Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

i don't get it either. they'd make more money with a 5% rev share.

pretty sure this is just to convert more people to unity pro. the thresholds are kind of binary and tailored for it.

 

Summary of the response of notable developers so far...

 

No don’t show realistic examples. How can white knights argue against that. Oh wait, I forgot that f2p games with low ARPU don’t exist to these people.

 

pfff, so you take a simple gif taken in 5 min today just to show you was wrong, about an open world chunk for a whole production showcase? gné

 

It's bad for everyone, because it sweeps the carpet under every single developer out there. Even if the majority of developers using this engine to make a game aren't going to make enough money from it for this to be an immediate problem, the fact that a game can become very popular and put the developer into possible destitution is itself utterly damnable.

It's fine if you don't care, but the people who do have very good reasons to.

 

I can buy your game once and reinstall it 200 001 times and it will affect you.
With indie games and an SSD it's like 1h.

 

Now game devs making the minimum revenue threshold but bloated user base will be forced to charge free users or just lock them out.

 

Does that boot taste nice? Do you just hate other devs?

 

They aren't even brave enough to make the editor free and charge per install. Still want that subscription fee from established devs. Might as well start a new company for every project so we don't have to pay for the editor during dev.

 

again. can you do that?
if we are flexing our muscles here at least port something that you have done!

 

but even if they want to force people on the unity pro business.. is clearly a danger move.. like desperate... i remember when microsoft wanted to stop the second hand xbox market.. what happened? from the start ps4 and sony won.. without doing nothing..

 

Thanks for the information! I'll probably never be a full-time developer but in the off chance my hard work pays off, I don't want to deal with this confusing mess and monitization.

Downloading Unreal right now.

 

They could have just raised the prices, but instead decided to go on a scummy, ripe for abuse system. This is a breach of trust.

 

This model makes absolutely no sense for Free to play games. 20 cent is what you hope for in revenu per install. Add to that marketing cost and you have just a few cents in profits per install. Anyone can create a bot that goes and download your game non-stop.

Also I really hope these threshold are per game and not applying to the whole company or person. There are many hobbyist with tons of free games. And just because one game sell well they shouldn't have to pay for their other game downloads.

Also how do you define Emerging market? Why is the difference in price so huge? Which countries are emerging and which ones are not? It's not so black and white for many countries. And the economy of countries are evolving constantly. That one seems extremely discriminatory.

Lastly please DO NO track games install without people consent.
If you really want to go that route, do it based on store sales numbers and not some dystopian tracking of installs. This would force ALL unity app the display to users that the game is being tracked on Apple Store when many offline games would usually not. Also this would mean that pirated games are counted...

 

It’s not just game developers. I received this email:

I am hoping by now you and your team have been made aware that we are transitioning all non gaming clients from Unity Pro to Unity Industry. Unity Industry is a software suite that includes the Pro Editor, Industry Success and the Pixyz Plug-in. The cost for Unity Industry is $4,950 per license. I understand this might be an unanticipated budget increase and with the way we're deprecating Furioos, Unity is already putting you in a tight spot. As a current customer you have until 10/3/2023, to renew Pro for one year and I want to make sure you take advantage of that opportunity before the deadline. Do you have some time next week to discuss? I should not need more than 15 mins of your time.

Here's a link to my calendar to book some time that is convenient for you.


So, just because we don’t make games we are now to forced to use a product we don’t need at all, for a MUCH higher price for our entire workforce.

We share more with game developers than enterprise companies. We are even pursuing the consumer market actively. I responded by asking whether throwing in a zombie in our product would label us as ‘game developer’.

Unity already completely screwed us over with Furioos (isn’t that an ironic name?) which caused a LOT of problems for our customer base. No decent support, completely opaqueness about their roadmap, suddenly dropping the service after dealing with so many bugs…

What happened to this company I once loved? I remember developing with Unity v1.2 personally. Back then the company had spirit and soul and was managed properly.

