Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Exactly. In a worst case scenario you could end up paying > 100% of your revenue in install costs. How is there at least not a cap at 100%?

I know it's not practical, but in theory it is possible which is just insane.

 

Well guess what, under the new pricing policy Unity effectively has no WebGL support either.

 

I think I use your file browser in my games, works great.

The way Unity works and the constant need to really ignore many of the features or to reimplement the simplest things to get any reasonable optimization, really makes me want to not use it too. The only problem is that at the moment I have no choice, the commitment and the time invested is just too big to do a quick switch. But I seriously will have no choice if this pricing model will stay as I sell my games very cheaply or I plan to do free to play web games. So this would force me to pay them more than I can earn.

 

This is great, but it's disingenuous to have 2.5 installs per game as default, since Unity have said they only intend to charge once per purchase. Whether or not they can actually accurately do that is another thing, but this drastically changes the calculations.

 

How so?
They are stating this:

 

This is just going to turn away future and exisitng developers from using Unity, this new pricing plan is overlycomplicated and dumb... Who in their right might came up with this...

 

It's nonsense, between the licensing costs, the percentage price by the distributors, the additional services etc... well in fact, there is nothing left for the developers.

Because your examples do not reflect reality, so perhaps when we call ourselves RIOT, UBISOFT etc. it is playable, but not for small independent studios (which was originally the core target of Unity)

Following this announcement, as director I will ask my teams to calculate the costs of migrating to UDK (only 5% after 1M)

DID YOU TAKE DRUGS UNITY staff team?

If I take our case, we earned money with our productions, after 2024 we will be in deficit... bye bye Unity

 

Part of the issue here is the 3 months lead time, no discourse a head of decisions, retro-active application which legal? and then the horrible communication

This is NOT the first time they have nuked the community either

Collab, uNET, Relay ... Unity has turned into Google with its bipolar levels of sudden life-altering changes and pore communication this makes them a frankly dangerous partner to depend on, especially for a small company.

That needs to be addressed
Epic addresses this with the way its TOS works, you can stay on a version and keep that versions TOS so you cannot be forced into retroactive changes and don't have to buy into the new changes if you want to stay on the current version

And UE doesn't change major versions anywhere near as fast as Unity

Personally not a fan of Epic as a company and really not a fan of UE as a tool, I find it slow and clunky to code for, and slow to prototype in mostly because I HATE blueprints and node-based visual "scripting" never mind other barriers it has with shaders and all ... but this change means we simply cant build our style of F2P games on Unity for the risk a project could bankrupt us.

We cant trust Unity to not just change the terms over night, as to our wider biz we cant trust Unity to not screw our clients similarly ... this is a HUGE trust issue Unity you need to address that aspect as well as rethink the brain dead model of per-install

 

What's disingenuous is including the seat costs for Unreal, because there's way less incentive to actually pay for those when using Unreal.

 

How do you think this is in any way legally enforceable? The latest, Unity want to charge MicroSoft for Unity games hosted on GamePass. MS never entered into a contract with Unity.

You've completely lost touch with how agreements and contracts are made. You can't say to someone there are no ongoing fees and then introduce for a product already made. It's ludicrous! Even just thinking about it. Authors are now going to be charged by the printer for every time someone picks up a book even if they don't buy it??

How did this get out of the boardroom in front of the public? As an idea, for future licensing, you could and should have started a discussion a year ago for future games. This is rank amateurism the likes of The Apprentice.

 

The old TOS are here, and they clearly state that you can choose not to accept the new TOS as long as you keep using older versions of the product. This is in complete contrast to what Unity's lawyer is now claiming.

https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service/software-legacy

 

Can you answer why Unity didn't just go with a 20-cent royalty for each copy sold? If the install fee is supposed to be per user, that's basically the same as per copy, and it would make the model much less convoluted and completely remove the possibility of piracy or install attacks bankrupting developers. Epic Games does this with Unreal Engine, so there's clearly a way to make it work. I understand that such a model might be a bit more intrusive on the developers, but it clearly works for other engines and developers would much rather have that deal knowing that we don't have to rely on Unity coming up with numbers based on data that we don't have access to.

Also, side note, why is the initial requirement so low? If you're really targeting the biggest of the biggest, 200,000 copies shouldn't be anywhere near the starting threshold. Don't get me wrong, 200,000 copies is a lot of sales and most people will never get that much, but it's nowhere near the giants that you claim to be targeting.

 

No they didn't. The QA deliberately mentions that reinstalls WILL count:

 

That’s not what they said, if I install on multiple devices it’s multiple charges.

 

Unity have said a few contradictory things re how "per install" will be claculated

And frankly, it doesn't matter how it's calced

If it's even a vague unlikely edge case that Unity can EVER claim more than X% of our net bookings (after tax) then just a hard no from us.

So the only model we will tolerate is a % rev share or a % net rev share where we can calc/know the max % of incoming revenue that Unity will bill for. Anything else is predatory and could and thus will nuke some pore dev at some point exactly the opposite notation Unity was founded and built on.

 

They did not say this. They said the exact opposite. The runtime fee has no correlation with sales. It counts installs including reinstalls.

