Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

As a Unity Dev of 10 years that switched to Godot in 2018 because I knew the way that things were going even back then.

Even I, am dumbfounded by the current situation. What could you possibly be thinking? That Mihoyo and Nintendo will single-handedly pay for your engine? Are you that delusional? How does this make any sense in your mind? Are you completely out of touch?

This doesn't concern me but, dear lord, this is so far off in the wilderness that one cannot not comment on it.

To all the indie devs, think VERY well before you continue using Unity, even if this changes.

 

this is a no-go for us and we already started evaluating alternatives.

 

wtf you do unity, now to have profitable game you neet to have LTV from user higher than 0.15$ in most mobile games is imposible.

 

Given this situation what do you think will happen at the event?

 

@Mike-Geig @LeonhardP
Can you confirm that the discount on volume is reset every month?
So, I'm a pro that overpasses the threshold, if I have 200K installs every month, I will pay $22,5K = 100K*.15 + 100K*.075 every month?

 

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/...ing is buying or,made available to the public.

the definition is clear

• Insider trading is buying or selling a publicly traded company's stock by someone with non-public, material information about that company.

and

• Non-public, material information is any information that could substantially impact an investor's decision to buy or sell a security that has not been made available to the public.

 

How do you remove Unity Analytics and Unity IAP?

 

downloaded unreal engine tonight!

 

unity need add paragraph, clamp fee max as x% of the revenue

 

I don't care personally, but it was probably a poor decision. Unity is going to increase prices on successful publishers to the point they go to another engine and Unity will lose money and have to raise prices on everyone else later to make up for the lost revenue.

The companies don't live in a vacuum, they talk to each other and will follow each other. They also want price stability and not changes that completely destroy their business model year(s) after they start development. That's going to be the biggest issue. People built models to predict revenue before they started not expecting any major changes.

It will be a chain reaction as companies leave. Human behavior.

 

For heaven's sake, this is so very frustrating.

Every time I see an announcement from Epic lately regarding their engine - it is for something amazing.
Every announcement from Unity in the past year(s) - amazing... ly stupid.

We don't need a horrible AI that automates game development and creates generic piles of filler games!

We need a stable (multi-threaded) editor - better performance - shorter load and build times - a clean roadmap - a focus on ONE Unity Version at a time with more than two years of lts support for developers that spent years developing and supporting - the Unity Plus subscription model which was ideal for indie devs like me - an asset store verification so my assets don't keep getting removed without refund - a stronger core feature set so basic functionality of the editor does not require me to install the same 20+ external plugins I need before one can even begin a professional game development - stop the constant renaming/rebranding of feature / code API / render pipelines - stop wasting your money buying "shiny" VFX companies and focus on your strengths - bring back your internal game development team so your developers can experience the pain of trying to make "larger" scale 3D games in their own engine in 2023 - announce something (anything!!!) that gets developers excited again - treat your customers with respect and ask for feedback from your community before making major engine defining decisions - rebuild trust.

... and THEN! you can start thinking about how to apply additional fees to your userbase.

 

Hello Unity, please reply to simple questions

1) Does the revenue threshold is calculated by what's comes in my company bank account, with reduced Steam cut, Publisher cut and refunds?

2) I have Plus plan, if I upgrade to Pro, from January 2024 looking back 12 months am I calculated by 1M threshold or separate months with 200k? (if we knew this is coming I would have upgraded to Pro a year ago)

3) Trolls with legal copies can uninstall/install the game forever just to hit us, does this counts? We have legal players that already hack multiplayer or scam our players, I'm 100% sure there will be fake installing. Also one user can have the game on PC and Steam Deck or Family share.
^ this point 3 is the most worrying.


Please just increase price for your plans and skip the confusing install part, that can't be reliable data.


I still can't believe that reinstalls are counted, and you say you have system to detect pirate copy frauds, I have high doubts, as AAA companies can't fight piracy and you suddenly can?
Then maybe sell this anti-piracy system licenses to triple A companies and make billions instead taking from indie installs counts?