Now it seems better moving to another engine. Despite all the investments involved.

 

But that 16,666.66 revenue a month is a gross revenue, not net.

For that 16,666.66 you have 20% VAT, 15-30% marketstore tax, 5-30% US govt tax (if you're outside of US). And after these taxes the money that reach your account will be a just few thousand $.

Many people confuse what GROSS revenue means. $200k gross is easily achievable by any game that can pay 1 dev's salary.

 

If you adapt their ads mediation services and all other mobile services of Unity they will wave the fee or significantly reduce it. It starts to make sense when you understand they want to monopolize the mobile services industry.

 

I have been developing a game for 5 long years of blood, sweat and tears. Scheduled for release in 3 months as Early Access. You can imagine the feeling.

I remain in 2020.3 and I haven't accepted any new terms, since I haven't installed anything new since. How can law force me into royalties for a platform that was advertised to me as royalty-free, and in which I already spent heavily?. It is a complete scam. For new versions, I guess it's their choice (because it also gives us a choice)

 

... this will even impact the asset market... less user for the engine, less selling asset.. a lose lose scenario...

 

It's starting to feel like Unity came up with the worst possible scheme to make money off of game sales so that they could then change it to be revenue based and make everyone think they were doing them a favor.

I've was a professional game engine developer for ~15 years. After that, I eventually decided to use Unity for a personal project (and helped some former coworkers with their Unity based game). I tried to improve Unity where I could, reported bugs often, and wrote articles to help others, but I always felt like I was just working around bugs or things that got abandoned (networking, navigation, etc.). I think it's time to give up on Unity and go back to working on my own engine or maybe check out Godot's progress.

Just one question, who at Unity do I send my bill to for all the work I've done helping your engine? Apparently retroactively demanding money is a thing now...

 

I hate Unity’s plans and I encourage diversity, but this feels like you are needlessly seeking a podium for talking about diversity. Two different subjects.

 

don't know, unity hub update?

 

If this was a private company, the changes would still suck... but the fact that this is a publicly traded company almost assures that in the next quarterly inventor's conference call, this will be announced as a change to improve profitability. There is no chance this fee will be used to hire new developers or improve the engine. In fact,they will probably at the same conference call announce a reduction in labor.

 

Users who use multiple devices for a game: PC, Laptop, Mobile would be a burden for a developer so they would discourage changing devices or even disable cross platform play.

 

I keep reading the "Only 10% are affected" excuse. Do they really think that devs making the decision on what engine to use think "Ah, it's fine. I'm only want to make less than $200k, anyways...".

No, people always think larger and in potential. And in the case of being really successful you don't want your one chance being pulled away from you. You don't want to be in a potential situation where your own hard work might not pay off or in the worst case even bankrupt you, because it's completely out of your control. This is just absolutely unacceptable for any sane person.

Unity just alienated their main audience, and that trust will be broken forever. And if they think that this is forgotten in a month or so like the reddit API change, they are mistaken, because this actually affects people's livelyhood.

 

Same here. I’ve been part of their journey since their initial beta versions! We should send them a bill for customer R&D

 

I bet they invested in some "install fee farms" where they will milk all unity devs by continuously reinstalling the games.
It's Illuminati level scheme.

 

Oh god, don't remind me. The random cutouts and sessions being dropped basically killed our usage of it.

 

I mean, I hate speaking in alarmist terms but honestly, I can't see how they would survive another 2 years.
I've dedicated most of my hobby game dev time to learning unity to the point where I'm pretty adept, and switching to Unreal is extremely disorienting for me. Not to mention the sunk cost of all the assets I've bought that are now rendered useless - some of which were core components of the game I have in development.

I don't enjoy this. I don't take any pleasure in saying that Unity is dead. I don't want to abandon a year long project and start over in a new engine. But this business strategy is historically (and consistently) the practice of a company that is circling the drain in an attempt to get a quick cash grab for the CEO's exit strategy.

