Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I'm a Unity developer since 5.x and I would not convert to Unreal or Godot unless forced to. This forces me to.

Just F***. How the hell did it come to this? I have two kids so finding time to reskill to C++ will not be easy.

 

Completely agree. A wildly callous move by Unity.

 

I wonder how quickly the engine will die if they actually do it

 

Should this be the case Valve and any other platform is instantly banning Unity games come Jan 1st.

 

Damn, this is still going on. And the news (and rollbacks) still sucks donkey ass..

 

The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 per-game lifetime installs.

What does "made" mean, gross earnings or net?

 

They've stated previously it's gross.

 

@jason_yak gross

 

It's painfully obvious now this will NEVER work. Everyone that uses Unity, from the lowliest bedroom dev to billion dollar corporations like Nintendo and Blizzard will dispute every single bill they get for this fee, because Unity won't disclose their methods of determining install rates. You would be stupid to not dispute it every single time. They're gonna have to make their own litigation company to handle it all. How did Unity execs honestly think this system would be possible? Have they already made deals with these big publishers or do they really expect them to comply?

 

Unity has always used “revenue” to mean gross in the past.

 

Absolutely ****ing ridiculous pricing. My F2P WebGL games will get smashed by this. I probably don't even make $.20 per install in some countries. This is disgusting. Would absolutely switch to another engine immediately if it was easy. Going to have to seriously consider my options going forward now.

On another note, there's gotta be some way to protest/strike this bull**** for us Unity devs.

 

My experience is that any sort of monetary trouble means Unity locks your license for at least two weeks, at which point an overworked support tech may or may not help you.

 

Also, even if you could somehow solve all of the many, MANY problems that have been brought up in this thread, let me underscore the fact that charging per installation IS STILL COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. Whatever nightmare telemetry you come up with to do this has absolutely no right to exist anywhere near anyone's games.

 

If you don't pay, they'll terminate your Unity license and you can't even open your project in Unity editor after that. That's why they introduced the new editor DRM with the new price plan.

There are only two options left. Use a cracked version of Unity, or another engine. You'd better saved a cracked LTS version today and start porting out.

 

How will this work for giveaways?
If we reached the threshold will we be unable to giveaway games since we will be basically losing a potentially infinite amount of money for giving it away to everyone?
In theory if I gave my game away and many people reinstalled it will I own 1 million dollars to unity while making 0$?
Are we just gonna have to wait for a year to set a discount or giveaway?
And we're not paying for giveaways since I read somewhere we're not paying for a charity game, how the hell is unity going to track what's a giveaway and what's not?
And why the **** is unity ok with charging for things we don't earn money from like free demos or reinstalls? How do you even tell the difference between a giveaway and a free demo if we're not being charged for giveaways?

The edge cases for this are absurd and the implementation wouldn't be reliable or make sense
I don't see this ever actually working and unity staying alive
I wouldn't mind a small simple royalty fee like unreal engine, and it would make total sense.
Unity promised it wouldn't have royalties but this is so much worse than royalty fee.

 

Very true! That's an aspect Unity didn't even consider. It doesn't matter if it objectively effects only a tiny percentage of users and is cheaper overall if it creates confusion and uncertainty. Game development is hard and stressful enough as is. So adding even more onto your customers is just idiotic.

This entire new payment scheme was apparently created by just accountants, top management and maybe stockholders without any input (or just ignored) from community / public relations experts, marketing teams or developers. The level of incompetence is most impressive.

 

Unacceptable, they are doing everything to ruin the engine, and now they are going to succeed.

 

Guys don't you see, this opens up a gambling market for game development. Now after someone makes a game, if they break the threshold they get to gamble on whether or not the profits will exceed the install fees. They can then try to sell their game off to someone else if they don't think it will still be profitable. Potential buyers get to gamble on which game will be profitable. It's like hot potato where the loser goes bankrupt.

 

Also a 10 year plus Unity dev. This decision is spreading confusion, anxiety and stress.

I already see discussions in companies I work with about the ramifications and the need to switch engines. This has the potential to destroy the whole ecosystem around Unity and like the poster above I have kids to support. I haven't slept tonight worrying about how this is going to affect my career.

Really distressing, really disappointing.

 

A demo is a requirement of Steam festivals, which I would like to continue participating in. That's the main reason for my question.

