Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

That is, if I have a paid game and it was stolen by downloading a free apk, will I pay money for it? GENIUS!

 

Bro I've read great advice from you in so many archive posts. It's wild to see you quit in this thread. I'll give Godot a shot too. You're right about the insanity. It's crazy to think the shareholders would keep the executive suite around after this. They need to restructure the upper management. If they fire the people in charge of this and get a more consumer friendly CEO I'll consider coming back.

2D DOTS physics would be nice to see too. Godot actually supports 2D heavily. Worth giving it a shot I guess.

 

And if additionally to reversing course they let go of Riccitiello and others responsible as a gesture that we don't need to worry about any future underhanded schemes? Would you consider staying?

 

probably this is planned- they added prices that nobody like- but people allready write that 5% of revenue is ok / so unity will excuse and add that 5 % and everybody will think they won/ shocking ceo

 

Y'all will literally do anything but admit this is a poor idea. If this goes through I won't be working in unity anymore. You guys are losing customers, potential customers and ad revenue from small Indi mobile games.

 

Distributing runtime... So no distributed runtime (local executable), no fee..

Guys!

Is Unity gonna "encourage" everyone to make their Unity games streaming only on their own (soon to be announced) proprietary game streaming service? "Stadia 2.0"

At this point I wouldn't put it past the sneaky bobble heads.

 

Look mom, i'm writing in an epic thread

 

Sidequest just posted this, hope other companies will do same

 

The game I am working on now will be my last project in Unity, this is sad because I invested a lot of time and energy into this and I really liked working in it.

But the bottom line is that Unity has proven themselves to be untrustworthy to such a large degree that it would be insane to be beholden to them.

On top of that this entire fiasco demonstrates extreme incompetence at all levels:
- Different PR reps communicating contradictory things in different places
- Plan obviously wont work from a technical perspective, reliable install tracking is impossible and a million other reasons
- Plan obviously hasn't been thought through from a business perspective, fails to consider cases where unity is the dominant product in its area. (for example F2P or low cost ad supported mobile games)
- Plan obviously wasnt vetted by legal or Unity's legal team is incompetent as well
- Massive price hikes that developers deep into development have no choice but to accept not even being talked about because the above three points are so astonishingly bad

I have always been a unity defender and evangelist before this. I am not some psycho reddit user looking for excuses to complain, I am usually the one defending unity on public forums when everyone else is against.

The incompetence and untrustworthiness publicly demonstrated at such an extreme scale at all levels today makes it impossible for me to ever recommend unity again.

 

So, if I sell my game via steam, the threshold would be reached at $140k revenue already. The revenue I actually get to keep from the sales after steam deducts the 30% fees, which is added to the revenue.

 

yeah so the way i understand it is like so:

Jan 2024 would be the first month they will start charging from this dumb system.
They need to check lifetime units + 12 months of gross sales at that moment. So lifetime installs (dumb af) + 2023 gross income.

So basically anything pre 2024 is just to check month by month if you owe them money for that month installs.

So, and i have no idea how they would even know your 2023 income + installs, if you met the 200k or 1m 2023 gross income and installs you will owe them only for your january installs * 0.2 (or wv number applies)

 

Hi there.


At this point I'm only blaming myself for saying things like "maybe I'll let Godot 4 mature a bit first" and "I'll finish the current project in Unity at least" but anyway;

This change should be abandoned immediately in favor of a normal, industry-standard revenue share instead of some bizarre eldritch machination.

Unity leadership should be asked to step down. Anyone in a position to look at this and think "yes, this is the best way to get the revenue we need to invest in the runtime" and went ahead with it should not be allowed to continue making mistakes.

If for some reason developers of small games, free games, games with demos, ect. shouldn't feel they're getting hosed, communication on that front was terrible. Not to mention the least no one is very confident in your proprietary tracking to prevent things like bad actors from abusing the new fee to bankrupt small marginalized creators or ones they simply don't like.

You just gave everyone another heart attack and no one needs that in either an amateur or professional development setting. Every time I see Unity trending in the news or on Twitter it's always "what did they do now and how is it going to harm me". I don't need this! No one needs this! Who is going to look at Unity's recent history and think "yes, this is an engine I want to invest time and effort in to learn and gradually be able to produce professional projects, the engine with multiple suspicious ticking-timebomb sounds emanating from mystery locations under the hood", this flat-fee things is going to terrify new developers off from making free or cheap projects.

 

Name the managers who made this wild decision. Society must know those who decided to kill the gaming industry.

 

Fire the incompetent CEO and all executives directly reporting to him for making serries of bad decisions, which lead to a complete degradation of trust between Unity and their customers.

 

Usage fees based on the number of installs are measured using a blackbox, so we do not know if they are true or not.
No one can predict how much our usage fee will be next month!

