Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I see a trend here. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cpdrn/ea_ceo_john_riccitiellos_thoughts_on/
"When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time."

 

All developers are on fire, reddit is on fire, the whole internet is on fire, there are already articles everywhere to denounce this non sense.

Good bye, you just signed the end of Unity

 

Totally agree.

 

Devs with successful games and studios that are businesses and that have to think about their own bottom lines definitely are aware of this change. None of them will accept this or any watered down lesser evil version Unity proposes unless they’re already deep into the development process.

 

My idea exactly.

 

ill just put this here

https://www.ign.com/articles/former...on-microtransactions-are-the-biggest-f-idiots

 

So if I understand this correctly... So I have a game that has around 3m installs and then the only threshold I'm saved from being charged is the 200.000$ /12mo which I will probably never see in my lifetime?

Also even if you somehow manage to get passed 200.000€ within the last 12mo are you charged that month for new installs and if in the next month it is calculated that you fall below the threshold you stop paying or once you are above the threshold you're done for?

 

I cant believe my eyes, this decision possibly sent me at least 10 years back with my career.

i have no clue what is going on with Unity, but i am concerned about the future of the company.

 

One thing that is slipping under the radar is for those who use unity offline (from the internet) well, you're kinda screwed as now the license is going to be required to be refreshed at least every 3 days... so they killed all those people who worik in restricted environment

 

100k is the salary of a normal unity developer. In other words, all studios where more than 1 developer should go to hell?

 

Except if you don’t want Unity’s splash screen, which after this debacle is looking to be necessary.

 

His post is not very clear, but it seems his game makes a tad more than $1 million per year, not per month. And he's left with 350k$ per year after Apple share & marketing.

 

You no longer need Unity plus if you make $100K a year.

If you game is not making over $200K a year you pay nothing.

It sucks more for successful games than anything, but price of business and all that. But in most cases it seems cheaper than Unreal.

 

He's probably not insider trading tbh, but they shouldn't be censoring your posts (or paying Reticuli anywhere near what they are).

 

@incredulous You should ask your forum admin colleague add an official tag before you post here.
People have said we're not upset about Unity is trying to generate more revenue, but it's should be reasonable. One of your colleague is saying the main target of this policy is for AAA-tier companies, but currently it seems the middle-tiers will get the most harm.

Also please don't "threaten" us with "Employees need to be paid or there's no engine", this is stupid, we choose Unity because it's simple for cross-platforms, but it doesn't mean it's not replacable, godot or UE are good candidates, as most person's choice, stride 3D is also an option to us.

Companies won't pay seats as they should do is a problem to solve, but the solution should never be "take a second fee", who can guarantee that there won't be a third, forth one?

Also speaking of the AAA-tiers company being your target, will you still charging them if they are actually your sharesholders? Mentioning here that Mihoyo, Netease are shareholders of Unity China, Tencent isn't though. If the anwser is yes, I would really be surprised that you're telling me that a US company likes to transition money from left hand to right, leaving trackable records for taxes for Chinese government. What a kind support!

Back to tech issues, all of your colleagues are mentioning that Unity has some fraud detections that can tell if an installation is legal or pirate, let's put this Super-Denuvo thing away, but thinking of this: so you're telling us there might be un-authorised network access during the installation -- that's fine, but, do you prepared that it could be turned into a DDOS attack, what if it takes more money on network defense than the revenue from this stupid policy?

 

How exactly is having to figure out another way to additionally pay for something you didn't have to pay for before "good for the devs"?
Please explain...

 

What the hell even does "monthly rate" mean? If the game is installed 300k, which is 100k more than the 200k threshold, and if I'm using the Personal license, do I have to pay 100k*0.2$ = 20.000$ EVERY month??

 

Sorry unity, but I think I'll switch to unreal engine or godot. I do NOT trust you any more, because my work and lost hours of sleep cannot be undone by you in this way. Since you are no longer on the developers' side, I don't see why the developers should be on your side. Either take down this rubbish you have done, or I think you will leave your employees jobless very soon. Having said that, best regards. I hope your CEO has understood the seriousness of the situation and that because of this rubbish he is putting the jobs of so many developers at risk, especially those who have to bring their children's bread home. Shame on you, greedy people! From now on, I will make sure that the games I download are NOT made with Unity.