 

There's one good way to sidestep this confusion and that would be using an engine with a clearly defined fee structure and not a 'black box' of proprietary install tracking and anti-fraud tools. Years of using this engine and it's become abundantly clear they're most interested in maximizing revenue and slow-walking features. That's their prerogative. I'm just going to write my own engine at this point. What a ****ing waste of time.

 

https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform

Was 2019 really that long ago that this blog post is a total joke now?

 

Yeah, I'm done. It's just pure insanity. I had some really good times with Unity, but lost most of my interest in the last several years due to the company kind of going off the rails IMO, and this is the last straw. Even if they walk this back, it's too late. Thanks to everyone I met and worked with over the years! For people who bought any of my utilities, I'll continue to support them, but otherwise will not use Unity again.

I've only used Godot a little, but it seems to have some of the spirit that Unity originally had. Unreal has way too many issues for me to consider it. Good luck, folks.

--Eric

 

https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge seems like a good starting point for the rendering side of things from what it's worth. That's what I'll be evaluating as part of considering developing an engine for our next game.

 

Yeah. $200k BEFORE storefront cuts is insanely low.
But the thing is, how will they check that? How do they know what deals every Dev has with their storefront (with all the "small business"/lower rev cut models they all have)?

It's probably gross.
Game Cost * Their gathered Install Count * 0.20 = Payment.

Disgusting.

 

In that case I think it's more likely the big corporations just won't use Unity anymore. They have tons of options that unfortunately the rest of us don't. And the billion dollar mobile games in China can just refuse to pay up and the Chinese government will probably back them up

 

Hahaha

 

NO! This is not how it works at all. In a scenario where a company goes from $999,999 per year to $1,000,000 per year (assuming they are on a Unity paid licence) they get a bill for 12.5c per copy of the game sold above the 1,000,000 units threshold, and reducing the more units are installed.

Developers do not get charged ANYTHING for the copies of the game below the thresholds.

 

This installs policy is stupid af. Imagine your IDE asking you to pay money for each compilation or install too. Do something simpler Unity, look at least on UE. If you'll try to milk hypercasual market this way you risk to get some anti-monopoly and anti-fraud cases pretty soon.

 

I'd rather pay 5% of any amount of revenue, vs. some random install fee because I can both 1) budget for that, and 2) it's a controlled cost. Installs are an uncapped potentially exponential cost; I can't think of any business off-hand that operates like that. Even in the world of server software installs, there's an agreed rate per unit used, not how often you uninstall/reinstall a given unit.

And we're supposed to "trust" Unity's fraud algorithms because they've obviously been so "trustworthy" to date to catch bad actors running up this uncapped potentially exponential cost? Give me a break.

I imagine other devs would disagree, but give me 5% all day over this nonsense.

 

Complete nonstarter. If recurring fees can be unilaterally applied today, why shouldn't I expect them to get worse in the future? I can't possibly trust an organization that would do that. The financial risk is untenable. Even if they were to roll back this decision now, this is already such a violation of trust that I wouldn't dare launch with this platform.

 

What about smaller devs who start a new project but are already over the limit and need to PAY for unity editors?

I allocate 5 devs to a project for 2 years, need to pay for the editors for that time. Do we get that as credit against this new fee? No. It's cheaper for me to start a new company at that stage.

 

No one running a serious business would disagree. A known cost that can be accounted for vs the "trust me bro" opaque Unity number each month. You can't run a business with this phantom cost haunting you each month.

 

Funny how Unity folks stopped replying to us when enough ethical / legal arguments have been collected in this thread.

Pathetic

 

I've always described Unity using the 3 terms, "Lazy, Stubborn, and Incompetent." I must now add one more term, "Greedy." (or Desperate??) Am I glad I left the boat after the DOTS fiasco? Oh boy...

Just make the Editor faster by porting to NetCore and make the Users Happy First before delivering the special "Care" package.

ps. Is John still CEO? then, it all makes sense.

 

As everyone has said, this mechanism itself is wrong.
It is a deceptive approach to billing in the future if the conditions were met retroactively in the past. It is a very cowardly way of billing.

"You ate more than 100 loaves of bread in the past.
Therefore, we will charge you for each piece of bread you eat in the future."
That is absurd.

To begin with, but the fact that the amount of payment is in US dollars can cause fatal problems.
If the unit price per installation is charged in US dollars, despite the fact that the selling price of a game, for example, fluctuates from region to region, the company has the potential to charge a fatal fee.

To begin with, the measurement of the number of installations is questionable.
Unless that part is clarified, nearly all game developers will object to Unity.

