Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Yeah, and please add an answer for games that have an IAP that allows players to convert to a premium version after install.

 

In the words of Shrek... "It's all ogre now".

Tim Sweeny from the epic store must have hacked Unity servers and published this dumpster fire announcement to send as many unity developers to unreal. Or maybe some inside shareholder just wants to end unity. Maybe a rogue employees last stand before leaving or being fired. Can't believe a team of unity staff actually sat around, discussed this, planned it, expanded on it, reviewed it, and past it through clearing.

 

The last one to leave, turn the lights off.

 

You also need to make more than $200k to pay the fee.
But from what I understand if you do you'll have to pay for demo installs as well. It's a bit weird.

 

The Man on top of it all is the same that ran EA into the most hated company of the USA twice in a row.... of course that is something he would do.

 

This could be fine for paid installs but in the F2P market where its already extremely difficult to get LTV (life time value) over CPI (cost per install), this is insane and very out of touch.

 

This is shocking and very, very.. concerning

 

Would love to see these calculations, please.

 

This is a betrayal. We have been with Unity for over a decade now, and we have dutifully paid for our licenses through price hikes, then subscription models, then more price hikes, but we stuck with you. Every month, paying our bill. Projects that take years to complete and we pay and pay, taking all the risk on ourselves.

Every month we paid our two Unity Pro licenses, from the beginning. By now we have sunk easily 30k into Unity, and all that with the understanding that there was not a revenue share to deal with, so we did it. We paid up front and took all the risk, then Unity changes the deal? This cannot be legal. Beyond that, Unity changes the deal RETROACTIVELY?!

Other posts by other long time devs list the technical hurdles and exploits with this new system, but I wanted to call out the absolute and complete betrayal here on a personal level. I would have used Unity until the end. I know this engine backwards and forwards and can make it sing. But yeah, now I have to rethink that. What will be next...

 

Answer the key question already. How are you going to count the installations.

 

Even if so: Who should ever trust this company again?

 

Please address the concerns about piracy, emulators and reinstalls.

I'm sorry but this does not sound correct at all. Please provide numbers instead of "trust me it works".

 

Question: Which Unity Versions will be affected by these new Licensing Costs, and what about games already released under previous terms?

No, some games are out there still making a lot of installs, shipped with Unity 2020 or something. Possibly without further maintenance (i.e. team has no Editor license anymore).

This is a valid question.

 

Auch wenn sie diese Entscheidung rückgängig machen würde, bringt es das Vertrauen

Exactly my thought. They have revealed what is under their mask.

 

I did mine, according Statista:
230 billion mobile app downloads in 2021, 43 billion in revenue (total market, including ads, subs and in-apps)

Average revenue per download 0.18$

And you want a cut of 11% to 110% of that...

Even if you get the Enterprise plan it still takes at least a 3% of that. Pretty much near the 5% Unreal takes... and of course using Unreal doesn't have the risk of unwanted, unmonetized, tier 3 downloads...

At least we have a way now to make some competitors using Unity to go to bankrupt...

 

The thread right now

 

I was quite scared there, thanks ^^

 

Are you the only poor boy they sent out to withstand the S***storm?

 

Wow, this is horrible.
Not only the retirement of Plus. This whole new monetization based on installs. How can you release 2 horrible things at once?
Did anyone just THINK about that installs are not a reliable metric. What's going on over at Unity??

 

maybe they could hire some tech writers... One time fee is not what this says.

 

Apologies that you're the lone Unity employee thrown in to placate the mob about this decision. The fact that this is retroactive and the fact that this is done 3 months' notice is really problematic. I'd much rather have a revenue sharing model because we're being taxes on success not for actions that the users take with the software. Free to play mobile market be damned, I guess.

 

I'm rather looking forward to the stock price drop.

 

Absolutely brutal change for mobile devs.
As a PC developer this is going to hurt me less and it still makes me want to get rid off Unity as fast as possible - changing the terms retroactively is simply disingenuous.
This is thought through and handled so poorly that I don't know how to trust Unity anymore.

 

Another thing got brought to attention by Rami Ismail on Twitter.

"If you made a game that just reached $200K in revenue at a 50/50 publisher split, and you decided to support say, this charity bundle for Racial Justice, you'd end up up to $60K in debt."

If you, as a developer is successful, you will now be actively punished if you want to give your game for free for any reason whatsover. Disgruntled players can now actively punish you financially.

Can you imagine if The Last of Us 2 had been released with Unity under this system? Or any other game that suffers a review bomb for any reason whatsoever?

Nothing will stop a small selection of a dissatisfied playerbase from a successful game from automating a system that uninstalls and reinstalls your game.

This system seems designed to punish being sucessful, and opens you up to being financially impacted by your playerbase for any reason whatsover.

 

I've always been a big supporter of Unity, through all the turmoil and other bad choices, I'd still advocate for it and its seeming bright future. But now, if this change is not reversed or severely changed to actually address the glaring issues with it, I too am going to have to switch engines, as there is no future for this software if this is how poorly thought out new monetization schemes are, and how little care there seems to be for the users.

How about this, if you can't handle the shame of admitting being wrong by reversing this, then instead give people the option between profit-share and this system. Don't decide for us which is "more profitable", let people choose.

