engagement?

That'd be so funny.

 

I legitimately did not believe my brother when he explained these changes to me but holy s*** I just read it for myself.

What finance-bro scum bag came up with this trash?

Walk this back 100% or I will never use this engine for anything (well maybe game jams, but certainly not anything I would sell)

Lunatic sh*t, truly.

 

Numbers assume a Unity Enterprise License.

Downloads:

1,000,000 = $0
1,100,000 ($0.125) = $12,500
1,500,000 ($0.06) = $12,500 + $24,000 = $36,500
2,000,000 ($0.02) = $36,500 + $10,000 = $46,500

then it's only $10,000 per million downloads after that.

Again the decision to switch engines depends on your pricing model. If you're charging a flat fee per install, than Unity is going to be better value than Unreals 5% revenue share, as $0.01 per install is going to be better than 5% of a purchase in most cases.

If you're freemium or ads based, you're screwed.

 

Yes it is. You need to make 200k in the last 12 months. If you drop below that, it's back to costing you nothing.

 

Is the new fee calculated on per-game basis or per-studio/company basis?
So, if let's say I make two games, one free and one paid, both exceed the minimum install count and the paid one also exceeds the revenue treshold, will I ever need to pay for any installs of the free game?

 

They also could shut your Unity license, down as well.... making it hard to use it or update if needed.. Steam, Apple, Google are all involved with California, they are all corrupt.....

This is why Epic fought Apple and helped lead the way to drop % costs.... Apple, Google, MS, Epic are all below 15% and lower now, Steam , Sony and Unity are the only greedy ones left....

California is one of the worst states, when dealing with this type of nonsense... I can only imagine, popular games like RUST, Valhelm and others, going nuts since there bottom line will be nailed...Same with F2P mobile games, this will cause many mobile games to be turned off.... Watch..

 

You're assuming PCs are the only medium the software is installed on. Apple is extremely against tracking users in this fashion without permission, and if they catch Unity doing so, they'll get booted from the App Store.

 

The worst part of this is the inherent unpredictability of of this revenue model.

If it were based on sales, one could factor that in. But this model could so easily spiral into a business destroying cost - completely unpredictably and out of control of the developer.

How can anyone agree to such a potential liability?

Also, the way that this has been rolled out breaks the very trust that would be required for an investment in Unity in the future.

In effect, Unity has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted - the very trust that developers would need to build a career on.

After this, could Unity be trusted not to raise the cost of installs - or further 'enhance' the forced monitoring of players (beyond this counting and qualifying of installs)?

A real revenue based model yes, but the potential liability of download hocus-pocus is creepy stuff - after so much investment in Unity perhaps it is time to run screaming.

 

Per Game...

 

Do we have an explicit statement which say that? I assume that we are necessarily in the worst case scenrario regarding this bag of S*** >.>

 

I believe it's per project.

 

Lol - lawyers always like to talk big, but that's not how the law works buddy.

YOU'RE doing business in the EU, so YOU have to comply. Not the other way around. Of course, you have the option to stop operating in all jurisdictions except California - good luck to you

 

Neither does switching subscription tier: the lower fees would only apply the next billable month. Not to mention probably having to take a loan to cover the Unity fee until Steam's payment arrives.

 

Everyone who is in a position to actually have to do the math for this has seen how the math isn't coming out in their favour and everyone else should be seeing this as a massive breach of trust on Unity's part.

 

They talk about "exchange of value", but there is no value in an install, just the sale itslef has value. So they are expecting us to pay for something we cannot control and get no value of a lot of the time.

I don't understand the reason why such an unpredictable metric is being used in the first place. It's completely insane.

Just do a revenue share like unreal. I wouldn't even be mad if they did that in the first place. You get money based on the success of a game. Easy as that!

 

If you want to. I think that if your making over 1 million in revenue a year, paying .15 per install, eventually dropping to .02 per install is probably not going to sink you. I'd be interested in a year seeing if you would have ended up paying more or less with epic though.

