Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I do to ... but if the ecosystem can grow, anything is possible!

 

Why not just change it to 20 cents per purchase instead of install? Epic Games does this with Unreal Engine so it's clearly possible. Also, if anything, this would end up with more legitimate money in Unity's hands since plenty of people buy games and never play them. When developers start getting charged for people pirating and bot-installing their game, especially for games that were released before this announcement and never agreed to be part of it, you're just going to get sued.

I seriously can't think of any reason not to just make it 20 cents per purchase. Since you seem to enjoy ignoring the fact that people can install it more than once, what difference does it make to you?

 

Getting rid of Unity Plus specially for indie game developers on emerging markets is a very bad and insensitive idea. The pricing of the PRO license is way too much for many of us that are willing to pay for the PLUS license. This just feels very insensitive towards your users.

 

Actually my math is wrong because the install cost resets every month.

This complicates things. If you're selling for $5 you owe unreal 25c of every SALE.

You'll owe Unity 12.5c of every DOWNLOAD. So it's likely unity will become more expensive.

 

I'd imagine they want to encourage you to get a Pro license where you pay "only" 0.02 per install and the limits are higher - $1million AND 1 million downloads.

But man this is just ridiculous, now in addition to user acquisition cost you have to pay Unity for installs. Bonkers. Never in my life I'd thought of a scheme like this for a game engine.

And how will they even enforce this, how will they know what the end price is what the revenue actually is? Is it gross or after taxes and other fees?

 

time to learn something new then

 

what about "When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS."

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

i am fine sticking to unity 2019 since everything after that was a dumpster fire anyway. In exchange i dont have accept your new stupid price policy

 

These changes are really not acceptable and make it too unsafe for small developers to use Unity. There is a high chance that i have to pay more to unity suddenly than i earn with my game with this per install cost. I will finish my project that im working on for 2 years now and after that Unity is dead to me if they are gonna do this. I will change to Unreal Engine.

 

This are a lot of bugs in this pricing model. Here are a few of them.
* It is unfair for F2P games with 0.01$ revenue per user compared to paid games that sell for $60
* There are going to be issues with piracy and reinstalls.
* It is possible to create bot farms and sink competitors.
* Games that do generate revenue by their install volume are dead
* Thresholds are per company and not per game, so it is possible to increase the threshold by creating a company per game and platform.


Can you guys explain why would you make such a faulty pricing system?
Developers can avoid paying installation fees while the revenue is below 1mln. So why wouldn't you just charge let's say 5% of revenue above 1$ million like the UE does?

 

Can we have the Unity uninstall thread... I think this is the final nail in the coffin....

 

Goodbye Unity

 

How did they calculate the $0.02 fee they charge per installation in the Unity Pro plan? They have Ironsource and Unity Ads data. Didn't even one person open this and look at it? To earn $0.02 from 1 player, at least 20 ads must be shown. How will this be possible? Let's say we somehow got 20 ads to watch. In order for the game studio to make money, it needs to show at least 20 more ads.

Especially on Android, apk files of games are copied and published on mod sites. How will Unity find a solution when even Google hasn't found a complete solution to this? We will be able to object to this figure after paying the invoice issued by Unity.

On another note, most advertising payments are made within 45 days. Unity requests installation fees from us between the 1st and 5th of each month.

Unity's board of directors should meet immediately and dismiss the CEO and CTO.

 

Im blown away that Unity users are suddenly begging for a 5% rev share.

 

"Please note: It is important to remember that games that do not reach the revenue threshold, including games that are not monetized in any way, are not required to pay the per-install fee." - from what i understand is per game, NOT per company. Sure this new pricing system is still very bad.

 

I expect nothing less than an overcooked, insincere, thoroughly-contrived, hopelessly vague and non-committal corporate non-apology after a solid week of stonewalling!

I sure hope you've been brushing up on your ukelele skills.

 

As a professional developer that has invested lots of time and money to learn and become good at what I do, I am scared.

Game dev is already a risky business, you work on a game, invest money and hope one day when the game releases it will reward you. And now there is an additional risk of paying more than you've earned.

I see all the comments here and comments from small, medium and even large studios. And I also hear the director of the company I currently work for saying next game we're moving to Unreal. And all of a sudden I'm scared as it turns a lot of my work experience useless. And will make it very hard finding another job if people really start moving away from Unity.

Please reconsider this! Unfortunately, I have a feeling it's already pushed people away and it's already done enough damage.

