Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Every (former) unity developer to Unity when their stock plummets to 0 after every developer has left:

 

Unity please don't forget the independent developers we love unity please reverse this decision....

 

In theory Unity is also working on a calculator.

 

Can you please link me the spreadsheets you mentioning? I can not find it anywhere

 

No. The video is correct. Read the Unity post again. You must have got 200k installs AND Made $200,000. After that the next install is $0.20. If you make $200,000 and get 200,001 installs you owe Unity $0.20.

 

Off-topic but I have reaction to your answer "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."

Your ads fraud detection doesn't even work, you are literally allowing pirates/modders to inject Unity ads with their own ID into modded APKs for years. I have been warned you twice about this but you never took any action. I hope you go bankrupt soon

 

If it looks like S***, smells like S*** and tastes like S*** -- it probably is S***.

 

Even if you sell your game for $10, after you get into considerations: refunds, lower prices in many countries on Steam, constant need to do sales to get additional visibility, Steam fee and taxes, your own taxes, your own other expenses, maybe also the cost of ads. What is left can be sometimes less than $1-2 per install. $0.20 from this is a lot.

Estimation:
$10 * 0.50 (sale) * 0.60 (after the store fee and foreign tax expenses) * 0.88 (taxes in your country) * 0.70 (average price in all countries that makes the main price lower) = $2
From this remove other flat expenses that you for sure have (like servers, domains, insurance, accounts, bills, ads).
How much will stay? $1?

$0.20 from this is 20%.

Now imagine if Your base price is $5 or less not $10. Or if you do -90% sales rather than 50%.
The fee you need to pay will only increase.

Ok let's say that we need to pay 10%. Now compare this to Unreal when they want 5% and only after your revenue from the product is over $1 million.

What is even worse in this new Unity pricing model: big companies pricing their games high will pay much lower % than the indies with low priced games. It makes little sense to charge more from indie devs than from big companies.

Free to play games will pay the most or will need to pay more than they will earn, as here the revenue per install may be very low.

 

I imagine that's the calculation the Unity execs used in order to come up with this, but these averages per install are absurd for most free apps. How many free apps make $0.6 per install - I imagine the percentage is pretty low?

In my case the number is ~$0.001 per install. I know it's low and can be improved, but I don't see any way to realistically bring it above $0.02 per install. That's 20 times increase, what Unity is asking would require a 200 times increase, which is completely impossible to achieve.

 

So if I read this correctly, the free game will have all of its installs counted towards the install count. Soundtracks shouldn't fall under that, since those aim at rewarding the composers. Although knowing unity, they probably don't give a damn. With DLC this could be interpreted as substantially similar content, yes. I gues it's time to create "game frameworks" on unity without any content in them and then release paid "mods" from a separate IP. I dunno, too many gray areas here.

EDIT: So the idea is - they wouldn't try to bill VRChat devs for the mod content their users sell. Similarly, if you're not high profile and distribute content and the "framework" from different companies, it would probably go unnoticed, but Unity will obviously try to punish such behaviour with popular games. Unity is getting themselves into a lot of legal battles over weird business schemes in the coming years either way.

 

This is a terrible idea. Every change that has occurred since Unity went public has been horrible for the devs. No wonder so many OGs have left for other (or custom) engines.

 

What if the game is more ?
e.g

Get 1,000,000 installs.
Average $0.2 per user over the year. That is $200,000 income.

Unity takes 1,000,000 x 0.2 = $200.000

Developer works for nothing

or

Get 10,000,000 installs.
Average $0.1 per user over the year. That is $1,000,000 income.

Unity takes 10,000,000 x 0.2 = $2.000.000

Developer goes to $1.000.000 debt

That scheme just makes no sense

 

This is the worst decision you can think of. Unity is digging their own grave.

 

How can you compare a $60 install to a 0.99c install, the CEO, marketing lead or whoever came up with this is a genius.

 

Totally agree with you. Plus, this new business model is super complexe for the devs and for them. I don't even dare imagine the resources they will have to add in support to manage all the misunderstandings, requests for proof, price negotiations and cases of errors... A business model like unreal's would have been simple and cinsistent for everyone. What a waste ...

 

Thats the install definition. Soundtracks and DLC cover the Revenue side.

 

the video said "200k sold copies" not installs. at 3.16 timecode. which is wrong and breaks the entire video premise

more precise if you have 200k+ installed copies of your free pc game unity can assume you get some sort of revenue that can trigger the threshold for you to pay fees.

BUT

unity calculates numbers of installs using a hidden formula they are not releasing

AND

they calculate the revenue you got using yet again a hidden internal formula that they don't tell you about

is this clear?

 

Actually, I'm just a silent reader of this forum. But today I can not restrain myself from expressing my opinion.

This business model does not make sense. Even if Unity would actually manage to charge each sell only 1x (+5 on different devices).

- F2P games (which make too little revenue per user) are a huge financial risk. In the worst case, the developer pays more money than he earns.