 

Here we are trying to introduce logic into what is clearly a commercial strategy of Unity in order to raise revenue in a way that is disproportionate, irrational and clearly harmful to the interests of developers. Let us remember that, if we start from an illogical presumption, all the conclusions we obtain will be illogical. The people at Unity who have decided on this strategy have no idea what this business is. They only think about investors and how to get money from anywhere. They had a serious problem; now they have two much more serious ones.

Personally I'm leaving Unity if they don't stop this madness.

 

Review bombing will now be install bombing. Costing you money
Can easily spoof your computer and keep running it 'for the first time'.
Also, people running your game on different devices will keep costing you money from a person that only purchased one copy of your game.

And for piracy, well, you'll just have to trust unity to detect them as pirate versions.
Single player PC games get pirated a lot.

 

Haha, just read this part of the Unity release

"This program enables deeper partnerships with Unity to succeed across the entire game lifecycle"

After this utterly egregious gouging attempt, the last thing I want is a 'deeper partnership' with Unity

 

It's on the blog post graphic, 200k in the last 12 months.

 

Yeah I'm no lawyer either. But I agree with these points. Increasing a subscription price is one thing and can be understandable. This is totally different

 

Chill guys, every Unity game will come with Denuvo now

 

I don't know what partnership they're talking about. I'm sure a partnership is supposed to benefit both parties

 

The answer is: not this S***. This move will definitely not increase their bottom line, regardless of what they come up with cause of all the good will they just lost. If it does end up doing so, shame on those that had the reasonable option to switch engines that didn't (i.e. only a couple of months into a project).

 

So people that charge less for their game and earn less will end up paying more % while people that charge more and earn more will pay less % to unity?
What if the game is being sold for 0.2$ And blows up? Will everything go to unity after 1 million sales?

 

Unity's new fees leave game developers fuming (axios.com)

At least they're rolling some things back like gamepass and apparently the multiple installs bs. This is still ridiculous that things had to make everyone panick.

 

If you kept selling 1.2 million units per year you would be paying $1,200,000 in royalties to Unreal (1,200,000 units * $20 * $.05), right?

 

Unity was part of my life, a part of me... It was where I started and developed as a person and as a professional... I'm very sad about this, and it's sad to see something that was so dear to me and so important, following this path... I will never be able to trust this company again, and it is very likely that we are witnessing the REAL beginning of Unity's death... Even if she backs down or some court makes her change her mind, no one else you will be able to trust this company. All because of the petulance, greed and hunger for power coming from some scoundrels in suits...

 

It doesn't explicitly say that it will stop if you don't meet the 12-month 200K anymore, and when you ctrl+f for the word "stop" you get nothing

 

If I die then do my wife and kids still owe you $0.20 per install?

 

"This program enables deeper partnerships with Unity to succeed across the entire game lifecycle"

How about we stopped using any other service beside the editor because you keep end of lifing everything you create. News flash, we DON'T WANT a deeper partnership with you. Why on earth would we want a "deeper partnership" with a company that can't even stick to supporting products they create? Then you raise your prices out of the blue (yeah why is no one talking about the fact that they literally JUST RAISED THE MONTHLY PRICING), then on top of that your charging a monthly fee PLUS install fees? You guys have officially lost your minds.

The privacy aspect of this alone will surely inspire a class action lawsuit.

 

Yet they have blatantly stated they can't track which installs are initial installs and which are repeated installs.

 

Imagine a mobile game made on Personal edition that cost $1, and sales 200K copies ($200K revenue) over 10 months (bulk of 200K was earned over the first few months). But sales slumped quickly and have been dead for a while now, so they just want to offer it for free while they work on new stuff with what $ they made. But then it suddenly booms in popularity and gets 2M installs from new players the very next month (streamer X played it and all their followers got excited). They’ve crossed the min thresholds in both lifetime installs and 12mo revenue already, so now they suddenly owe Unity $400K (2M x $0.20) which is $200K MORE THAN THEY MADE, gross.

