Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I bet that they could avoid this entirely if John took even a small cut and compensated his employees better, but this is just greed.

 

Like it or not they're compared because they're the two biggest publicly available engines being used for 3D game development today. With Godot chasing after them like the kid nobody wanted to invite to hang out. They're the engines that most people are aware of so they get compared. Whether it makes sense in the context or not.

I vastly prefer Unity's workflow to Unreal's but the last 5 or so years for Unity have been rough. I thought they couldn't f*ck it up worse after the Ironsource debacle but they sure managed to find a new low. I don't think there's a way back from this. They've entirely lost the trust of the developers. No amount of back-pedalling will make this right.

 

He miscalculated. Revenue would not count Apple and Google fees.

 

I am so sorry Unity but this is legal robbery

 

I'm working on a VR game for quest where I was hoping to have a game available for free, and you are able to buy access to more minigames for a fixed one-time fee (so more or less a demo)

Now, reaching the 1 million $ threshold seems very unlikely, but it's pretty absurd in the event of reaching that I could possibly start losing money on each copy sold / installed in case just a small fraction of users would buy the full game.

 

Appoint yourself as new head of PR cause you did a much better job than other Unity reps. Yeah more time has passed and maybe you have more pull in the org, but the communications and communication style has been a dumpster fire for this announcement. Your customers are devs. No serious dev will fall for PR speak and ambiguity and just accept it at face value. Either way, trust has been eroded. Unless Unity experiences a shakeup in leadership the loss revenue from this announcement and the handling of the response will dwarf revenue generated from the runtime fees.

 

"We don't want to charge for piracy" is a HELL of an evasive statement. And LOL at "When raised internally, we were told "we would work with the developer to not bankrupt them.""

Thats a HELL of statement. Thank god, "someone" is gonna "work with us" to not "bankrupt us." Whew, for a second there I thought i was screwed. /s

 

Man I really miss the times when Unity was just a game engine garage startup, and not a big corporation on a stock market. And the announcements they made was adding new cool features to the engine, not more ways to squeeze money from the user base...

 

Shouldn't this be a thing that gets figured out before this sort of amazing idea goes live?

 

Good for you. A clear and informative post.

Thank you.

 

Have 200k monthly installs on mobile. ARPU $0.5. That's $70,000 per month after iOS/Google fee. Suddenly Unity wants $22,500 per month on pro-plan. That's a rev.share of 32%. With a 3 months heads-up.

Every mid-size mobile company on Unity will go out of business.

Please tell me my math is wrong?

 

Correct, because an existing system already exists and cannot be disabled.

 

There's a saying:
"Terrible changes are made to hide bad changes"
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case with unity:

 

Nah, they actually went, announces, and nowcharge 12 cents USD a MINUTE for a build minute on a system where their build system burns 30% of the billable time unnecessarily waiting. (the team can expect to be closed down if they are unprofitable, so Unity is actively disincentivized to make Unity Cloud Build Faster, ever)

They are serious about the 20 cents here.

 

Absolutely insane.

They're screwing small studios, by removing the plus tier, so 5 seats that cost 1995 before, will now cost 2040 EACH per year on the pro tier.

They're screwing mobile devs (especially the hyper casuals, with high downloads, tiny CPIs which would double, and very low conversions).

They're screwing Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. Because they're telling the mobile devs to use their ad platform instead (to get a better runtime fee). (Part of me thinks this is the whole reason behind this stupid move.)

And they're screwing the distributors, if they plan on charging THEM on every install, for hosting subscription based games. So gamepass, like you said (Microsoft), but also, apple arcade, maybe even Netflix (as Netflix has app store games that are free but exclusive to their subscribers).. among others I'm not thinking of.

At this point, I'd be surprised if there was no class action lawsuit (coming from devs), and a whole bunch of legal disputes by way of the little companies: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple...

I'm not a lawyer, but I think there may be a legality issue in switching from "use our engine for years to develop your game, pay 399 per year, its cool", to "now pay 2,000 and give me X cents on every install you get, unless you use my ad platform wink wink".. with only 3 months notice (which in game dev time, the FTC should know, is absolutely nothing).

 

Yeah of course a Unity employee would create a new account to reply on Unity's own forum. Just say you use ChatGPT. We know what it is now.

 

This is the most unreasonable, insane policy I've ever seen. I want to can my entire project that I've worked on for years, we we're finally preparing for release.
I'm never using unity again.
Truly F*** everyone who was involved in this. So much for the democratisation of game development.
I mean for F***s sake, had unity even finished building a single feature in the past five years? And then have the audacity to demand money per install?

 

If you switch to Pro then you won't reach the $1 mil revenue requirement with those numbers. Assuming they count revenue after platform fees.

 

Hearthstone is made in Unity, Pokemon Go is made in Unity.
Will Activision and Niantic happily pay this?

 

What's crazy is, even though they're probably joking, after their game is deleted they would still have to pay Unity for any installs from pirate versions.

 

Q: How will you deal with piracy?
A: We'll install a complaint box.