- A game on Steam, for example, that costs only $5 will have a higher percentage financial impact than a game that costs $69.

- A game that costs $4 on Steam and has 1,000,000+ sales within 12 months has to pay. But a game that costs $50 and has only 100,000 sales is exempt from that payment (but it generated more money).


Basically, the issue is clear. I don't see any room for Unity to survive with this business model. We all know that game development is a difficult field. You don't know beforehand how your game will be received, will it be a flop or a hit? An additional incalculable financial risk due to the Unity engine does not help game developers at all.

You're basically forced to change engines unless you make games as a side income.

I don't even see how they can fix this image damage. Even if this business model is withdrawn tomorrow, they would have to cut the current subscription prices in half so that game developers don't switch engines anyway.

 

I'm very concerned about these developments.

When you have a new install, it can take a long time to get revenue from that player but we'll probably have to pay the 20 cents immediately after the month has ended. And we have to wait three months for the Unity ads payment, I think thats unfair, we're not a bank but game developers

 

It's a gain only because you're comparing it to the paradigm they've created with this. Otherwise, compared to how it was in the past, it's just new extra costs, or no change.

Anyway, as I and many, many, many others have said here. The details of whether this actually costs you nothing/something/a lot/bankrupts you isn't even really the biggest issue.

The problem is yesterday we paid for licenses and we got use of the engine. Folks over at a certain other major game engine paid 5% gross, and that was also it, they get use of the engine. These are very clear, clean terms, with a predictable and reliable runway for a project.

Now we are (potentially) hit with fees an obtusely determined, otherwise meaningless metric. Never mind how convoluted, controversial and decoupled from revenue 'installs' are. There's also the fact that its practically racketeering, where devs locked into the engine either due to being in development or already having launched, find the terms of licenses they already paid for and used effectively changed.

I don't care what calculations you use. You tell me, how do you pitch or budget a game project where part of the costs include "installs, as prognosticated by Unity's super secret tech", and "potential future new fees, if Unity suddenly feels like it needs more revenue". Where these costs could stretch into perpetuity, and could be based on metrics prior to any implementation date.

 

I believe you are wrong, even if only 10% are affected day 1, most developer aspire to come up to those numbers, and a lot of them have a low ARPU business model that is severely punished or even unsustainable in this model if it is a success. I'm in this exact situation, and I see no other choice than start looking at alternatives to Unity right now. I've bough a lot of assets in the past but I won't spend another dime unless this is decision completely reversed and a TOS is in place to protect already released game from this kind of BS in the future. Also why would you expect F2P devs not to buy any assets? Typically these are small devs with small budgets that rely on being able to use pre made assets as opposed to bigger studios that can afford to create everything themselves.

 

I don't mind paying for the technologies I am using, but asking college students and amateurs to pay up for installs is downright evil. I don't want to shiver over install and the sort of prototypes I make, I'll never be able to pay 0.2$ every time someone presses F5 on itchio. Granted, nothing I'll ever make will hit 200000 in a month, but if it does, it's criminal to press web game devs for money, when all they ever do is make simple stuff to test ideas or pray some small concept goes viral and more people play their little game. Now that's dead. Way to kill passion of novices and enthusiasts. Or, rather, excellent marketing for Godot and Stride. More power to them. The only decent thing about Unity is C# and I wanna know their answer when Microsoft will send recovery agents to Unity every time someone compiles their C# code. What a dumb joke.

 

Oh my God, I don't know which genius came up with this idea, but this model is very ambiguous. Counting installations, a data point itself, is inherently unstable. Unless device uniqueness can be resolved, which, to the best of my limited knowledge, cannot be achieved!! This becomes an uncertain factor and a black box. It could even turn into a weapon for competitors, like a Unity of a DDoS attack (repeated installations)!!!

 

Any chance to get a Toturial how to do a "preproceesssor" thing ?
never done.
Will bee very interesting to me

 

Yes, sorry. When I replied I didn't realise you were the author of the calculator. I was referring to your spreadsheet.

I'm not sure exactly what you're not following with my calculations, but if you look here: https://unity.com/runtime-fee you'll see the charges are a "monthly rate" and the example given here: https://unity.com/pricing-updates

only references the past month's install count because the amount from prior months aren't relevant. The counter is essentially reset every month so every month the first 100,000 installs are at the highest price tier.

 

I do not post a lot on the forum, but as a french dev I must say it : "John Riccitiello, va te faire enculer !". All those years to learn developpment, I even made my professional reconversion from nurse to dev because of Unity with love).

Today, you betray all indie devs. F*** you.

 

Indeed. I updated the original answer to clarify what I meant.

 

The video calculates fee per sale. Unity Runtime Fee is per install including reinstalls. Source: Official FAQ.

Video just uses cherry picked examples. Please look at how many devs on this thread have used this calculation to show they would go bankrupt. This fee structure is completely incompatible with the mobile freemium market. Many profitable mobile games have ARPU waaaaaaay under 1 usd. And again, the fee is not per user, but per install.