Unity themselves don't plan on being here in 5 years if this is how they're now operating.

It's not just greedy and corrupt, it's literally, and quite likely intentionally, clueless. Look at how they've responded so far.

How are you going to measure unique user installs? Dunno.
What about free to play games with high install but low payments per customer? Dunno.
What about false positives from piracy? Dunno.
What about intentional install bombing? Dunno.
What about devs with existing products that can't afford this? Dunno.

Literally anything that hasn't been responded to with a "dunno" has been "trust us".

At this point the damage is done, and a full retraction will still leave a scar where the trust used to be. New developers will not be choosing to learn Unity from this point onwards. There's just too much risk if they can turn around and say "hey so we're unilaterally deciding to charge you for metrics you have zero control over".

Unity is dead. The best we can hope for at this point is for a retraction to put it on life support long enough for those of us with existing unfinished products to get them out there before we move on.

 

and what happens if the lower again the 200k limit or the installations things when.. even a streaming is onsiderated an "install" and they will sue your house?

 

If only it were trivial to distribute the Unity Editor with a game, and tell people to open the editor to play it.

 

Why do you hate me Unity? Solo dev with Unity Plus here.
I've paid for Plus even when I didn't have to (while actively developing). I could have switch to Plus or Pro just before I release my game but I wanted to support Unity only to be betrayed. I wanted not to care about revenue or splash screen. You're now changing everything and it seems you're making this as you go. It is clear that you didn't think this throughly.
Also now you're adding new items to my list of things I should worry about( fraudulent install reporting for example)
I paid for less headache, you're giving me more.

But with recent announcement what do I get?
Same product. (not interested in Sentis or others for my current project)
Same treatment with Unity Personal, when it comes to runtime fee limits or service features.
But I can remove splash screen! (year is 2023 BTW)
I'm forced to switching Personal or pay 2K a year for Pro after the grace period.

-Why do you behave different types of game monetization, (ad rev. premium. f2p) like they work the same?
-Why do you think distributers will pay Unity Runtime Tax? What if they don't? Did you ever thought about how publishers will look at this new tax? and how will this affect future Unity games?
-Why would I trust your data when it comes to installs? Your CEO and Managers have been clearly giving the message that they don't trust the company they run, by actively selling their stocks for a long time.

Here is how I see the recent changes:
Unity is trying to plant the idea that they can charge for a new thing, a runtime tax.
What is Unity Editor without its runtime component? Nothing! for game devs.
So this is both a license price increase and a new way to ask for money for me.
This will probably not affect me and my current project for runtime tax department, but I don't like the idea of this change. It is an ugly thing to bring in to game engine market.

What will happen is; They might change the deals a bit but they'll do everything to keep this new tax idea alive. To put out the fire, they can make deals with mid-big studios behind doors.

If your license sale revenue is a small part of your revenue (like you've been saying) then make the engine completely free with all its glory. Then we can talk for revenue share for different platforms. But no to, sneaky stuff with game install counting, unnecessarily complex, half-cooked, not given enough thought price changes please.

 

The more I think about this, the worse it gets. My response has swung back and forth between anger and a feeling of “well, it’s probably unlikely to affect me in the near future.” But the feeling I can’t shake is “why should I trust Unity if they go ahead with this?”

Let’s say I release a game and it sells pretty well (for a one man project), makes me a nice bit of money but doesn’t meet the thresholds outlined in this model. No problem, right? Well, no. Even if that’s the case now, what reassurances do I have that Unity won’t just move the goalposts again at a future date? If they did it once, what’s stopping them from doing it again? I have no reason to trust Unity not to lower the thresholds and suddenly start charging me this ridiculous fee. And the fear that Unity could just suddenly decide unilaterally to screw me over would just be hanging over me forever.

 

Someday, 80% of your viewable screen space will be ads before it causes seizures.

 

IANAL but refusing to offer substantially similar terms as they do to other business customers seems like the textbook definition of antitrust that I learned in school.