 

I am reallly wondering about you Unity. Last year there was the announcement and the near "rage quit" as you decided that console developers needs Unity Pro.
As Nintendo and PS gives you pro keys for their consoles that was not the problem - but XBox didnt so you wouldnt be able to deploy to xbox (so i said bye bye to it).

That was where i thought "ok this sucks - time to check out alternatives".
GoDot 4 is still there but was not a console alternative..but it will be starting 2024.
W4Games is hardly working and have an Early Access for Console Stuff - the only thing is they dont have currently release a pricing plan but promised me "it will be cheaper than unity".

When they are going to have this working there is a big chance that nobody longer needs you and your weired shady changes.

Tracking per Installs on the runtimes ?
Does this means that every runtime out there tracks the install ?
Since which version ?
Do you know that we have GDPR here in Europe that we need to tell what data is tracked ?

 

This is "UNREAL" ehehe.
Yes "Unreal".

 

Guys, Unity Runtime will cost us $ but Unity Editor is now free !

You can stop your Unity Plus and Unity Pro Subscription, because Unity Editor Free Edition is ok to use even > 100k$ revenue.
And if you don't want the splashscreen, remember that it's only managed by a line in the playersettings.asset.

 

This is the worst decision Unity have ever made. And I develop with Unity from the beginning. I hope they change it or I will have to change them and I really don't want to...

 

Hell yeah.

 

I'm currently learning 3D art so I haven't messed with programming/Unity yet but all I have to say is this is NOT a way to keep game developers aka your clients/customers using your product. You are NOT winning the game engine competition with this pricing model. This will only drive more people to using Unreal and Godot, or the other smaller engines (with better pricing models).

 

Just to be clear, if I had released my product now instead of 2016, which had over 5 million downloads and made over $200K, I'd owe ONE MILLION DOLLARS. It was ad supported, so do you think I have $1,000,000? It's clear to me that you have no interest in catering to my business any longer and thus I will no longer be using your platform for development.

You are going to lose substantial market share, probably almost all of it in every market except abusive adware phone games and $70 AAA titles. Congratulations on the worst idea thus far!

 

I thought the main event would be the apple presentation. Who would have thought that unity would make its main announcement

 

How to lose all trust any%, there goes 7 years of learning the engine I guess.

 

Another critical aspect of this problem is that the calculation is not visible to the developer. If I am charged a royalty based on my revenue, then I can verify its authenticity by looking my bank statement. I have absolutely no way to independently verify install count.

In fact, I have no way to independently verify sale count either. Maybe Steam sent my game to someone without me knowing. Maybe a bug in the Epic Games Store puts my game in a million libraries. It's happened before, it will happen again. In either of those cases, while I lose the opportunity cost of making a sale, I'm not charged a royalty, because I never got the revenue. And I can verify that personally with my bank.

With an installation fee, no matter how much trust or distrust you have in Unity, you have no way to independently verify their numbers. Even if you trust them now (both morally and in terms of engineering competence) you are also gambling that their future employees and executives will maintain that trust 5, 10, 20 years from now, or whatever the longevity of your game is.

With all due respect, I think anyone crunching numbers to find theoretical ways that they lose money are missing the point. The concept itself is flawed, no matter the exact numbers.

 

This is a big worry. Unity just suicided so what's preventing Epic from adapting a more predatory business model once all the masses of ex-Unity developers settle on Unreal. They can increase the royalty or whatever the f*ck they want. What you gonna do? Go develop your game on the joke that's known as Godot?

 

It's all our fault. We continued to use Unity after they merged with IronSource (a company that literally made installers for maleware). We deserve this.

 

"
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. "

I stopped here and decided to swich engines.
The fact that they are saying something THAT OUTRAGEOUS so easily is seriously astonishing. I'm baffled by how unashamed they are.
Congrats Unity, you won the prize of the worst engine. You've been trying to have that prize for years now, but now you just have succeeded

 

I've been working with the engine since at least 2012. I have £500+ of assets purchased on the store, most of which are scripts so can't be ported to another engine... and I'm still leaving.

The change to this new pricing model represents a dark day for us all.

 

I need to know how this affects free games.
I'm about to release a free game and need to know if Unity is going to drain my bank account for a passion project I've spent 2 years of my life on. It seems this is making even free games unviable.

Regardless of the answer, this is the last project I'll be creating in Unity.
I've avoided Unreal for a while now and suffered through Unity's bugs as I was simply comfortable with the UI.
But I no longer have a reason to stay. It's clear to me that Unity just feel entitled to my bank account.

 

As I understand in some edge cases developer may have to pay MORE than he earned, right? In this case there simply MUST be added something like "but no more than 10% from earnings". If Unreal takes 5%, then Unity shouldn't take more than 10% (no matter how many installs).

 

Are forum posts still free? Do I get charged for each time this is viewed?