 

Like I know...
What I know is that I will be definitely asking for a concrete methods they will be using to fight the possible "install bombing", otherwise, I will invest my efforts into migrating to either godot or unreal for any future developments. There's no way we can be sustainable with this garbage model when our main project is WebGL based and you can, pretty much, "install bomb" the S*** out of it for pennies and bankrupt us in the matter of days. The sad thing is, looks like our main WebGL project will have to be shut down because of this as there are no real alternatives that can do C#+WebGL.

 

Android builds are crashing out of nothing with no ANR, crash or logcat report in 2022.3. 50% of the time. I'm currently unable to release my game because of that. How about to fix that before you even think on taxing a game I cannot release?

 

Not knowing the laws around that, but I would estimate that 56k shares are simply not enough to cause any eyerow to be lifted there, when there are several mio of shares around.

 

That's soooo last year (years actually). they think in yearly revenue for shareholders. nobody remembers what happend in 2019, the ex-EA CEO for sure doesn't remember... he's too buzzy making a model to skin us of every $.

 

Literally, this is the first time I seriously started considering switching to another engine as part of the business strategy. Did you guys ever include a game developer in the loop while discussing these things?

I wouldn't be surprised to see some court action going on pretty shortly.

The more I think about it the weirder it gets. I couldn't find a point that this model touches the nature of the gaming ecosystem:
- Re-installs
- Multi-platform distributions
- End of business
- Product lifecycles
- Bundles
- Piracy
- Variable margins among different market segments
- Bots and farms
- Trolls
- WebGL (seriously?)
- Backwards threshold
- Window of 3 months
- Breaking trust

I can see a lot of devs and producers moving to Godot, native iOS (Android & iOS to İOS only), or Unreal depending on their segment and situation.

Anyway, time to remove the phrase "Try reinstalling" from the FAQ (at least something doable within 3 months).

 

Does anyone know how this affects already released games? What happens if we update the game after Dec 2023, I presume it can't retroactively apply to all installs? For projects which aren't started yet it's easy because we'll be leaving the Unity eco system going forward, but we still have old products which needs to be updated from time to time due to platform changes etc.

 

How much honesty do you really expect there? Are you really thinking that when they earn money by that, they will tell you the truth or make sure you are safe, when all they care about is their own income?

 

All the complaints are for free to play models where devs earn a few cents per user and have millions of users.

Devs selling games for anything more than $1 or so are going to be doing fine with this fee structure.

 

Yeah, with crash rates when certain features are on being pretty high, maybe the next Unity move is to charge us a fee every time our games crash.

 

It does.

 

It does

 

I have a F2P game with 1 million installs, but around 90% of this installs are from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh with ARPU 0.01$. Should i block my game for those countries?

 

this really needs to be added there, a great point

 

TL;DR, honestly. Sorry.
Will test installs (e.g.

adb install -r my-awesome-build-99999.apk

) be counted as installs which I need to pay?
If so, I am glad I began transition to DevOps. That's enough of making games for today.

 

Jumped on unity since it's very first public beta, it changed my life. >17 years later and millions of downloads after it really pains me to watch the S*** show many predicted when the guy in charge of EA at its most hated moment was considered a good choice as CEO.
Still love unity but its like watching a friend slowly killing himself due to his idiocy... painful.

 

I expect them to present the real system they are going to use. The one that includes all variables and concrete a,b,c,d on how are they going to do this. The system we can use to calculate if we are still profitable or not after this change. All this "surface-lingo" crap in the blog post and in the QA doesn't make it any more clear on how this is going to work. They either present the real strategy or I'm steering of the engine. Simple as that. Dodging the question with "trust me bro" or "it's gonna be fine, don't worry" is going to be no-no for me.