 

Seriously? LOL.

If this mess ever gets litigated, that gem will absolutely rear its head. One of the many inconvenient facts (which also includes the whole "choose us over Unreal because we don't collect royalties" marketing message) that point to bad faith.

 

i swear, there will be a "we listend to you! we revert the new price policy and switch to a rev share model"

 

thing is though that Unreal is for console/PC games, 5% is nothing for a game that cost most of the time way more than $5. Nothing at least if you compare to the mobile market. Here it's not a 5% fee but in 99% of the cases it would mean 100% or more of your income (profit).

You acquire a user for $1, get a return of $1.20, now you got to pay those 20 cents to Unity instead. They literally killed the entire mobile market with this. Or at least most of it.

 

Even if they walk back all of this, the damage has been done - John Riccitiello and the execs have officially just killed this engine and any trust they had from their developers & community.

I've used Unity for many many years now and have quite an asset library, its sad to say goodbye - but great to leave an absive company like this one has become.

Goodbye Unity, Hello Godot!
(And yes, this is my first (and most likely last) post on the forums, which I dont use - for anyone who thinks judging by posts is a good metric for usage (How about installs eh? ))

 

what is the solution to combat third party keys being sold at a fraction of the price? how are developers supposed to account for this situation? there are games market priced for $15 usd that are being sold on third party sights for $0.50. are developers supposed to account for this in their budget? what about stolen keys? you know.when people buy keys in bulk with stolen credit cards then resell them? charges on the card disputed, money returned. do the devs pay for this too?

 

Heh.

Joined:
Jul 3, 2012
Posts:
1

 

Really depends on the game. Id rather pay 20c per install of my $20 steam game than $1 on every sale. Mobile is dead.

 

Godot needs to laser focus on making their engine easier to pick up for Unity devs, like right now.
Will this engine survive to the expiration date on my Unity Programming Professional cert? Only time will tell at this rate.

 

This is not good

 

Well to be fair, if you aren't making much money but have a lot of installs, then you won't reach the revenue threshold and thus won't be charged. And you can still use Editor for free. That's what it says if I understand it correctly you need to meet BOTH thresholds for there to be charges.

But it isn't exactly unsurprising for people to understand it this way, this is just another in the long line of PR disasters for Unity, when I first read the tweet my heart rate instantly jumped, because it felt like "Hey it's Unity here now give us your money for every user you have we are altering the deal pray we don't alter it any further" this is basically what I thought at first and I panicked too, because I have a lot of installs but very little money atm.

 

Wait, we're not in April...

 

Has anyone here ACTUALLY done the math on their project based on current analytics data to see how much this change might cost them?
Because I see a lot of screaming, even by professional studios, and a lot less actual numbers.

 

this is absolutely ridiculous to charge based on installs, just change it to per copy sold if you're that hungry for money, this at least makes some sense then instead of paying for pirated copies or people just re-installing the game into oblivion (which you will not be able to nor even want to detect).

 

First time posting. Working on small game since a year with a set of talented friends.

We're reviewing moving off unity enginge for this project and will absolutely not use unity again.

This model is just the right mix of greedy and abusable to kill any trust

 

If this insanity continues there is only one solution for the future for small Indie studios that do mainly consoles.
we need an Open Source alternative that cannot change in the future so we can invest time on in.
As I understand the only good one is https://godotengine.org

The problem is that it cant do PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox X|S, Switch out of the box.
I see it can be done with third party support:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html
We need to get organized ourselves, nobody will help us in this crazy world.
We need to make groups for godot in Sony forum and xbox forum and somehow maintain support for godot ports.

 

"Thanks to your feedback, we understand that our initial communication wasn't sufficiently clear about how the new pricing plan will benefit our community..."

 

imagine you retire from game development in 10 years, maybe 15 years. maybe youre running a farm, or a boating company, or youve opened a small shop, and then one day in the mail you receive an invoice from unity for $0.20

 

This literally happened to me. My game suddenly popped up on key sites even though I have not created a single key. It was some kind of backdoor in steam with trading cards.

 

Goodbye Unity

 

Basically if you make a lot of money ($200k+) switch immediately to Pro, otherwise you'll pay an arm and a leg for every install you have above 200k. This is Unity's "subtle" way of reminding you that if you make above $200k you are now a Pro...