 

More than epic, it’s unreal

 

Didn't Riticiello already ruin the reputation of another company?

 

jUsTUpGrAdEtOUNITYPRo bro. I am a solo dev that doesn’t understand the economics of running a business or how communities work.

No serious dev will ever release a Unity game again, which will kill morale in the community. Not to mention once the serious devs that make the hits that Unity is trying to profit off of migrate, the only users are gonna be you, Mr. ImASoloDev that doesn’t meet the thresholds. You bet your ass they’re gonna try to milk hobbyists and solo devs as well once all the studios and developers migrate.

 

These pricing changes are extremely disappointing. We only recently got another price increase to all subscriptions. I've been on the Unity Plus plan for many years now, and before that another plan that was sunset to make way for Plus, each time over those years the price gets increased with broken promises of improved transparency and better product.

Many others have already raised all the issues about the install tracking and some of those are still unanswered.

The FAQ at the time said "Does Unity take royalties" - to which the answer was "No, Unity is royalty free. We don't charge on a per title basis or require a revenue share model."

Well, it seems that's changed, since it's not a per title basis, but an install basis now!

I also don't want people to forget the price increase to the plans. Basically the plan I'm on, has now disappeared.

I can no longer subscribe to Unity Plus (which gave me all the features I wanted, including customizing the splash screen, advanced cloud diagnostics, ads and in-app purchases, cloud storage).

For me the cost is $35/mth (but it was already recently updated to $40/mth), but now it's completely gone. Instead, to get the features I want back, I'm forced to upgrade to Pro, which is $185/mth.

That's a 428% increase, just to keep the features I was paying $35/mth for!

I'm not interested in any of the other features in the PRO plan for now and these frequent price changes are really not fair on any of your decade long supporters.

In fact I've been a supporter so long, I used to buy the yearly outright price, back before you had the subscription model, just to support Unity and what they were doing.

So I'm supposed to go to free plan (where unity get 0 income from me) or I have to pay $185/mth for such minimal features? You can't be serious.

Additionally I've spent many tens of thousands of $ on the asset store (of which Unity also take a cut of fees) over the last couple of years.

Are you sure you don't want to charge a fee for the number of lines of code I have, or maybe the binary size while we're at it?

This is seriously making me reconsider everything I've come to know about Unity.

Please reconsider these changes and come up with something more appropriate for everyone.

 

Whatever yes man told the Unity execs that they could accurately count installs and not account for bad actors was lying or grossly incompetent. Ignoring the fact that the concept is moronic, nobody is going to pay Unity based on fake numbers or numbers that don't accurately represent whatever ridiculous thing this is supposed to be tracking and accounting for.

 

Just as we do not pay per install for the graphics made in Adobe and Autodesk products, no payment can be made in Unity. We have already paid the license fee to produce games in this software. Unity cannot say that the money you have paid so far has been wasted and that I will charge Unity tribute now. This is clearly not legal. They can be sure that we, as a company, will file a lawsuit.

 

Same. I'm actually blown away by the absolutely disgusting arrogance of the leadership of this company. I have so many projects that I love, that I've spent countless hours pouring every ounce of my soul into... and they're just gone now. I can never finish or release them. All because some rich guys just aren't quite rich enough.

Disgusting. I look forward to learning Godot.

 

This is not worth for DLSS 1 support.
Unity 2022(LTS) still have a tons of editor bugs. In 2022 version, i can't see my script features in inspector before changing layout default to default again.. Assets not works as advertised and partly destroyed every unity updates. And after all, this action... Looks like a end of the road for me (at the unity side). I'm done guys good luck.

 

No. At first your free game must earn at least 200K USD.

 

According to Sweeney:

So, even if future iterations worsen the terms, you have no risk that Epic will try to pull the rug out from under you.

 

They're catching a flight or consulting incompetent lawyers that think they can bully users.

 

Nice updates.
Unreal Engine is good.

 

I'm just a hobbyist, but I don't think I'll ever release a game with Unity under these circumstances. In other words, if I were to create a game that I wanted to publish, it wouldn't be with Unity. I think Unity is really shooting itself in the foot here.

 

That won't happen, so I can't really answer that.

I was certainly happier when Unity cost money up-front and you paid for upgrades. Because that was it, you paid money and got a product, and there was no possibility of abusive revenue shenanigans. I knew switching to subscriptions was the start of bad things, but I didn't realize exactly how bad it would get.

--Eric

 

I too have been using Unity since it was Mac only so Unity 2. For a small scale developer this doesn't really change much in effect but it has some deeply worrying implications. Can't help to think that it looks like Unity just flushed down it's own product but we'll see what happens after the smoke clears. Right now I'm thinking it would be safer to use an engine which allows the developer to own permanent license and completely own all the products that you make with it.

 

Maybe things will get even worse! Do not leave!