Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Same. Too much risk. Guess it was time to move on anyhow.

 

I have spent 3 years, 5 months and 19 days building a free to play mobile game that I will be launching on Google Play and The App Store.

I am about 96% done.

Other similarly structured, free to play mobile games usually make an average of between $0.02 to $0.20 per user.

So are Unity telling me THEY ARE NOW TAKING ALL THE MONEY AND THEN SOME FOR THIS CHUNK OF MY LIFE??? THAT I HAVE JUST WASTED 3.5 YEARS??

Over the 200k is still detrimental on such small averages! It makes mobile games make a loss after the thresholds!

Please tell me this is bad PR and a misunderstanding and that Free To Play mobile games with IAPs and Ad revs are not shot dead totally and unnecessarily?

I can't port my game to another engine at this stage.

I didn't agree to this! Who would? I happen to be using an old Unity version (2021)... Maybe that (with the old terms) might save me and others like me if Unity have no better news?

Someone please respond to me

 

Ohhhh it's 1st of April, how nice of Unity to honor the April's Fool <3, it certainly foo... wait... it's 13th September -.-

 

Nah. None of us would be happy to handle the business-side of things, so we would hire an industry veteran to protect our interests.

Oh wait, this is familiar from somewhere...

 

After spending too much money on asset store, now should move to another engine! You will loose your customers, and would not be the most popular mobile engine any more. RIP Unity

 

2000 shares buys what now... a pizza?

 

Only if its a F2P style revenue. Anyone else is not going to realistically be affected by this until you're selling 1,000,000 copies of a game, at which point you'll still be paying less than you would if you used Unity.

 

Are you a solo developer? Or a studio? If you're the former you're almost assuredly never going to hit the cap for Unity Pro.

 

Your only option that I can see is to use unity ad service and ask for a discount. Who knows how much that discount will actually be though.

 

The ppl talking abt tracking pirated vs legit installs are kinda missing the point: this is unenforceable, even if it is legal (something I really doubt). If they had a way of tracking installs that would be part of this announcement. The reason this seems like unity is making stuff up on the fly as questions are asked is because that's exactly what is happening.

 

I know the meme, but in this case we ended up with "Directed by Uwe Boll".

 

People making games that refuse to acknowledge that no software is unexploitable and that motivated malicious gamers exist make me chuckle.

 

And also several answers from the official side. They are waiting for the community to calm down. To be honest, I really believe that everything in this world has its limit. The new policy is terrible, why not make a percentage of sales like in UE. And most importantly, as many users noted about trust.

 

Same...and I have followed all pages silently so far, I am simply speechless T_T

 

I love Unity and C#. I am developing my first game for 2 years. I spent many time to learn Unity. Today I am downloading Unreal Engine.

 

I am hurt, betrayed and so so disappointed

 

The saddest part about this is Unity was trying be a souped up race car to beat another car that is already FASTER than it, and got burned, became it has parts in that are already worn.

While I understand Helgason giving John Ritticello the benefit of the doubt, going public and investing in technologies just to keep chasing the Black Car from Ridge Racer was not smart

 

If it's just the runtime DLL then that should be even more clearly illegal. It's already established law that when you link to a DLL or include one in your software, you are bound by the license that was attached to that version of the DLL. If you include a DLL that someone put under an open source license, they can't turn around a year later and demand that you pay them, even if they make a new version of the DLL that costs money.

I agree 100%. It's not the amount of money that bothers me, it's that they would spring something on us with such short notice when they don't even have answers to how it will actually work.

 

I'll say it one more time:
1. No, they cannot change the TOS retroactive.
The main reason is because it is illegal to do that in most of the world.
The second reason is because in their old TOS is was forbidden to do that
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hjic6/unitys_stance_on_retroactive_tos_changes_in_2019/
So if you got a game already shipped:
- DO NOT PAY UNITY A DIME
If your game is still in development:
- DO NOT PAY UNITY A DIME
- DO NOT UPDATE UNITY
If they ask you for money I'm sure there will be ways to do a class action, most people here are not happy at all.
2. Yes, it's hard to start from scratch, but we as developer learn new framework/languages/things everyday, no reason to stop now. Learning a new engine will not be as difficult as the first time you started with Unity, most of the feature will be almost the same anyway. Do not be afraid to learn new things, do not feel traped in unity.

 

Just get pro. And your cap goes to 1M. That is a couple grand so no biggie.

And it isnt all your revenue. Youd start paying for what you get after that. Just do the math pls. Sit down, read things. Notice that the price per install goes down as it go up and stuff. If it affects you, cool do your best to protect yourself. If not, business as usual.

A lot of people who would not be affected by this at all are losing their minds because EVERYONE is losing their minds. And it aint helping anyone. A lot of newbs will think they need to change engines and waste months of their lives for no good reason. It aint whiteknighting, literally it is more likely more actual people will be screwed by reading this thread than by Unity.

EDIT: Install still stupid tho.

 

Look, anyone who says that they, alone, have all the answers to everything and so trust them on those but they aren't going to show their work, can't be trusted at all. Nada. Zip, Zilch. Only fools would do that. Try that on some legal authority and see how far it gets you.