 

Worst thing would be people saying things not completely syncronized because they are rushing to answer

 

I expect community "improvements" that are going to remove the "phone home" stuff for tracking when this is added.

 

Full stop, we dont want details, we dont want to hear why this is a good system, just reverse this announcement. Announce a regular % profit split scheme and dont let the people responsible for coming up with this strategy EVER make a decision like this again.

 

Unity took a huge chunk out of our non existing budget by demanding $1500 for Pro, then an additional $1500 for Android and an additional $1500 for iOS back in 2013. Per seat. We couldn't afford to do console publishing.

Then they switched to a subscription based model and ambushed my friends at Nordic Game Conference demanding that they start paying for their seats. Literally, auditors were at the conferences.

Then they went public.

Then they hiked up prices.

Now they're coming for the F2P games.

They're probably going to change their ToS so that we can't use third party services to replace Unity Services, like Steam Datagram Relay. Just watch...

DOTS is the reason why I'm staying right now because our project uses it.
This kind of bs is the reason why I'm considering leaving the games industry for the second time. Unity is not "for the users" anymore. It's for the investors. AKA Vanguard, ARK and Blackrock.

I'm considering using all my game development experience to contribute to Godot. They're really one step away from becoming the next big thing anyways. A proper server authoritative multiplayer package and they're good to go.

 

Hey Unity, So should developers be responsible for paying for each pirated install? Or are we overlooking the fact that three-quarters of the lifetime installs of each game occur as pirated installs, especially in countries like Russia, China, India, Pakistan and others?"

 

Random thought. What if someone bundles logic that blocks requests from the executable from access to the internet. For a purely single player game. There will be no way to communicate an install occurred, and therefore Unity will never know. So a person can game the system and not need to pay. How would you stop that? Will you make internet connections required for the game to communicate that it was downloaded? So Unity becomes always online, at least for the installation process?

 

Hadn't I bought a ton of assets I would delete my account in an instant. But for now I guess I should leave Unity behind, until they decide to change their plans. And getting rid of Plus is a stupid move too ... Guess my first monetized project will be with Godot or Unreal then.

 

There is no way you can legally define or prove INSTALL in any meaningful way.
Who will be trusted to report how many installs happened and prevent fraud?

 

What if i have a offline game but i also sell DLC. How you gonna track this? -> Impossible unless you enter people privacy and breaking the law.

 

That's why you pay less for installs in emerging markets.

 

Again here's the math for mobile:

1M users acquired through UA in a month, for the time being, we're going to assume we spent $0 getting those users.

For those 1M users on the Pro plan, it would cost a studio $60k.
You can figure that out as follows
first 100,000 * $0.15 = $15,000
next 400,000 * $0.075 = $30,000
final 500,000 * $0.03 = $15,000
all together now: $60,000

So, to pay that off, your average LTV per user after Apple and Google takes their cut needs to be at least $0.06 ($60,000/1,000,000), in order to pay that off.

Now for the kicker. Factor UA cost in, and the entire business model stops making sense, margins on UA normally are often times less than $0.05 already. You'd need to increase that margin 2x to make any reasonable money with Unity now, that is not a reasonable expectation, or even achievable most of the time. You'd need an absolute unicorn game to make that work. Unity will be taking most of your revenue at that point, making your own engine upfront for mobile becomes the cost effective business model.

 

You people should understand. A new CEO that has zero information about how this business works, and does not care about legal laws, has given orders to collect money no matter how.

Now Unity has a VERY BIG problem. Because many developers are going, at least, to go from Unity Plus to unity Personal (like myself) but this means we had to have the Unity splash screen and forget about consoles.

The way Unity reacts to this forum and people will mark the future of the tool. We'll see who wins, because this has gone too far.

 

Just to confirm,

You're asking us to cancel our Unity membership today and create a new account for future projects, so we don't have to pay any fees on products published 5-10 years ago, correct?

 

Sounds like an idea from an incompetent, greedy moron who just wants to make a lot of money.

 

This came to my mind just now, the date for this stupid fee starts Jan 2024, but it calculates based on last 12 months, so in reality, we are already in it. They worded the announcement as if there is still 3 months, but we are few months into it, just the date of the billing hasn't started.

This, is pure greed.

 

This is shocking.... more than type-c iphone 15...

 

I understand that this solution might be more profitable in some cases, like maybe for mobile games.
But for a lot of other situations it's very concerning. Mainly for games that have free and paid versions.
I'm also scared that publisher may want to remove older games from the market which would be dramatic.

I'm not entirely against this decision, I know you're not Godot where developers are just not paid (whether this is a good or bad thing is another discussion) or Unreal with all of epic's annoying marketing around it.

Yes you need money and I won't be the one to pretend like I can rethink your financial decisions.
But really, this doesn't seem to be the right way, maybe you can compromise it.

 

unity won't back down, like game development you do not make an announcement if there is not already something in place to work.

 

I wonder if you can hear some displeasure and rejection of users from the responses in this thread lol, but I'm afraid not. That would require that your users still have some meaning for you, and that day is long gone.

 

@Mike-Geig Here is the post they're referring ; I'm genuinely concerned and scared about demo versions as well.