Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Is there a clarification post I missed? I didn't really get that impression from the FAQ because I was thinking the install count is held as lifetime, the monthly installs are counted as well.

 

So if I need 10 million downloads to make $200k I now owe Unity $2 million? Is that correct?

 

Looking into it more and more, it's very grey. Neither of us might be right on this and it basically needs to be tested in court, which means huge fees. Not an open and shut situation... if we went through EU, most of those costs would be provided so maybe worth trying.

 

The requirements to get the metrics that this fee model would need are not legal in most of the world (and in the EU they might even care to enforce that). I suspect that Unity will actually rely on the storefronts to manage this for them, but I see no reason for the storefronts to play along with such as stupid business model. "Systems" to identify a legitimate download is just asking the store.

I strongly suspect that this was an idiotic spur of the moment idea from the csuite by a person that has never needed to think in a professional capacity. Beyond making everyone mad it is not a workable scheme. It just looks like Unity is in the middle of a corporate raid on itself. Reading through public finances it's suspicious that a company engaged in massive cost cutting has been suffering a 50% year over year increase in expenses.

 

What about games distributed with just an apk download that don't go through the play store?

 

I odn't think exactly 2 mil but yeah basically. This is more or less what Unity is doing to us. You will end up owing hundreds of thousands to Unity for using their engine.

 

Well, I'm assuming if you don't meet the eligibility (200k in 12months) you won't have to pay. I think it would be pretty weird to word it like that but not actually mean it that way, but who knows. We'll just have to wait for clarification

 

I believe if you make over $100k you are supposed to upgrade to Pro anyway, so you would just pay $2k a year per seat because you are not reaching the $1 million revenue in 12 month threshold.

 

You would owe Unity for downloads after you hit the $200K per year threshold.

So you wouldn't owe unity 2 million, but for installs after that.

Of which it's a better deal to get Unity Pro, you'd pay a lot less.

 

Technically this is legal under the terms of service we have accepted as it clearly states new terms can be added at their discretion.

 

You are wrong, It is installs PER MONTH, so the first 1million installs free, if you sell another 1 million, you won't sell that million in 1 month, let's say you sold the 1 million in your first year, so that will be an average of 83,333 unique players who installed your game per month, so you will pay the $.15 per install with Pro. If you include bots, reinstalls, updates, piracy etc... the 83,333 installs per month will be higher, how much? IDK x5 times more?

 

There's the lifetime threshold install count. After that you're charged X amount for every install in a month. So if you have 100,000 installs in January and 100,000 installs in February you're charged 15c for all 200,000. See their table and explanation where it says "monthly rate". Also note their example amounts eg:

Where it only accounts for the installs from the past month because the amount from months prior are irrelevant for the calculation.

 

I am also worrying for the calculation, basically we need to give a third party a blank pass to charge anything they want....just for using a game engine? This is insane.

Additional billing information

All determinations, calculations of installs, and revenue related to the Unity Runtime Fee will be made by Unity in its sole discretion.

 

this whole system sucks nad honestly if they need/want more money its cool and should just be x% of sales and thats it.

but where did u get that graphics from? official unity?

in any case, the answer is there, first check step 1, then step 2, if you dont meet step 1, then it wont move to step 2 so it will in fact "stop" if at one month you dont meet the previous 12 months 200k or 1mm

 

You're misunderstanding it. You never pay anything for the fist 200,000 installs, so you're overestimating by $40,000 there.

Also, the revenue thresholds are per year, so you could easily avoid this edge case by waiting to change the price to free until a year has passed, assuming Unity will implement the fees for free games (which is not a given).

Of course if you spend 1% of that $200,000 earnings on a Unity Pro licence you have nothing more to pay Unity since you would be under the Pro revenue threshold of $1,000,000.

If I'm not mistaken, you'd pay Unreal Engine about $10,000 for the same revenue from a game made in their engine.

Your scenario is an edge case that is completely avoidable, and made with assumptions that are not confirmed.

 

EXACTLY!!!

 

I think they have buildin analytics to track this.

 

UNITY CEO!!!
Be a shamed over yourself! What is the reason for this? I speak for all the small mobile companies, small pc teams that enjoy to make simple fun games as a hobby to get a little bit extra pennies for the family to enjoy, and now you stand on that pricing hill with your allready deep pockets and taking from us like a king takes taxes from farmers, you greedy son of a bitch!! I'm glad I took my 7 years of stuff I learned in Unity and everything that came with it and moved my S*** to Unreal!!!!

 

This is stupid, unity will kill itself if this is implemented

 

I guess he's still bitter about the time people blew him up for this;

 

Woooo!

~ I just wanted to chime in.

 

What happens if a developer crosses the revenue/install thresholds and decides that they're not going to pay? What are you gonna do about it?

 

The act of installing software has never been something that generated any income for any developer ever.

Even back when Bill Gates was considered one of the greediest most hated men in the world and was successfully sued for anti competitive behaviour Microsoft sold a license that you bought once and could use to reinstall Windows on your PC without fee. I've been around computers since the 80's and my father a developer from the 60's. I've never heard of monetized installation. (Professional services you are paying for an experts time not the actual install).