 

The most insane thing is the WebGL pricing model. How the hell are you going to prevent the "launch" bombing if you are admitting you are charging "per launch"? 10 year old script kiddie will be able to create a bussiness-destroying software that will make the company go bankrupt in days. This is just stupid and completely disconnected from reality.

 

I'm assuming it's before platform fees since the fee will be different for different companies, and Unity won't have insight in that.

200k * 12 * $0.5 = $1.2M

 

Please roll this mess back, also why do I need to be online to use Unity? that makes no sense, I really like the engine and I would rather not change but this kind of change out of nowhere is really forcing me to want to try something else.

 

No, revenue does include these 30%.

 

If you think of in a slightly different perspective, this is a culmination of Unity as a cool gacha project under the guise of game engine.

1. Build community and exposure for your "Fraud Engine Project"
2. Do all the best to advertise it as tool to make your dreams come true
3. Run an asset store
4. Get money from thousands of newcomers through asset store
5. Ruin the market with S***load of asset-swap craptitles.
4. Get even more money from 1% of those, who were talented and lucky enough or from big companies

So new developers kinda agree to try their luck in such gacha, investing their lives, money and nerves, however casino is always wins at the end.

Applause!

 

Besides this being a completely unsympathetic pricing system it's just plain scary. The possibility of losing that much money from either fraud, like piracy etc. etc. Or just unlucky circumstances will scare away a ton of Devs especially those less experienced.
Even though almost all those Devs would be protected by the min revenue of 200k it's just a risk no one is going to want to take with other engines being as available as they are

 

Is this even legally enforceable for games released under the previous terms? There is a lot of legal precedent over "onerous or unusual" clauses being invalidated because they weren't prominent enough in contracts that people actually signed. Given nothing like this has ever been in Unity T&Cs I'd imagine such a big change would be found to be unenforceable if challenged in court.

Really the only way out of this mess I can see is to only apply this change to Unity 2024 and onward, with previous versions keeping the old model. That way you can let the market tell you if your new pricing model works for people without risking losing your existing developers to other engines. You could even incentivize devs to use the new price model by removing the splash screen for Personal users in the new version. You'd also no longer have your reputation sullied by low quality games advertising the fact they are written in Unity. Seems like a win-win really

I don't currently develop games in Unity, rather I use it to build bespoke one-off experiences for clients. But if I do start developing my own games I could not at this point risk using Unity in case I get hit with large, unexpected fees. Unless this is reversed quickly I will be using it as an excuse to start working in Unreal and will probably learn Godot as well.

 

The CEO and whoever approved this should resign, I work as a freelancer and I had multiple clients reach out to me about this situation thinking about changing engines, doing this kind of thing hurts the name of the brand and my prospects of getting more work with this on the future

 

That would be better if I wasn't mistaken, I thought the threshold would reset every month. Small games would then never have to pay anything.

 

its only 1 mill for the ENTERPRISE option, so for free users the threshold is only 200,000

 

no installs are lifetime and the 200,000 is in a 12 month period

 

I fully understand you are not the one who called the shots, but attempting to generate revenue based on installs is just absurd. How come you are measuring a game's success by number of installs? 1 million installs of a free game / visits of a WebGL game and 1 million installs of a $60 game are inherently completely different. You don't need 300 IQ to figure that out.

If Unity really cares for (or "celebrates") customers' success, why can't Unity just negotiate a revenue sharing deal with the ~10% top grossing game developers? Why a manipulatable, unreliable metric like # of installs? The fact that you state you are "aiming" that 10% doesn't change the fact that your policy is harming 100% of your customers. I don't see there was a "needless panic;" even when taking all of your clarifications in consideration, this is still a horrific policy that will and have already driven me and other developers away.

Whoever drafted and pushed for this policy (I fully believe many conscious Unity employees have pushed against it) needs to be investigated & held responsible.

 

More revenues for Unity is understandable but the way this is done is just the opposite of what developers are looking for in an engine.

 

Wait. On top of all this crap, they're also doing away with Unity Plus? That's a bloody outrage it is.

 

I don't have any significant problem with you guys targeting those specific, devoid of gameplay, addiction simulators. I have no love for them. They're a blight on society.

I do have many, many, problems with the way you guys have went about this.

There's a very good chance you don't have the legal right to do any of this retroactively, and you certainly don't have the moral right. It doesn't appear that Unity is acting in good faith at all when you market the engine as not needing any revenue share and then you go and do this. The theory that you can do a 180 here, retroactively, is probably unenforceable in any court of law with such obvious bad faith (admittedly, the forced arbitration clause may help you out).

No, even though I despise the games you're going after, altering the terms in the way you're doing is evil, evil, evil.

And trying to change the terms retroactively in this manner destroys all trust. "First they came for the addiction simulator devs, and I said nothing."

Even if we buy the narrative now, no-one, absolutely no-one, trusts you guys not to squeeze the rest of us at some point in the future after what has transpired today.

Not to mention, the scheme is just dumb with so many edge cases and ways for things to break down, and the "trust me bro" aspect (which is also legally dubious).