 

Sorry, I missed your post
Did you (or anyone else) post something similar on Reddit or Twitter?
I think you could reach more people that way

 

No, you pay for the installs THAT MONTH. If you have 100K a month then yes, but i think in your case it would be 100K over time so you would split that up more.

 

This will be an impossible burden for any free to play games if they rely on other sources of income like microtransactions. The uncertainty that you might suddenly owe huge amounts of money to unity because you have a lot of players not making use of the microtransactions just isn't worth it. This will force developers to try to get every single player to engage with microtransactions in contrast to focusing on players who are willing and have the means to pay.

I'm currently working on a free to play WebGL based game which will be completly unsustainable with this pricing model since a single visit to the website will count as an install. This would be completly unsustainable even if I were subscribed to Unity Enterprise and would have more than 1m plays, which would result in a per website visit fee of 0.01$.

If this pricing model will go through as is, I (and most likely a lot of other free to play game developers, especially on the webgl platform) will be forced to change engine

 

Ill switch to another engine whatever happens. I dont trust this company anymore

 

This does not affect only big F2P mobile games, especially since every reinstallation counts even smaller indies reach that threshold quickly.
In our case this already means we probably can not add a demo for our games, have to cancel opportunities like Steam festivals and more.

Very poorly thought through decision.
For example regarding bundles for Steam games, my current understanding is that they are not supposed to count towards the payed installations. How on earth is this supposed to be properly differentiated from regular downloads.

I have a hard time coming up with a more shady business decision and it is extremely bad PR.
Even random players in our discord already heard about it, are asking us for our opinions and are calling it a rugpull.

 

No Demos are fine as long as they don't include the full game.

 

Lol, seems like they pulled an "Elon Musk buying twitter for 4 billion" by buying Weta and all the other nonsense and now they are looking for desperate ways to get the money they wasted back.

They do realise in the end we are also trying to make money right.

If it's gonna cost money to create games, we'll just find another job/engine.

The stupidity is astounding.

 

Do I understand correctly that to remove Unity splash screen, in 2020 I was able to pay 420 USD per month as Plus plan but now I have to pay 1877 EUR per year for Pro plan because plus was removed to "simplify pricing"?

 

I hope Unity can reconsider this pricing plan.

 

If you are against this, please use this image as profile picture on the forum!

 

Are you guys trying to run yourselves out of business? From this day you have zero trust from your users, even lower than that. And that's coming from a user who has a lot invested in Unity, in assets, projects etc. Switching to Unreal or Godot or any other engine for that matter is almost certain for us now.

Great job! Your investors will definitely love deserted product.

 

Homeless A: Hey, buddy, how did you end up here?
Homeless B: I made a F2P game with Unity, and it became really popular.
Homeless A: Wow, but if it was so popular, why did things turn out this way?
Homeless B: I paid all the taxes, and $100k got deposited, but the Unity invoice was $300k.
Homeless A: That's really unfortunate. I was Unreal developer.
Homeless B: Then why did you become homeless?
Homeless A: I bought Unity stocks.

 

And yet you decided to go public with this? Oh man, this is one absurd disaster.

 

Q: If a game that's made enough money to be over the threshold has a demo of the same game, do installs of the demo also induce a charge?
A: If it's early access, Beta, or a demo of the full game then yes. If you can get from the demo to a full game then yes. If it's not, like a single level that can't upgrade then no.

Im guessing you never deployed a game on steam or google play or apple or any modern console? As almost all of these deployments cause you to have a install full game from demo.

 

Yes - absolutely we have, though one of the serious concerns is that it's extremely difficult to do the math on highly unpredictable metrics. The proportion of paying users per install changes per product, time of year, marketting, platform. Any math we do is a stab in the dark at what users may or may not do.

Ultimately what this comes down to is a form of rev share (which I could completely understand, and whilst I like not paying money, have always been surprised unity dont do - I'd love Unity to have a more legit business case for investing in their tech).