The person who hatched this scheme is a genuine numbskull.
Ya dun goofed and you need to go.
CEO steps down or this company is finished.

 

The end of an era. Unity finally dealt the killing blow on itself. (It's a good news tho. In long term it'd be better for the game dev ecosystem if Unity dies)

 

This is completely true in every point!
Right now it looks like Unity is killing all Indie success before it even happened...

 

Up to 1 million in revenue every 12 months for a single game, it is basically a flat fee. After that it gets more complicated.

Ok, I see it now, your right. This seems like it will negatively affect mobile gaming the most, but there's some edge cases that could wreck people, although I'm not sure how realistic some of the examples I've seen posted here are.

 

Yes, I'm not comparing it to UE since I don't use it. But who knows how higher can be the unity fees with the competition reinstalling your game with bots, haters, resintalls etc... It can literally bankrupt any studio. Today we know it's .$2 per install, and tomorrow?

 

*$2k per year per seat.

 

$2 million, as of right now. Expect them to up the fees and lower the thresholds the next year.

 

This move is so stupid, so f*cking incompetent, that I almost wonder if it's intentional self destruction. Like they did this to justify a future downsize, they needed a major public fiasco to justify a huge company shakeup as all their current plans and projects are a total fiscal disaster by every conceivable metric.

 

Unacceptable.

Unacceptable.

Unacceptable.

Unacceptable.

Unacceptable.

Unacceptable.

Unacceptable.

Unacceptable.



You are just making **** up because you have no idea what you're doing or how to implement this.

 

Hmm yea that changes things quite a bit then!

 

Does that mean the threshold should also be per month? I.e. I only pay if I get over 200k downloads a month?

 

I am curious what is Klei with their Oxygen not Included, Paradox with their Surviving Mars and developers of Escape from Tarkov thinking about that. They are very large companies with huge sales and at January 1 they will start to receiving huge bills.
I hope they will have a serious conversation with Unity CEO personally.

 

The meme has finally become reality. I didn't think it was possible, but here we are.

 

Lol this is ridiculous!!

So a company is better off making $999,999 per year, but as soon as they make $1 more they're instantly billed $150k. SO INTELLIGENT.

 

What a way to kill all indies and small mobile dev companies. Wow.

 

Yeah it's from the blog post (I use DarkReader extension that's why it can look a little bit different)
I just found in the previous comment which cite it but it seems Im not far from the truth:

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones.
A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. 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.

Here they basically state that you need to meet the requierements only once (even if I can admit that they don't explicitly talk about revenues)

 

I guess he was right, we were F***ing idiots for sticking around.

 

No, I didn’t even take anything out of the first 200K installs (those made the 12mo revenue and ticked the lifetime installs box). Look again… based on their chart while the first 200K lifetime installs don’t get dinged, the next 2M do, at 20 cents a pop.

Sure, it’s admittedly a pedantic edge case, and could be avoided by not making it free in the 12 mo window… but it’s POSSIBLE. And that’s the issue.

An indie dev shouldn’t have to worry about this scenario, period, ever. The fact that it’s even possible makes it a horrible scheme. Add burden to the indie who has enough burdens already?

Just activate revenue sharing and call it a day. Burn with hellfire whatever this thing is.

 

Well you're billed per month so it'd be for just installs from the first month after you cross $1M revenue for the previous 12 month period. So it wouldn't be that number, but some lesser version of your scenario still applies.

 

This is what I thought of immediately when I saw the pricing.

 

Also Call of Duty Mobile, Pokemon Go Mobile, Genshin Impact, etc. But they probably will cut their own deal with Unity.
Poor Vampire Survivor Poncle, switching to Unity in the latest patch just for this. And they will be significantly worse off too, because they charge low price per unit.

 

How can I trust Unity will count the number of installs correctly ?

How can I trust Unity won't alter anymore the terms ?

How can Unity know my income per game ?

How can I trust Unity will protect me against "install-attack" ? (spoiler alert : they can't)

Bye bye Unity, that was a nice ride, but my next game will be done with another engine. (or with Unity 5.6 )

As stated by other users, there's no coming back from that, except if all the direction is fired, John Riccitiello 1st.

 

What happens if a game qualifies for fees, and then we delist it? We're expected to believe that we're on the hook to keep paying for up to a year for what customers are doing with their purchases after we've already stopped selling it? If we close our Unity account while installers are still out in the wild, being put on new devices or being sold as keys, do we get hunted down to pay fees? No matter how bad the math ends up working out with their rates, the idea of tying fees to something completely out of a developer's control is the most insane idea of all time. You can tell nobody with programming experience was involved in this decision because the edge cases are glaring. It's unenforceable and anybody who thinks about it for more than 5 seconds can see why. That's not even mentioning the fact that there is no way that their estimates will be accurate to begin with.

 

So Unity has no way to accurately track installs, won't tell you how they are tracking them, and yet they will charge you anyway!
"Trust me" is not good enough.

 

Ughhhh, Unity sinks even lower

 

We want to know how this will affect non-commercial games that have 200k installs but no earnings.
This actually exists, such as some rhythm games in mainland China, like Phigros and Orzmic. The genre of the games and some relevant policies prevent them from making profits.
If this affects, we may see a number of wonderful free indie games vanish.