 

You are wrong by the way.

Installs are charged per month and the installs for previous months don't factor in. 400k installs per month is:

Pro plan example:
100k x 12 months = 1.2M @ $0.15 = $180,000
300k x 12 months = 3.6M @ $0.075 = $270,000

Total: $450,000 in install fees per year.

My favourite part of this thread is clueless bootlickers telling people that Unity changing the terms and charging them tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year for games published with different terms years ago is no big deal.

 

Hey Unity team.
It's probably already been mentioned a hundred times but as we are really, really, really concerned about the upcoming changes I want to reiterate this: Unity stated that it doesn't want to bill devs for demos, free copies and game pass installs but how do you want to do this from a technical perspective? How do you want to know if it's
- A time-trial demo
- A game pass/PS+ install
- A charity key install
- A free week(end) install
- A refunded install
- A pirated install
It's all the same build. Most of this information only exists in the backends of the platforms. How do you want to make sure that you don't bill us for illegitimate installs?

 

Has there been any word on what happens for developers that sell multiple games? For example, if I maintain three games through one patreon, and my patreon income exceeds $200k a year, how is this calculated?

Alternatively, if I give a game away for free but charge people to join an external discord, something they are only motivated to do by virtue of the game being free, does this freely distributed game qualify as income?

 

If they would actually charge PER PURCHASE nobody would give a flying bat about this and all this drama and hate wouldn't happen.

 

200k for a small team would steal mean they cant pay the bills based on game rev alone
Even 1mil a year for a team of 5 would be a tight cashflow

I am fine even encouraged a royalty model but IMO

Drop the sub fees altogether they are just in the way
Use a % %-based royalty after some threshold ... your competitors use 1mil and 5% here
Have a protection against retroactive TOS change
Have protection against long tail e.g. when you make less than X in a period royalty is waved

 

There is NO way to know if a game is a reinstall or not that will not be ALSO an unauthorized access to personal data on the device. IMEI, MAC Address, GUID saved out in a secret folder, it doesn't have any sense.
There is no way to validate from Devs side the invoice will be sent from Unity.
If there is we need full disclosure of the EXACT inner working of what we are installing on users' devices.

 

If I understand well, if I stop making sales, I will get charged when people install the game on new PCs.
Why don't they just go the Epic way and make the pricing a royalty?
At least it wouldn't try to squeeze money out of people who don't have any income.
Farewell free demos?
Plus the distributor is going to pay, but what if they don't want to? I don't think Steam has a contract with Unity.
The terms of service being retroactive I don't understand either.

 

I'm sorry but your post directly contradicts the official announcements and the FAQ.

 

điên

 

it's really not about exactly what the prices are... "you'll be fine you won't hit the threshold" etc..etc..
it's about the fact they think that they can say "oh, that game you released 4-5 years ago, under the terms of the license you paid for then? changed our mind: you'll owe use money when people install that now"
'coz what if next year they decide, actually, it's $1 per "install"... or they remove the earnings threshold? or something else... 'coz by then, the precedent has been set that they can retroactively change the terms.

what if they'd just come out & said "we're doing a revenue share, oh, and it applies to all old games too". nobody would be OK with that (not that anybody is OK with this, either...) - it's mad.
at least if it were for future games only, or games using the 2024 version of Unity, people could make a sensible decision & switch, or at least know what they're getting in to... or stay on the old version, or whatever. - but they seem to think they can change the terms on already released games, after people have already paid years of license fees.

publishers aren't gonna want to sign Unity games if there's that risk. they're also not going to want to take on Unity games if there's the risk of it being unsupported at some point, either.

 

Both 1.5 and 5.1 would require some measure of trust in Unity, of which there is none left.

I know you're trying to mediate here, but even all of this is too little, too late. Trust has already been broken and I don't see how it will be possible from here to earn that trust back. Plus this was just the final straw on top of seeing Unity languish for the last 6 years with nothing particularly useful accomplished on it.

That's one thing Unity needs to understand - this community rage is not just about the pricing model change, as unacceptable as that change is. That's just the spark that triggered the powder keg. The power keg is the accumulation of developer frustration that has been building over the years.

 

it's been 24hours now, the joke lasted long enough, time to walk back. everyone knows you will.

 

They'll be charging the total, then putting it upon us to dispute the charges. That's implied already with any piracy counts, via their Twitter account: "we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team."

https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701688242783834124

I assume it'll be the same for all of these examples, as they don't really have a way to detect the differences with their magic box of install-determinations /eyeroll

 

Welp. Partner in a small indie studio, here.

I want to reiterate that the removal of the Unity Plus tier hits us pretty hard – that's a huge price hike *just* to remove the Unity splash screen, with absolutely no other benefit to us.

We're fortunate (?? ha, ha) enough not to be affected immediately by the runtime fee, but this is such a huge blow to our confidence and trust in Unity, I really don't think we can justify continuing to use it.

 

Apart from the stupidity of a per-install fee, it's scary that this is applied retroactively.
Basically you bought Unity license, agreed upon some terms and conditions, developed and released the game. Now they change these conditions and ask you to pay more. You can't refuse, as your game is already made and published. You can decide between paying and removing your game from the market.

