Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Flashmob at unite singing "All I want to say is that they don't really care about us" during the keynote

 

0.2$ Per install is a really bad idea, please reconsider this...

 

How long until Unity takes down this blog post?: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform

The link to the TOS GitHub is now dead: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService

How can Unity expect their users to trust them after this? Even if they reverse this nonsense, the damage is done. You guys seriously screwed up.

 

I don’t know how many years have passed, I wanted to see if Unity has changed (become better) after development is complete. I didn’t expect this to make me make a cruel decision now. I was currently working on an RPG and now have to give it up. I'm already dissatisfied with the semi-product features they developed, and now they're adding this per install!

What do you think the future development of unity will be? Regardless of whether there is per install.

 

Just wanted to say I don't approve what Unity Technologies wants to do!

Down with CEO!

 

This is a regrettable thing, it could have been better.
This will force me to give up using Unity to create my game. I have purchased a large amount of resources from the mall, and I hope the engine can be more user-friendly, rather than causing users to worry about these issues every day.
Perhaps you have your own difficulties, but this does not make me agree with this approach. Perhaps you can adopt the same commission strategy as Epic, only earning money from companies with huge revenue. If they have a revenue of $100 million, you will receive about $5 million. It is difficult to earn much profit from independent game producers because our pricing for selling games is usually very low, such as $1-2. There are many games at this price on Steam. Do you think after deducting $0.2 per download, how much do we have left?
You can choose to have individual users purchase it all at once, giving users with income less than $1 million permanent usage rights, which is more attractive to use than deducting fees every month.
Also, please do not activate once every 3-7 days as it is too frequent and may affect production.
We only want to create games stably, and we don't want a sudden storm to disrupt everything. Thank you.

 

This is seriously making me think about switching to other game engines.
I'd rather not deal with this. What's even up with this pricing model?

• What if people refund the game?
• How do installations get tracked?
• What happens if people launch the game using pirated versions?
• Does the installation count each time a user installs the game, again?
• The pricing table is vague at best.

Hopefully, Unity will reconsider using a revenue percentage model instead of this overly complex approach.

 

Unity, a company with (according to google) almost 8 000 employees doing products for game developers.
When these developers posted 6000 posts on the official forum with valuable feedback depicting the new pricing model as clearly broken, not fair in many cases and also unpractical, what Unity did? They delegated 2 employees that literally answered to 40 out of 6000 posts, and mostly to the easy questions. They answered mostly with one sentence, like they would be in a hurry. 5960 posts with great feedback and examples were ignored entirely.

I understand if it would be an indie game engine made by a few people, could be a bit difficult to answer that many questions, but even then at leats these few developers should try to answer them. But 8000 employees and this?

I have tons of questions but the chance that someone will even read this (yet alone answer) is rather small.

I will post two examples of this being broken anyway:

1. I am working on a gaming portal that will have let's say 100 WebGL games made with Unity. Let's say that in the first year I will be able to make these 100 games be played by 1 200 000 players each. I plan to show ads every like 30 minutes to these players. Most of the games they played, they did so only for 1 minute to try and then only when they liked a game they started playing for longer. So let's say that it took them 5 hours to try all the games, then they leaved and never came back. I was able to show the ad to them 10 times. So In total I have displayed the ad 10 000 000 times. Let's say that I was able to earn $5 per every 1000 ad views. So I earned $50 000.

Each of the 100 games I have was played 1 200 000 times. So if I have Unity Enterprise (best case for dev) I need to pay to Unity:
100 games * 100 000 * $0.125 + 400 000 * $0.06 + 500 000 * $0.02 = $46 500
So basically 93% of the revenue. And the numbers I presented are optimistic. If I would have most players from Turkey, the CPM would be probably 10 times lower. So Unity would get 200% of the revenue. If I would not have Unity Enterprise it would be way worse too.