 

If theoretical examples do not convince anyone, please notice that if any of my $1 games would now be above the revenue treshold, I would need to pay around 100-150% of my Steam profit to Unity.

How is this possible? Low price, even lower prices in Turkey, Argentina and many other countries, frequent sales (to have any visibility), fees, taxes, server costs and other expenses that the new pricing model do not care about. This would destroy my company and would force me to remove my game to not pay Unity more than I earn. So as soon as my game will be more successful, I am out of business.

If any streamer would like to prank me, stream my game and ask people to buy it to force me to remove it from Steam and destroy 11 years of development and updates (I am talking here mostly about my most popular multiplayer game).

The only fair model would be to pay Unity a % of PROFIT (not revenue and not per install like it is now).

 

Regardless of if they backtrack on this nonsense, why would I trust them now for my development? They clearly don't care about the people using their product, only the people buying their stock. Like seriously, why should I trust them as a company now? They've completely shattered their public image

 

How will this work if you create games/apps for other companies? Will you have to charge those other companies the same revenue cut to be able to pay Unity?

 

that is a couple of million dollars btw and I doubt the laws allows that. but that is my personal opinion

yes, is retroactive. meaning even if the game is out for 10 years once it hits the numbers unity will made up then you have to pay.

lets assume your game had 300k installs three years ago. then the secret formula unity has (that they will not tell anyone about it) calculates an hypothetical 250k installs in 2024. (taking in account demos, free downloads, piracy from people that stole your game)

so you will get charged.

the key to understand this is that unity will make up numbers as they want.

 

- Did anyone form Unity even talked to Valve, Sony, Microsfot, GOG.COM, itch.io, Nintendo? After all from January 1 they will receive tens of thousands of bills to pay for Unity games (43% of all games).

- What about pirate games? How on earth is "the distributor" going to be billed if someone downloads the game from Thepirateboy? I guess Unity will bill the pirate site, right?

- I have agreements with both companies, they are not allowed to give Unity my sales numbers. HOW will you get those numbers? Or maybe you won't, and some AI bot will just "guess" and you will bill Valve whatever it comes up with?

 

I'm sure that on paper the per-install fee sounds like a good idea (though short-sighted even from the off when it comes to typical mobile monetisation), structured around an intention to prop up the free tier but get more people into pro or enterprise editions, but in practice there are so many pitfalls and potential for abuse that it's very difficult to see this being an effective way to proceed.

I appreciate that most people won't even reach the thresholds, and you're keen to argue that it won't even affect the bulk of us, but I think we're less concerned about paying to use the engine and much more distracted by the fact that there's no clear-cut approach to even implementing this successfully. If Unity owned the only storefront that all games were distributed on then it might be easier to believe you could pull this off in a somewhat sensible fashion, though you'd still be dealing with developers/publishers contesting the invoiced fees all the time.

With this left as proposed, there's a real danger of developers feeling that demos and multiple branches of their games might incur extra overheads, which puts artificial limits on their productivity and reach that no other engine is even considering, plus Unity developers may start to be ostracised and excluded from package deals and similar simply because of the engine they are using. Maybe you really do have a fool-proof plan for all of this (though that certainly isn't coming across at present), but it shouldn't be hard to see how this could become an arms race between yourself and the darker side of the internet intent on exploiting this approach to damage someone else financially. We've long anticipated that a revenue share model would be coming sooner or later, and even though that has the potential to cost (successful) developers much more overall, it still stands as a stronger and fairer approach to gain additional investment for engine development. If you can't openly discuss how the tracking system will work due to it being proprietary tech or being concerned that such frank discussion will lead to it being even more vulnerable to attack, then I don't really see how you'll ever be able to convince us that this seemingly very flawed approach has merit. I guess I'm hoping you'll reconsider.

 

Holy crap! If Eric5h5 is done, it really is over!

Even the most stalwart Unity Knights are turning their backs on this.