The complexity and uncertainty is killer.

Still probably unenforceable, and certainly morally bankrupt. What, people are going to rush to release their games this year so that they can avoid this mess? Not nearly good enough.

The only correct way to go about this is to change the terms going forward at a specific engine release. Everything before that can use the old terms, and everything after the new. Don't like the new terms? Don't update to the new release.

And whatever you do, don't do something convoluted and dumb like charging for installs. If you need to, change to a revenue share model. Or just change mobile to a revenue share model. That captures 99% of what you're trying to do (and it's not like there are many alternatives in mobile). If you don't think people are paying their fair share, set a percentage you think is fair. The alternative is that some people get hit way harder based on the monetization model. They will change their models to avoid the fees. And then you will change the criteria to capture them better...

For God's sake, don't do anything retroactively. At the very least, in order to prevent a massive exodus, there needs to be a guarantee that you won't try to anything like this in the future. The EULA must change to make it explicit that Unity will not attempt to retroactively alter agreements. But to be honest, I think the only way you fully repair this situation is with a leadership change.

 

This stupidity doesn't make any sense. Cannot be implemented, most console games have limited access to internet with tons of limitation from console company to how to send data and what to send. Cannot send install count to Unity.

As time goes by I am more convinced that its only announced to spread panic and then settle in a 5% revenue share exactly like Unreal. This is sad because their customers are Devs and not sheep, we should be a little more smart than this.

 

Beware, there's no staff tag for that user, so they could very well be blowing smoke.

 

Whoever made the decision to publish this info early should be fired imo. This is a great post and the kind of thing that should have been posted in the first place.

 

I want to make sure I'm understanding the new pricing system right.

Let's say Vampire Survivors goes on sale for $1 and the devs have the Unity Pro subscription. They've just cleared the threshold eligibility.

Someone buys the game for $1, but they're averaging 5 additional "installs" (which could be anything from a user reinstalling, installing to a different device, or playing a free demo) per sale.

At the Pro rate of $0.15/install, that would cost the developer $0.75. Suppose after Steam's 30% cut, taxes, and marketing expenses, they take home around $0.25 of that.

In this scenario, which doesn't seem far-fetched, a developer would be paying Unity more than their revenue for that sale. Is there something I'm missing here or is this actually a potential scenario?

Won't this result in situations where developers are literally halting/stopping their own game sales to avoid losing money?

It doesn't bother me that the Unity company wants their cut from the more profitable games, but there's gotta be a better way to do this.

Is this not going to create a massive legal mess for them? I'm sure that the bigger studios affected will turn it into one. Why "installs" instead of "sales"? The latter is fair and easy to track. Why use the unreliable metric that can be exploited and requires extra fraud prevention work?

Hoping that either my concerns are unwarranted or that they reconsider how they're implementing this. I've been using Unity for over 10 years now. This fee probably won't affect my game (or will just require me to buy a Pro subscription, which I'm fine with), but it does have me concerned for the future.

 

that's a lot of good will to burn when they could have just done a 4% rev share and people would have basically just shrugged

 

I agree that the new pricing scheme is strange and opaque, plus it is obvious that it is unfinished and not fully understood by the engine developers themselves, judging by their answers:

Q: How are you going to collect installs?
A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.

 

This conflicts with the FAQ in the 1st post and with this article https://www.eurogamer.net/unity-rev...-drawing-criticism-from-development-community :

 

This is ridiculous. So unfair competition can buy my game and install it over and over making me pay a ridiculous amount of money for one sold copy.

 

Okay, so most mobile games that operate on scale will have to contact sales.

And then Unity will control whatever % of your revenue they can take, since at that point you're at the mercy of them.

I hope with adding this in the policy you mean something like "Unity shall NOT take more than 10% of your profits, if you think that's the case, get in touch with us", instead of just "If the pricing is too much for you, contact sales, so we can make a deal"

Based on the info the other employees gave, the tracking was supposedly gonna be a PlayerPref with an id. If that's the case, the user can just delete it over and over again. If you have more protections server side, like getting the user ip as well, then what about distributed attacks? Essentially users will be able to DDoS us except that instead of just taking a multiplayer server down or failing the attack due to the security measures, they're gonna be charging us 0.20$-0.01$ per request.

Please, just don't move forward with the whole per-install fee idea. There's no way you're gonna make a perfect system to track installs, where the solution to most problems are just "Contact us so we don't overcharge".

 

• The ass made the decision
  

 

Can we all stop acting like a brand new account is a unity employee please. Or I am coming back on hear as president of the internet and saying stupide S***. There is plenty and I mean plenty of unity staff reading this right now Twitter X what ever were calling it and redit are on fire over this right now. There top story on at least half the biggest indie game dev blogs and gamming websites if they wanted to responded they would of done it. Also selling unity stock short's after hour trading is a trending in discord groups right now. Someone at unity is paying attention I promise there wholes company is on fire.

 

Even if they do this, then trust will not be returned, and in this case it will still be better to move to UE.