2. Small indie developer is selling his game for $1 and was able to make 1 200 000 players installing and playing it.
When you will remove all the Steam fees and all the taxes, he was able to earn around $480 000.
He needs to pay to Unity: 100 000 * $0.125 + 400 000 * $0.06 + 500 000 * $0.02 = $46 500
So around 10% of the revenue, not bad but:

Now a big company is selling a Unity game for $70 and was able to sell 1 200 000 copies.
Let's say the fees and taxes are the same as for the small indie developer (40% remains), so they earned $33 600 000
They need to pay to Unity: 100 000 * $0.125 + 400 000 * $0.06 + 500 000 * $0.02 = $46 500
So around: 0.14%

The big rich company pays 70 times lower fee than the poor indie developer.

Not to mention that the indie dev will most likely use Unity Personal or PRO, not Enterprise. So he will get a lot worse deal.

Is this really fair and makes sense?

Please Unity employee answer and show on my two examples that we are ale wrong and you give the fair and best possible deal to every developer.

Not only your new pricing model is not fair for everyone, but it also makes your engine unusable in certain business situations.

Just get some % of the revenue (or better the profit) rather than per install and everything will be clear and working properly. I will be happy to pay you, but not 95% or 200% of the revenue. Also I would prefer to not pay you 100 times more than big companies. Maybe you had some good intentions, but the person who invented this didn't predict all the possible use cases. In practice what you propose will not work and will only harm your business and the company, making many developers leave to get the more fair and better deal. Only those like me who for various reasons can not switch so easily, will stay. But even for me I need to seriously reconsider now what to do. I am really in the middle of working on the gaming portal mentioned in point 1. What would you advise me to do now if I am at a risk of giving you 95% to 200% of what I will earn? Should I make the portal anyway, earn nothing and only owe you more money than I will earn?

 

now you need to buy the pro version to disable the Unity logo

 

i didnt say that, but i agree and appreciate being confused with the legend, Kubold.

 

One thing has to be admitted:
The forums are on fire. Put some ads here and there will not be the need for any pricing changes now ^^

 

this still isnt acceptable for those small to medium sized indie teams who wish to grow to a larger size. it places and extreme dampener on f2p models, they dont provide any sort of information of how we can control who has our software or where they install it, and a studio could be billed for millions of installs to pirated platforms or users who run install/uninstall scripts.

not to mention the market share for mobile is massive but the margins per user for mobile games will almost never make up the difference.

unity will kill their mobile platform with this move and will likely never recover unless they can reverse this decision. from the amount of developers and companies who have already stated that they plan to take their games down or not continue with development, unity's market share in the industry will plummet, along with stock prices and revenue. studios aren't going to pay for this when they can migrate over to godot or UE5 and only see revenue share over 1million+

no matter if its a threshold to start at or anything else, charging based on install will screw over unity.

 

Do you have a quote from that? In the FAQ in first post it says for example Betas indeed do count.
Even if not, how do they want to track that, same way as with the bundles.
To them this will have the same project ID as the regular exports, so how does it look different than say a separate Steam Deck export.

Next EXTREMELY major problem for us. We use unity as dedicated servers and use auto scaling for the servers.
This means everytime we spawn a new instance for players to play on, this will look like an installation to unity and they will invoice us for it.
We probably will have to cut the multiplayer system for now and rework everything to be p2p instead.

 

LOL, so if they going to put the install costs on the distributers like Microsoft , Well microsoft just going to watch without actions draining money from them to unity? , LOL

Maybe this explain why Microsoft dropped VS support as respond to unity behavior .

 

The point is less the actual price (although, as demonstrated many times in this thread, this is a very serious problem for many companies) than the fact that no sane, self respecting business can accept that their costs can now drastically vary in a way that is

- out of their control
- cannot be tied to revenue unless the devs also start charging per install (good luck with that)

As a business, you simply cannot operate with such a sword of Damocles over your head. And I'm not even talking about piracy and bots mass installing a game. Just think about all the events that could cause old players to come back.

- A popular youtuber makes a "old games I loved" video, nostalgia kicks in, dev costs suddenly skyrocket.
- A new sci-fi space movie is released, makes you want play an old space 4X game again.Instead of being happy about that leading to new customers, devs will also worry about past player base mass reinstalling.
- A friend hypes you up about "replaying this game as we did last year, that was so cool"...