 

Math is simple - this might cost infinite amount as long as you meet the rev threshold because there's no mechanics guarding against people doing mas reinstalls on purpose, same goes for pirated copies ('trust us bro we know when it's pirated' is not good enough sorry), so as long as you break the threshold, even on free plan and don't update in time when there's some group trying to tank you you could instantly go to infinite amounts, that's all.

And that is here the main problem, not the fact that you need to pay, paying is fine, even if it gets more expensive than it is now (which it did), but paying based on 'trust us bro we tell you how much to pay and is all good' is just ridiculous 'business' model.

Also: don't expect the actual numbers from developers here if the actual numbers aren't predictable in any way, shape or form - this is the ACTUAL problem here.

 

man this affects our livelihoods, of course we've done the numbers, but it's not just about that. it's about a half-baked, unenforceable pricing policy change that's being sprung on us with only 3 months notice, and on top of all of that we seemingly don't even get the option to remain with an older version and license of unity to avoid it. it's a bait and switch, and it's abhorrent.

 

It was a stupid decision not to understand how the game's living space came about.

 

1. How do you calculate the last 12 months’ revenue?
2. If I got $200k and 200k installs between 9/1/2022 to 8/31/2023, do I have to pay the Unity runtime fee starting from 9/1/2023?
3. What if the revenue changes to lower than $200k between 10/1/2022 to 9/30/2023? Do I not need to pay the fee starting from 10/1/2023?
4. How can developers trust your installs data? Is any third party involved?

 

Yeah, that's literally no different than what they had before. Except now you have the OPTION to pay, and don't need to pay for "Plus" if your company makes more than 100k in revenue from Unity.

I'm really not seeing what the fuss is about.

 

There are numerous posts talking about what they would have owed Unity if they released their game after these changes. Yeah it’s the minority, but it’s there. No I’m not gonna link them for you.

 

I bought a UE5 learning book.
Goodbye Unity

 

I don't understand why Unity is always compared to Unreal, as they are completely different entities. Unreal originates from a gaming company, emphasizing performance and graphics card capabilities from the very beginning. It is a byproduct of Epic's excess production capacity during game development, designed for superior game performance and visual quality.

In contrast, Unity was initially created to offer small to medium-sized developers an easy-to-use tool for simple game development. Throughout its evolution, Unity benefited from the rise of the mobile internet era, emerging as a compromise where both machine and operating system performance faced many restrictions.

Unity's greatness has never been about creating games of a quality comparable to Unreal. Even if it can't produce features like Unreal's Nanite or Lumen, it doesn't matter. Unity stands out as a flexible and user-friendly system. Unity's true distinction lies in its open developer ecosystem, with numerous outstanding individual developers creating a myriad of plugins and 3D resources for Unity.

The price changes threatens to shatter the hopes and boundless aspirations of countless developers. With developers moving away, Unity's thriving ecosystem faces potential devastation.

 

If im right...
`install count` is calculated from all titles, not each titles right?

 

Finally!

 

As I understand it, monthly, that means you have 200k free installs per month.

 

It is insane to pay %5 of IAP revenue to Unreal, or pay money for every install to Unity. Every game uses Photoshop , Photoshop runs in every game lol, lets Adobe get money for every install. We, as developers, artists, animators etc. create games with full effort, brainstorming and creativity then you are counting our money at your offices. Is it fair, really? If Unity will advocate this pricing decision and insist on it, nothing to say apart from Goood-Byeeee.

It is so clear that that Godot will be the most popular game engine in the following years. Let's see.

 

I mean, a meteor could destroy Earth tomorrow as well but that's not very likely. Neither is this program costing a developer an "infinite" amount.

Unity said that they'd not count pirated copies or install bombing, and if you are making more than 200k in revenue you probably should have the resources to be able to work with them to ensure those copies are not counted. If they don't live up to their word, they're asking for a lawsuit.

It sounds like people are making a mountain out of a possibility with less than molehill-sized odds. If you are monetizing your game and making $0.02 per user or less (the amount to lose money), then you are doing something wrong.

 

the pricing idea is not that much of a problem (except the legal status of sending anonymous data to a server without the user concent -> which might be a BIG problem).
the problem is that i don't think they can make a difference between piracy and legal copies (also g2a and other gray sites which ATM are worst than piracy for devs, imagine with this new pricing model).
also people might find a new way to review bomb a game by install and uninstall it.
(yeah yeah, sure they say thy will not count piracy and review bombing... aaaaa how?! because I don't really think they can)
also also this pricing model might really hurt mobile developers.

other than that the model is absolutely fine