 

yes I can, you too, like the tiger scene : just put fluxy in your water system generated shader, turn water scattering color to red and so you will have the effect as the tiger do walking in the blood, take VFXgraph and design some splat too, use decals and your are done, fine tune your hair system on the creature at 120hz just to be sure it don't jitter to much, then ask an animator to give you attack/iddle animation, or buy it on the store, then put some nodes for animations using Visual scripting I am creating state machine for NPC executed on the server (multiplay) so they sync every where client side. about nature, You can even use speedtree to design nice trees like this, HDRP will take of your clouds and lighting

 

Hi. I don't feel too good about this change.

One is that this looks a system that goes against the idea of low profits and high sales. (The issue is not the size of the amount.)
Does it mean that it's disadvantageous to strive to get more people to play at a lower price?
Don't you think this is a dreamless story?

The other is side effect:
As shown by the great excitement here, this "sudden change in the pricing structure", which is not a mere price increase, has confused and repelled developers, causing some to consider switching to other game engines.
If this causes people to leave Unity and reduce its value, it is likely that knowledge and careers related to Unity will also be weakened.
I love Unity. So I would be sad.

I hope this is reconsidered.

 

Just wanted to add my voice here. I've been a Unity developer for 11 years and have continued to support it even with some of the questionable decisions in recent years, but I don't know if I can support it after this. I sincerely hope Unity will reconsider this price change. In particular, the method of evaluating installs needs to be made crystal clear and must be verifiable by the developer.

But the most egregious thing is that Unity wants to apply this change retroactively to games made in previous version of the engine. This is completely unacceptable in my opinion. Any decisions to use Unity in the past were made based on a completely different price structure. A major change like this should require informed consent before the fact. Regardless of whether or not the change is technically legal, this is a ridiculous way to screw over your customers and will destroy any goodwill developers had left for Unity.

 

That's one way end your business. Even if this mess is fixed (it could easily be fixed with something like "...fees will not exceed 5% of revenue above fee threshold ($200k/$1M)". But the damage to the reputation and trust is not possible to repair easily, maybe at all. Why would any dev stick to this rollercoaster company, that thinks it can ruin your business with 3 months notice? That thinks it can unilaterally and retroactively change TOS? For most devs the situation is clear- change the engine, even if you have to pay more, but have stable platform. Shame that such great engine will be destroyed by shareholders greed. If not this time, we dread what will be next time.

 

This is absolutely not true. You will have to litigate it or defend yourself in litigation, but usually court will side with the more stable agreement.

 

I'm against this change.
You bought a pack of cigarettes, paid the excise tax on it. You smoked 10 of them at home. Then an officer comes to you and tells you it's 20 cents for each remaining cigarette. Even more - if you smoke the same cigarette in the bathroom and bedroom and hallway while walking around the house - 20 cents for each location. That's "nice".

 

I am ashamed to have my game made with Unity.

My players keep asking me why I used Unity instead of Unreal, every time.

I answer: Unity is also good.

Now...

I am embarrassed to say that it was made with Unity.

 

There’s no way this isn’t a stock buy back stunt.

 

Ah and don't forget the custom pass to blur the water normal for a very good water particle looking!
https://github.com/alelievr/HDRP-Custom-Passes/tree/master/Assets/CustomPasses/Liquid

 

Wow, this is a low blow, for me is time to start learning Godot.

 

U think why ppl will pay 2k/year for Unity...the only reason is removing Unity splash screen

 

At last the voice reach stock market

 

It would be interesting to see from unity some figures about how many companies they expect will be effected by the change, and how many not.. eg, how they forsee this playing out.

as 77 pages of posts suggests you all make >200k a year and >200k (installs per game) or for those of you paying pro/enterprise you now make >1M a year with >1M (installs per game) ..


Am I really that much of a povo amongst the rich?
so all of you are in the will need to pay category??