The entire marketing around a game will now be a double edge sword, since any $ you put into it may actually cause old players to reinstall. You're excited about a new update that makes your game 10x cooler? You better think twice about the way you communicate, because getting players back will bite you in the ass.

Can you imagine how much a nightmare this will be to manage your business? The problem is not only the cost, it's the unpredictability. I just don't see how any business would be willing to handle this sort of uncertainty. I certainly don't.

 

I can write a script that will automatically install/uninstall game made by people I don't like. Finally a useful feature! Let's say reinstalling a game takes ~2 min, automated tool could make 720 reinstalls per day. I could run it for a week (7*720 = 5040) and the person I hate will be charged by 5040*0.2 = 1080$. But if game is small and it could be reinstalled in 30 seconds this sum raises to 4320$ But wait! I have a second laptop that could do the same! it's 8640$ now! Awesome!
I'm so evil.
And I also have 20-30 friends on the internet who will happily run this script for a week or two. Because it's fun!

 

Even better, there might be cheap botnets of thousands of computers that will be happy to help you!

 

They don't know how to answer. The suits send them here for some damage control and feedback. It's not their fault. They might be as angry as we are, but they can't even express they're concerns.

They are cannon fodder

 

What are you think guys about adding rewardable ads on Play button in editor? Watch to Play!

 

In that evil world, Unity can do that themselves... (more installs, more money)

 

This. They clearly want Installs as a chargeable metric, which is the truly gross part, but looking at this thread most people have already devolved it to debating whether the charges will be low / high-- missing the point that if the metric itself becomes acceptable they will leverage it further.

It's not an honest fee, it's not a reliable cost for game developers to track. It's a tax they can raise at any time once established.

I've been using Unity for 10 years now, today I've lost every inch of trust in the management of this company. I don't give one whit what the actual calculators say, this is a poisonous metric.

 

I made a Unity Install Fee Calculator and the numbers are revealing

Feel free to make a copy and play with the numbers yourself. I welcome any feedback if I got any of the formulas wrong.

The spreadsheet is made for premium games, but can be modified to analyze free to play games as well.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hKdOR529Lf5RcDPANRncZC8W-zHY7eXk9x8zu4T39To/edit?usp=sharing

 

Awesome!

 

There are geos where LTV never even close to 0.20$. Should I close the game from that geos? I am really confused.

 

id like to remind you that a single developer gets paid on average 68 thousand dollars a year.
provided a company brings in enough revenue to pay for those 4 developers, they meet that threshold.

100k installs for an indie team isnt impossible to do, for instance battlebit crushed sales this year.

unity flipped the developers it works for on its head for every penny they could shake out, and decided the playground was the best target, shaking out the little man for every dollar instead of just taking a revenue share after a certain revenue amount was hit.

go read more posts, I can promise you that you will start to see how screwed up this is.

 

No, that not what they say. If the company has had $1M revenue the last 12 months ($83.334 per month) they will have to keep paying $22.500 every month for the monthly 200k downloads if the income stays at $83.334+ per month.

 

I honestly think they forgot about that. Everything about this feels chaotic, rushed, and half baked. The retroactive changes are legally dubious regardless, but this gem (the attachment) in particular seems extremely inconvenient to their argument that they are contractually allowed to add these fees. How on earth do they think they can argue that they've acted in good faith?

 

Try Quantum, there is no need for unity on server side.

 

Man, to think I submitted bug reports with fixes for them.

Like, one of the new flagship features of Unity 2023, the HDLines for hair, is completely broken. The profiling on it is messed up, and not only does it accumulate multiple kb per frames, it is also in the release build because they didn't complete the preprocessor branches. What makes it worse is that because of the halfway exclusion in release builds, it crashes release builds randomly because the memory gets corrupted with profiling markers that get never cleaned up. I did the same for another bug where HDLines would initialize a compute shader via OnValidate which of course also doen't work in release builds.

After initially reporting those issues, I went to debug both issues myself and sent them a fix and an explanation, because I knew the unity devs were under a lot of workload. I wanted Unity to succeed. I feel like a fool now.