I don't know how this can be legal, but I'm sure Unity's legal department have all the answers. But from the point of view of developers this means:

• If you use Unity to develop a game, your product will always be subject to Unity's changes of policy. They can always ask you for more money. They can actually force you to remove your own game from the market.
• The company you are giving this power over your products is apparently willing to take advantage of that.

IMO, any mentally healthy person should walk away from this.

"But it doesn't affect me; I don't reach the threeshold/I make enough to pay the 20 cents without iusses"
Ok but what's stopping them from changing the conditions again next year? What if the 20 cents becomes 40? 60? What if they decide to implement a per-hour-played fee?
What if next year Unity is on the brink of bankrupt and in a desperate attempt to raise some money they raise to 10 euros per-install? Unlikely, yes, but theorically possible.

Again, you are giving this company power over your own product.

I really don't understand how they thought this was a good idea. Predatory monetization tactics can work on the short term but will end up hurting the user base.

 

i think hacking your own game by blocking all unity API calls will be a new thing in 2024 . But generally they should put max % cap of 5% from revenue otherwise it will be just dangerous to make games in Unity. It would be dangerous to ship any game with your game public UNITY RestAPI key cause it will be 5 clicks away from someone to bankrupt you

 

Are you sure it's profit? The text says revenue which is a different thing.

 

"You used to buy a hammer, now you rent the hammer forever, now you rent the hammer and we get share of everything you make with the hammer."

 

Ok. If i pay money for runtime fee, i want to charge editor wait time fee (after the 20 seconds - per second x 0.2$ ) it's okay? Unity stole my time for years during editor wait times and bugs. Also i want to get money back from asset store for deleted or useless assets. It's a good deal...!

 

Most players will try your WebGL game for 2 minutes, quit and never be back. If you would even always force them to watch the ad before playing (which would not always be wise) you have a chance to earn probably from $0.2 to $5 per 1000 views depending on the country. So let's say that it is even $5. So you earned $5 for 1000 views of people who will never come back playing your game. Now you have $5 and you also need to pay 1000 * $0.20 = $200 to Unity. So your dept is now $195 in this best case scenerio of having people from probably USA and forcing everyone to watch the the ad before playing. You earned nothing for your hard work, but you owe Unity $195.

 

I have been paying for unity since 2019, i am still in development of my project and have 4 programmers i pay for on top of unity. Please do not go through with this business model. It’s tanking your reputation and now I’m worried that even if my project becomes successful i will never break even with taxes and price gouging from steam and now unity.

 

Yeah, that bold part... given that it's come out now that you guys did promise not to change the EULA between major releases (I remember this distinctly now) and are trying to do so anyway, simply hardening the EULA is nowhere near good enough to restore trust. Repeating a promise you've already broken means nothing. Those responsible must go. Nothing less can possibly cure this situation.

 

We should be able to do what we like with games without worrying about wrongly charged fees, abuse and changing policies, our lives depend on it, so who would risk it? Pricing should be straightforward and not require us to explain where the installations come from, bundles, gifts or piracy, it doesn't matter. This pricing model is beyond comprehension....

I've been a Unity Plus user for years, I've bought countless assets, I probably won't exceed 200k in revenue per year, and it still bothers me to the point where I'm considering leaving the software, and many developers feel the same way.
I have no questions about this, only a request to withdraw from this pricing model.

 

There will be cracked Unity that removes all the tracking and DRM, that's 100% sure. But you will have to trust the one who cracked it doesn't add other malware. The only way out it switching engine.

 

Government now charge Unity for each game created.

 

In comparison with other engines, that 5% does indeed sound very reasonable as a cap.

 

I rarely comment but now I must.. to summarize: This is disgusting behaviour. I chose Unity to work with it only because I felt the product I make is mine and I own it. I loved Unity and now I feel like this trust between me and Unity has been compromised.

This is one thing above everything that was already mentioned a few hundred times. I'm heartbroken.

 

It's worse than that. Even after you sell the chair you built with the rented hammer, they want to charge you every time someone sits in it.

 

Apparently we'll have to believe on their blue eyes.... "Trust their black box which has been solidly closed"....

 

Really a bad idea to publish a paid game with a cracked version of the engine. If the game is successful they will find out and prosecute.

IMO there are two options here: either Unity backtracks on this decision and fires the people who came up with it and the managers who accepted it, or you have to use another engine.

 

Okay, I thought you were talking about the technical availability.
I have voiced my sustainability concerns later in the thread (page 62), especially when WebGL will be the platform for "install bombing", as there's no way in hell any method can protect from a canvas fingerprint changes and VPNs.

 

If you just want to charge for the first install, would it not make more sense to do revenue sharing? Charge at the point of sale instead of the point of install and the vast majority of the outrage Unity is experiencing goes away. Not completely as now there's royalties involved, but there would be a lot less outrage

 

Very bad decision.

I think a more sensible option is to just charge a monthly fee to Developers instead of having the free version anywhere from $3-$10 per month.

They would make more money and not have this kind of backlash.