 

it s time thee Community faster switch.
We have taken so much Damage in thee last Years here.
All times we aree silent, and say nothing.
but this h ere, is a big probleem
- to things like Patreon Subscriptioins
- to free 2 Play games
- Mobile Games

This is just pure greedy!

 

But Unity is just one tool in a long list of tools which games depend & utilize to create a released product. Surely you guys use lets say Microsoft Visual Studio or some other IDE? Unity is deriving a disproportionate amount of value through the use of MSVC compared to lets say the average developer. I'm sure that if Microsoft reached out to you guys, gave you less than 3 months to move your entire dev pipe from any Microsoft product, or they'll extract a fee of their choice with arbitrary requirements dependent on the number of times a Unity derived software is installed on a device, using Microsofts own counting method which you would be at the mercy off, you would also be incredibly upset.

Just the way you guys have rolled this out is also very unprofessional & concerning, you're giving developers less than 3 months to make a transition & choice, surely affecting a ton of games already in production which already have publisher contracts in place. If you want to make a money grab, sure, but you should've given a grace period for games already in development to be covered by the old system. This is majorly going to screw over mid sized studios & larger which already have contracts in place with a publisher of some sort, because they'll already have games which are projected to meet the cut-offs, they'll have to eat this fee due to contract structure most of the time, and they won't even have the tools to control the cost because that's likely to be publisher controlled.

 

My guess what will happen next is they will go ahead with this model. Then, there will be a massive user developer exodus to UE, Godot and other engines. Then, after about a year they will change it to something more reasonable and maybe a few developers will be back but things will never be quite the same again. Fast forward few years and the company is sold for $1 Billion to Microsoft which will operate if for a couple of years before finally pulling the plug.

 

I am here just to add my voice to the backlash. This will ruin Free to Play mobile development in Unity. Profit margins are razor thin, this will bankrupt many studios. An example:

Installs: 10 000 000.
Revenue: 2 000 000$.
Dev Costs: 600 000$. (+ continuous Live OPs etc. costs not counted)
Marketing Costs: 1 300 000$
Net profit: 100 000$
Runtime Fee with Pro License estimation: 5 000 000 * 0.06$ = 300 000$
Net profit now: -200 000$

Runtime Fee estimation is complicated but 0.06$ is average install fee after hitting revenue 1 000 000$ ergo approximately last 5 000 000 installs.
Maybe I am misinterpreting it and the correct runtime fee in this case is 0.02$ which still makes the company profit 0$.

This is simplified but possible real world scenario, F2P makes money by spending money - big revenue, small margins, small net profit, many installs.
Of course there is big variability, but many studios are in big trouble now

 

So say a publisher releases your free game on their account, but then you release dlc content without any unity runtime on your account on some game platform, should that count towards the revenue? Who is going to pay?

 

it will not be that easy, unity has merged with IronSource which is a company that got caught creating spyware. it will not be a trivial task to remove the tracker they will add in the games as one may think.

the only hope you can have is that google or apple, on mobile, they will be against this data collection from unity and actively block the apps being uploaded which will force unity to remove the spyware

 

That's by design. The blog mentions they will wave the fees if devs use their mobile specific services. It's an attempt to monopolize the mobile market seeing as 70%+ of all mobile games are made with Unity.

Suits don't care about Steam, this is designed for mobile. Everything else is an afterthought, hence why they didn't have anything prepared for common pitfalls of the model in Steam context.

 

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Build.IPreprocessBuildWithReport.OnPreprocessBuild.html

 

@Mike-Geig.
1.
If a company on the Pro Plan gets 100,000 in month 1 and another 100,000 in month 2, is the rate for month 1 $0.15 per install, and $0.075 for month 2 ?

2.
How will revenue be measured by Unity ? i.e. Installs would (presumably) be as per installs on the Unity dashboard, what about Revenue ?

 

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

 

You don't get it, do you? Pull up Itchio. Do you see the kind of numbers their top games pull? Most of those games are made by newbies and students and they won't ever see a dime for their work. Overnight you have a 1000 installs and now you owe 0.2 * 1000 to Unity while you see nothing but tumbleweed in your bank account. If you think I am joking, look up the best games on Itch and see how many are monetized. These are enthusiats and Unity has absolutely lost the plot with this change. You can go back shilling now.

 

Seems Legit.



https://www.eurogamer.net/unity-bos...evelopment-fees-announcement-raising-eyebrows

 

Suits have been selling stock for years, it doesn't mean anything.

 

Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_wants_108_of_our_gross_revenue/

 

No, it's a per-month counter. The 100,000 in month 2 would be charged at the $0.15 rate also.

 

A single game has to exceed both installs AND revenue. Those itch games are not making 200k/year.

 

Time to move to Unreal or Godot. We cannot take this new licensing change since it will totally break our revenue model. Goodbye Unity. Hopefully one day you will be reverting this change.

 

I'm just here to say, f*ck you unity.

And please stop pretending you don't see the problem here. This is insulting.

 

they sold stock a few days ago. not "for years"