The problem with this form of rev share is that it is unpredictable, and applies to different companies differently. A premium game that sells for $60 is paying a different rev share to a FTP game that makes $1ppu. It is also by definition not possible to keep static - Unity will have to change their thresholds and pricing, because the value of $ changes, and they have shown themselves to be willing to throw signficiant changes to company costs at developers with virtually zero warning (let's not forget, company accounts are done per quarter, and we've been given less than 1 quarter of warning for this change).

Had in January Unity declared they're going to start doing x% rev share for products that make of y$ in sales, we could have evaluated it, done simple maths, and made simple decisions. When talking to investors and publishers about P&Ls we could have given them concrete information.

Instead, an entire industry's worth of developers have been told that within less than 1 financial quarter they're being switched to a badly planned, virtuall unenforcable, unpredictable pricing model change at a time when many were already questioning the technical strength of the platform.

So yes, we've done the maths. And we're still pissed.

 

None of stupid things Elon did to twitter (X) is remotely comparable to what Unity did to itself. What Unity just committed is a tumblr-level suicide.

 

This is incorrect, the way I understand their crap new policy.

I really dont wanna sound like I'm defending Unity.. Let me just try to clarify, while making it very clear that whoever came up with this model needs to go to prison.

On the pro plan, TWO conditions need to be met before any money gets sent to unity:

IF

LIFETIME INSTALLS = 1,000,000 or more --- In your examples, YES, they'd reach 2.4 million in one year

AND

Revenue (this is BEFORE store cut, as far as I know) >= $1,000,000 total in the last 12 months --- In your 2ND example, YES, they'd reach $1,000,008 in one year

THEN

You would pay Unity FROM THE MOMENT YOU MEET YOUR REVENUE THRESHOLD, regardless of having passed the INSTALL threshold before. And NOT RETROACTIVELY.

So you would pay $0.02 PER INSTALL (provided they come from non-emerging markets, $0.01 from emerging), because you would START payment having OVER 1,000,001 INSTALLS above the INITIAL threshold of 1 million (1.4 million installs over that, to be exact).

To find out how much you would have to actually pay Unity in that second scenario, you would have to take the number of installs that originated after having met (and passed) the 1 million revenue threshold, let's be aggressive and say it was 20,000 installs (you only made 8 dollars more than the threshold in that example, so 20k is a lot), you'd then have to pay unity 400 dollars. 20,000 installs x $0.02 per install past the revenue threshold.

So in this example, it's not horrible. It would get worse and worse and worse, if you increased the monthly install count, and kept the revenue at 1,000,008.



I hope I did this correctly, but Unity's communication has been dreadful, so forgive me if I'm wrong. We're all reeling from this BS.

 

They have one good news. Posting to the forum is still free for now.

 

WOW - I cannot believe this. I have well over $10k in Unity assets, 6 months into my game and now I have to change to Unreal or Godot. Unity should fire the CEO. My 2 cents. I definitely will not be going ahead with this project of mine in Unity. Unreal seems the best choice but what do I do with all the Unity assets I have purchased from Unity????

How can you trust a company that can change at anytime how much they charge you?

 

I have a F2P VR game (therefore I cannot use the in game ads for reducing the price). We average around $0.50 per user. At $0.15 per install even if they somehow magically figure out how to prevent including reinstalls, that is a rev share of 30% for us. Something we did not agree to when we chose Unity for our business.

 

wait...can someone explain how unity is collecting this "install data"? are they making deals with distributors to collect this info? every unity build ive ever made never has an installer. are they actually planning on collecting and distributing peoples information like some invasive malware through the exe to detect what machine its on?

 

These policies render Unity as too risky to continue using

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 is not transparent enough. How are we supposed to model any market predictions if we don't know what exactly is being taxed? Furthermore, how can we trust your closed-source proprietary method isn't vulnerable to attacks by a malicious third-party? What if I make a botnet of devices repeatedly install-an-uninstall an Unity application, can I ruin an indie studio I don't like?

Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses?​

I understand the GDPR compliance; however, you're counting on the fact that everyone (not just the developers, but the end users too) will be so understanding. What you're risking is that the entire ecosystem might have to start wrestling with the PR nightmare of: "Every Unity software is a spyware"

Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games?
A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.​

Again, this is not transparent enough.

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.​

With this move, you're destroying the trust that your developers had put in you. How can we model a pricing plan for our software if we can't know what the fees will look like a few moths from now? How do we rationalize investing years of development into an application that can, at any time, stop being supported by a financially viable model?

With moves like these, you're not only alienating your old developers, you're also discouraging any potentionally new ones from choosing Unity. This will hurt the entire ecosystem in the long run.

 

I can tell you this flat out - regardless of how I feel, whether I loved or hated this decision, I can not imagine standing in front of an investor with a P&L sheet that basically has a ? mark in where unity costs are concerned, not just because of this model, but because we can't place any guaruntee on how future costs will change.

 

I guess I have to finish my Early Access Unity game whether I want it or not, because I owe it to players who already bought it.

One obvious change at this moment will be adding DRM, to make it more difficult to pirate every time I update it (they do pirate it every time within hours). I definitely won't be writing to Unity and begging to lower the fee because of piracy (and that is their plan to handle this at this moment - you need to write them and beg "to work with your situation so they won't bankrupt you" - their words).

Also with adding DRM, I have to take off the game from gog.com (their whole thing is no-DRM games). That's where the pirated versions are taken from, btw.

One thing is certain, my next games will be using Unreal, even if it means spending 2 years to get up to speed with it.

And yes, if Unity announced that they would take 5% of revenue I would be like "Oh well. Ok. I'm making money, so they make money, it's fair". But charging for installs...?

Let's say you are above the thresholds. 20% of Steam installs are refunded. So you earned $0, no goods were traded, but you (actually, Valve) are billed $12k. I'm pretty sure it's illegal.

 

good idea. twitter is sh*t if you're not popular (and now also if you don't have the blue)
but reddit would be good. posted here

 

We need to draft an official request letter addressed to the leadership of Unity company, signed by a maximum number of community members, utilizing a platform for collecting signatures in support of the letter.

Furthermore, it is imperative to initiate an investigation into Unity's intentions and actions to determine if they exhibit any monopolistic characteristics that contravene international laws, as well as the laws of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada.

We may also consider initiating legal action to prohibit the use of such an instrument for illicit money-making schemes through legal recourse.

The formation of an initiative group is necessary.

 

that's actually a good idea

 

Charging per-install is needlessly complex, takes monetization strategy options away from developers, and demands they rely on a proprietary, inherently biased install count.

A revenue-based approach is the only responsible approach I can see without losing a ton of trust and users, especially when there's excellent options to switch to.

Speaking as a professional dev for >10 years using Unity, this decision has absolutely left me questioning my future use of the engine.

 

If he's making $1 million/yr from 4.8 million installs per year, then that is $0.2083 per user.

He says he gets on average 400k installs per month.
He says he earns 1 million per year.
That is 4.8 million installs per year and $1 million in revenue per year.
Subtract store fees, and that is $700k.
Subtract marketing costs and that is $450k revenue per year.
Subtract 1 million installs for Pro and that is 3.8 million installs that will be charged.
- 100k * 0.15 = $15,000
- 400k * 0.075 = $30,000
- 500k * 0.03 = $15,000
- 2.8m * 0.02 = $56,000
Total: $116,000 in install fees PER YEAR
$450k - $116k = $334,000

That is $334,000 per year left over for funding the rest of business. About 11.6% fee on the Pro plan.

- 100k * 0.125 = $12,500
- 400k * 0.06 = $24,000
- 500k * 0.03 = $10,000
- 2.8m * 0.01 = $28,000
Total: $74,500 in install fees PER YEAR
$450k - $74,500 = $375,500

That is $375,500 per year left over for funding the rest of business. About 7.45% fee on the Enterprise plan.

 

One of the worst choices Unity Technologies has ever made

 

Forgot about GoG. This is a big problem for desktop devs. Many people want non-DRM copies and Gog version.