 

Well, what about the apps, that are free, don't use ads or iaps, but use other monetization strategy? Our app takes charges through our payment backend, and hell no we won't disclose Unity how much we made. Could be a possible solution for others, too

 

They can try all they want. It is not about pricing either way. It is about their methods. The way they want to charge us. The way they can modify anything on whim.

The damage is done and no amount of apology will change the fact that as a Studio we cannot thrust Unity. We are forced to move to other engine.

 

What's your Unity plan? Pro or Plus? Because it changes thresholds.

First, 1m installs and 0.01 ARPU puts your revenue at 10k usd. You will not pay any runtime fee because it is below the revenue threshold.

However, if your game scales to many users and you have same ARPU and pass both revenue and install thresholds, the install fee will end up taking half of your revenue even under best conditions (Unity Pro, Emerging market pricing, no user installs more than once, which is false, Unity said they count reinstalls too).

So if you're on Plus, pray that you never earn more than 200k, you'll be in debt

 

At least here we would expect Unity to introduce the rule only for games released after 1/1/2024. For existing players, they can adjust the Pro license for inflation or increase it slightly. But that we now have to take our game from 1.1. from all the stores is already violent.

We are unfortunately in the fortunate position that we have over 1 million downloads and also have an extremely high revenue. Only unfortunately profit we have hardly any - we're already struggling with the pro license and our salary. Until now, we have always invested our profit directly in new user installs. But paying per install from 1.1. never works out for us. Even if an install would only cost $0.01. We can now actually only take our App out of the stores?

 

The runtime fee is absolute insanity, you better roll it back, otherwise there will be mass exodus. Just saying

 

I'm really not that optimistic about solid stuff presented by them about that. I could see they just deal with features and act like this change never happend.

 

I've been learning and working on my game's first prototype for a while now. Before that I had to spend a few years in mastering Unity. I explored a lot of possibilities, poured a decent amount of money in unity-specific assets and this feels like a punch in the face for me and most likely all other (indie) developers.

There are too many "ifs" involved in this story and my trust in Unity has been severely damaged.
That's one thing. I am also concerned for the future. Because who says that the next thing wouldn't be something worser?

I am fan of the Unity engine, I truly am. But this move.. Greedy and very harmful in my experience.
I'll be exploring other options. All the time I have spent in learning and building feels blown away.
But I rather go with something trustworthly instead of waiting for the next thing that might get me.

 

Guess what page now 404s

 

no, because unity will more likely add them back in because they take in consideration the pirated downloads.

if you game is popular in those areas unity will most likely include the numbers even if you blocked or not interested in that region. that is because they assume the players will try to pirate the game instead

it doesn't matter what you do.

 

Just like others have said there needs to be a cap so you don't pay higher than a percentage of revenue - like the 5% with other game engines.

That's the only way to protect from the possibility of a game that makes just over $200k but gets millions of downloads - including redownloads, accidental ones .etc - paying a really disproportionate amount that could absolutely make a game financially unsustainable.

If the intention is as Unity is saying to take a minimal amount from only really successful games then that addition would be completely in line with the aims.

 

Have you looked at some of the other options out there?

Source, U3DE, etc.

 

As someone who wanted to start making a career in GameDev using Unity this has completely turned me away.

I'm developing my first games in Unity and lucky I can switch to Unreal or Godot if you go through with these changes.

 

Well, in this case, as I told already, we will be closely evaluating the possibility of shutting down our main WebGL project and moving future projects to something that is not run by delusional money hungry rats.

 

A lot of my clients are indie developers. They can't afford such pricing per install. Probably they already looking for alternatives. And I will have to use the engines they choose. Too bad because I like Unity. But we all knew that someday Unity epoch was going to end.

 

Next insane problem. We are running an Early Access with regular updates:


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.

So in other words when we release an update in Steam, people are downloading the new game files, i.e. redownloading the game and we now get charged for everybody again.
This is insane.