It’s an unsustainable business model. The indie studio just bankrupted because of an unpredictable cost spike due to a huge increase in popularity of their once successful (but now free) game.

Game over.

This fee structure might as well have been thought out by a child, and anyone involved in getting this through needs to be completely ostracized from the company.

Make me CEO of Unity. I could do better than this blindfolded.

 

Don't even have to do that. Buy -> install -> refund.

Also there is blackmail potential. What's to stop someone creating a bot network installing a game over and over and demanding ransom from developers?

 

The only issue here is it assumes that for each month, the rates do not reset, which is not obvious (in fact, the example in the FAQ implies the rates DO reset each month)

 

See where it says revenue threshold on the far left? Look underneath it.

 

It won't drop to .02 per install. That install counter resets monthly. We won't have over 100,000 installs per month so we will be almost certainly paying 15c for every install.

 

Your terrain system is a joke, your baked lighting was embarrassing 10 years ago, the animations systems are clunky and dated, the engine crashes every hour, there are glitches and error messages all over the engine, we haven't had an exciting new feature in over 5 years and BILLIONS are spent annually on this sh*t?

Hey Unity

What the f*ck do you do with your revenue? Why should anyone want to give u money if you're incapable of providing ANYTHING back?

 

This is such a horrible pricing model. It has 0 protections against pirating, multiple re-installs, and malicious users.
If you have 1.5 million installs but 400k of those are pirated/malicious, you're just f**ked.

I'm now counting the minutes until a class action lawsuit is levied against Unity for this, and I will be part of it.

 

They should stop the half measures.

Just grant themselves the legal rights to the souls of our firstborns, their firstborns, and so on unto eternity...

 

Don't worry, the bot network will be ran by Unity itself

 

yeah I saw it but for me when you pass step 1 your stuck at step 2, you don't get back to step 1, they don't mention that anywhere it's a sliding window until it meet the requirements then you will be charged for every new installs, maybe your right but we can't be 100% sure, they never mention that we get back to step 1

 

Both conditions must be true for it to apply. They've said this multiple times here.

 

A really stupid plan! You will lose everything you have built over the past decades. I guarantee this. The mobile game market is seriously declining, studios are losing a lot of money and going bankrupt. And amazingly, Unity continues to push them down further. We make games, run advertising campaigns for only 0.02$-1$/install (depending on the type of game) (mainly losses, very little profit), and you collect 0.2$/install =)) . Really stupid.

 

Do you mean exactly like our, and most everyone's demos are run? Or early access builds? Or build iterations? This hits your builds too EVERY single Our Apartment build in crowdfunding stages = an install.

 

i disagree. flat revenue fees are straightforward and are values you can plan around. theres no way to plan around # of installations and a pricing model that can change/fluctuate at any moment, even years after release.

 

Add me to the list of people thinking this is insane. I've personally created a few game using Unity and taught several hundred developers how to develop Unity but can't really consider it anymore. It's a shame since it's actually gotten pretty stable (LTS only) and the decades of googleable solutions makes it the easiest engine to use but this is really absurd. Charging per time a person install a F2P title, charging per WebGL invocation? A developer shouldn't have to architect a monetization strategy around the game engines whims.

This would be like a plumber asking for a a dime every time somebody uses in toilet they installed. Or visual studio charging per time someone used the .Net runtime. Maybe Microsoft should get in on this and charge Unity 10 cents every time someone installs unity or uses the runtime as well.

I'm sorry Unity but you really can't change the customer contract at will and expect your developers to accept this. Increasing the per seat cost, sure, changing how much you charging for extras like cloud build, source control, changing your asset store cut would all be undesirable but a normal cost of doing business. This is injecting a whole new cost into developer calculations. As a major publisher tweeted "Include engine choice in your pitches, it's important" you just made the engine kryptonite to every publisher/biz dev.

 

Me too. This CAN'T be legal.

 

'

To me that just sounds like they'll lowball the numbers but who knows.