 

I said you have two options. One of them is just to use something else that's not Unity.

 

Would you trust them with the install count that they will claim? Piracy, hacks, abuses, frauds... How will they determine an accurate number? The core idea behind this plan itself is faulty! I check my dashboard of my unreleased game and on analytics I see downloads from other countries although abolutely no one but me has the game.

And it's not just about the money either. For today you can say it's feasible for this, feasible for that. But x cents today, 10x cents tomorrow. There is no way of knowing. Game development is a long term process and requires commitment. A company should not be able to make this big of a severe change!

Why would a developer have trust and keep investing their time, money and energy in using Unity after all this? They've gone loose and It does not look like it's going to change either.

 

Unity can't just demand money from Valve and other storefronts arbitrarily. Well... they can, but they don't have a strong right to do so. Valve et al. are not parties to the contracts that exist between the various developers and Unity.

Maybe they have agreements with some storefronts (if so, probably not all of them). Maybe they're just assuming they can get all those agreements in place. Maybe they think that storefronts will take the path of least resistance and play along, even though some of these are gargantuan companies. If a big player like Valve pushes back (I doubt they want to remove a huge chunk of their library, and given the choice would probably prefer not to make the payments to Unity), then good luck Unity.

But... there are so many smaller storefronts out there too. Will Unity just focus on some and ignore others?

This aspect seems truly bizarre. And of the scheme's many weaknesses, might be one of the easier to exploit. For example, developers could apply their own pressure to storefronts, leverage relationships, boycott those that collaborate, etc.

 

Also, on Xbox it is possible to install any game on the store without buying it. I do not know how anyone at Unity though this system was well planned through...

 

Does terminating my Organization via Unity dashboard terminate the contract?

Or do I also need to terminate my account?

 

Sad to see you go, one of our assets is the first I ever bought way back unity 5 to have a better line renderer for an educational Mars mapping software. It is still in my portfolio on p14 and I am sure you can see your asset in use in the image http://www.destined.com/Portfolio.pdf

 

What happens if you make 1M revenue (gross) but you're just breaking even? This won't go well.

 

The threshold is per game/project, so you most likely won't have to pay for demos/early access EVER for new projects. And if another game has made you upgrade to PRO, you have long way until the new game will be affected by this.

It's still dumb af. There are better ways to make your Devs upgrade to a Pro License. How about offering something good and usable to Pro users, huh?

 

Speak with your actions. Go silent. There is no Unity without developers. Avoid the asset store and forums. Let our pocketbook decide change.

 

I think I have a bad dream that I need to wake up from...

This is killing the community and all built up trust (again). I really hope some magic can turn around this insanity...

 

First off, shout out to the few Unity employees that have replied to this thread. If you've ever been let down in a group project, imagine what they are going through.





However, as someone who rarely posts here, I can't help by do my best to add to the noise so that Unity understands how bad this is. A developer can neither predict nor control how many devices a user installs their game onto, once they have bought it. The same way a retailer doesn't control what I do with the clothes I bought from them. Whether or not "99.9% of cases work out to less than 5% of revenue" is irrelevant...

I, as developer, do not control of the number of times I am charged by Unity after successfully selling. Forever. That is not a contract I am willing to agree to.


Then of course, beyond the unpredictability of legitimate customers, there is fraud. We've fought cheating, digital piracy, and hackers for decades. But it's still rampant, even in AAA titles with state of the art prevention. Unity's claim that they can accurately determine whether an installation is legit or not, is not believable.

Additionally, it was already said by Unity in this thread that their algorithm for counting installs will change. I would never undertake a multi-year project knowing that the royalty model will change month to month, at the whim of whoever tweaks it.

That's a general statement for any company, but for Unity specifically it's even worse. I am absolutely unwilling to let the team responsible for HDRP's mess make arbitrary, iterative changes to my royalties algorithm!


And my final point: I am unlikely to be personally affected by any of this. I make hobby projects for free, and my day job in Unity has a higher cost per user than models at risk of losing money per install. However, if even ONE PERSON is screwed over by a malicious hack, or because their model relies on a low price per unit, it makes me unwilling to do business with Unity. The Hollywood strikes are in part caused by streaming services using private, internal algorithms to determine viewership and profits. It's not just game devs revolting against this practice.

 

This is exactly how it works.

Example:

Dev has 199999 in revenue and 1 million downloads.
Dev owes nothing.
Dev makes another dollar.
Now dev owes hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Dev is sad now.