Yah, these aren't people who deserve trust...

 

My thoughts immediately went to Deadpool. Only replace "film" with "engine".

 

ai am confident that it will apply to installs AFTER you qualified.

you start paying AFTER you made 200k.

it's an "AND" ..

and again ... i project that they will roll back and create exceptions after the reaction from the community.

 

they don't even have a way to track legitimate installs.
you could sue them and they wouldn't be able to tell how they got the number of installs they billed you for. it's just a guess after all.

 

With this new crazy Unity fee possibly many new indie games will have a type of 200.000 sale units limit, in many cases pass this limit is money lost for devs.

 

Unity won't touch ANY of your money until you earn $200,000 (and if you pay ~$2000 for a Pro licence they won't touch any of your money until you earn $1,000,000 in a year).

Do you expect to earn more than $1,000,000 per year with your game? On a Pro plan the most you will pay per install is 15c, and that scales down the more installs you get too 1c (and installs from developing countries are only half a cent).

If you are stuck at 2c per user you might struggle (AFTER earning that first $1,000,000), but if your revenue per user is closer to 20c you'll be doing fine.

 

Few developers ship with Unity Personal thanks to the splash screen, and fewer still are going to hit that $1,000,000 USD/year limit for Pro. You basically need to be a studio for it to matter.

 

I'm not sure about the legality of this, to be honest. Someone will sue this guy.

 

Here is what I think they will do.
They will statically evaluate game installs and compare them to other game titles with similar installs. Then if one game shows strange out of order statistics (hacking, abuse or something) they will just average it back down.

THAT IS THE BEST THEY CAN DO.

Why? Because they cannot legally collect more data to do anything further. All they have is the number of installations of a game - a number associated with the title. And the date and the approximate location (country).

Now, they will probably start charging you slightly less, to make you feel at home.

But, eventually we will run into disputes,

and YOU will have to provide "proof" to dispute it!

But guess what your "proof" is.

Every financial detail of your game. Bank account, steam statistics and financials.

Amazing.

 

If you have 200k units sold and anyone installs it on two devices or reinstalls it and you're over the limits, you're screwed for life.

 

No matter what they do now, It'll be too little too late.

 

"Unity silently removed their Github repo to track license changes, then updated their license to remove the clause that lets you use the TOS from the version you shipped with, then insists games already shipped need to pay the new fees."
https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/0RKOx9Mn75

 

Godot, Flax, Uniengine, Stride... it's like thousand of C# compatible engines out there.

 

Ahh.. the New Coke strategy. One can hope....

 

With all the confirmed sales from stock market analytics the CEO and other higher ups sold over 10$ million dollars worth of stock between a few days. By the looks of it possibly 30$ million, but the last 20$ million has not been concrete confirmed yet though. Take the last 20$ million as rumor till confirmed, but the first 10$ million yeah, confirmed.

Mostly August 31, September 1, and September 6th.
So quite a big pizza.

 

Except for low revenue/high volume F2P games, nobody will lose money by selling more games! Realistically you have to sell 1,000,000 copies and earn $1,000,000 before this affects your earnings AT ALL, and even the it will be a tiny fraction of your earnings.

 

If I deleted my game from Steam and people continue to pirate it (which I'm 100% certain Unity cannot detect), then that means I'll be paying 20c to Unity for every pirated game for the rest of my life, right?

 

Yep. If it were this easy to detect pirated copies, piracy would not be possible at all. But it's more than alive and well.

Fact is that even to detect unique installs, Unity would have to obtain information that in a lot of countries would be illegal to obtain and store without a user's consent.

And because I'm in the EU, I'm pretty much legally required to prevent any person based data collection (which includes IP) that Unity does on my app. I got fined for having an old google font javascript on one of my websites, because it sends a user's IP to google's servers. If unity sends an IP to their own servers, which isn't even enough to accurately track anything, I'm literally forced by law to block it.

 

Unity, but maybe you will provide possibility to choose which monetization we should use in concrete game? old or new, cause in some cases you can just take all revenue from game.

 

A tragicomedy.

 

Why do some people have such a hard time understanding that sales != installs?

 

I'm just here to contribute to the post count to encourage some better information. The plan as laid out just doesn't make sense. Hopefully we get an update from someone with actual authority soon - I feel like we've been recycling the same information for the past 60+ pages and nobody knows much more than we did when the announcement was originally made.

 

Well, that's the end of what trust I had.

Do these people think we're stupid?

 

New idea for Unity management: a fee to forum users whenever they post in a thread with more than 1,000 posts.

Effective yesterday.

 

Nonono, you have to make a revenue of 1 000 000 USD not earn, this is before you retract all payments and taxes and storefront share etc.

 

Hi, exist official numbers about Unity personal and paid subscriptions users? I think that the personal license is most of the Unity users.

 

This is literally a backdoor to your bank account that you can never close, if your game is viable (200k gross is not that much, its like minimum wage earning in a year), a single user could get an hold to your runtime, make a bot, and trigger millions of of installs.

 

Same reason I imagine most of them assume everyone will always stick to Unity Personal?

Most Unity users never release a game.

 

LOL ? XD

 

Unity changing their TOS secretly?