 

It's awful that they're just abandoning this, why would I trust any Unity communication going forward?

 

Doesn't work for what we do, we have a shooter with server side controlled AI that need to calculate for example projectiles flying through the unity level.
Works if you have some simple game maybe, not for us.

 

Seriously? Do you, unknown Unity developer, have the courage to write these lines after what you have read? After developers who will cancel their game and a type of job, "Unity developer", which with these changes and this uncertainty is as useful in a resume as programming in Fortran? That we should make ourselves a herbal tea and not have a stroke? Thank you, you really were a great help.

 

change the model. forget tracking installs, thats such a stupid idea...like really extremely stupid. change the model to sales. scale the % owed per sale up to $0.20. just lerp it.

Code (CSharp):

1. public int numberSold;
2. float minPrice = 0.01f;
3. float maxPrice = 0.2f;
4.  
5. void Update()
6. {
7.    float valueOwed = Mathf.Lerp(minPrice, maxPrice, Mathf.Clamp01((float)numberSold / 200000.0f));
8. }

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/agn89u/join_john_riccitiello_and_joachim_ante_for_an_ama/

Read that to see what kind of big liar John Riccitiello really is ...

 

If you were a malicious 'l33t hax0r', you'd maybe modify the game executable to spam the 'game installed' message to Unity's servers repeatedly (making up fake machine IDs if necessary), to send a much higher rate of install reports. Or write a standalone 'install bombing' tool to do the same thing.

"Never trust the client"

 

Thank you for this. I would only revise #2 so that it is guaranteed not only for already published games, but also works in progress. Game development can take years and we should be able to safely plan the process without risking being forced to choose between a new contract or abandoning a project we've spent years on. A good solution would be to attach the Terms of Service to specific versions of Unity, so any changes would only affect those who choose to upgrade to a newer version.

 

Yes I know and I don't blame them, but the company. My post was not directed to these employees in any way and is also in a kind of neutral tone only asking for a proper answer. I believe the company had some good intentions with the switch, but it is just not going as they were hoping for.

 

While I've always valued Unity for its features and community, the upcoming pricing changes have put me in a challenging position. If the model remains as proposed, it may become untenable for me to continue using Unity, especially for projects that don't generate revenue. In that case, I may have no choice but to explore alternatives like Unreal Engine or Godot, which currently offer more favorable terms for developers like me.

 

Don't mind me. Just posting here to be part of history.

 

This is the CEO.

 

Please, be respectful, there is no need to insult this poor rodent.

 

No need to yell at him. He's probably an intern who used ChatGPT generating comments to defend Unity (while working on his resume for next job).

 

You really underestimate Chinese workshops.

 

You can be sure pretty much everyone is looking for alternatives at the moment. I'm still not 100% sure wheather to switch. Switching engines is not easy. All the assets, all the knowledge erased. Back to square one. But having Unity as a some sort of digital landlord is too much. And this is just continuation of many many questionable decisions from Unity leadership.

 

Or you would just pay for a Unity Pro licence and keep the remaining $198,000.

 

unity must be crazy, unreal is just out there and you do this wth lol

 

My last game launched a couple months ago, so I was just in the process of architecting out (on paper) my next one. Instead of using Unity for it, it looks like I need to spend this autumn learning Unreal before I move forward too much on the implementation. This decision is beyond incompetent.

 

I feel sorry for Bossa. first, f*cked over by the SpatialOS situation with Worlds Adrift and owing them thousands in server fees...now when they have tried to revive the game they have to deal with a predatory engine trying to scam them out of money in Lost Skies

 

The biggest insult on top of Unity's model change, is that they can't even have reps on here addressing our concerns. I mean, wtf man after dropping this news, they're literally pissing in our faces right now while our jaws are dropped trying to fully understand what we are in for. For devs of all spectrums ~ platforms, free/paid, solo/sml/lg_studio, industrial/educational...

 

The best time to switch was when Unity merged with IronSource. The second best time is now. If switching is easy this thread will be so silent since people will just leave quietly.