Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

People are saying that Unity is very greedy, but this is an absurd accusation.
With these changes they will clearly be making LESS money because everyone will have moved to another engine.

 

Again, Unity Technologies does not operate as a democracy. That petition could get 1 million signees and it doesn't mean unity has to do anything.

 

How does it make it ok to hurt a genre of game that is one of the most accessible for small studio to make a living of? Any pricing should not hurt a specific genre this badly! Also the idea itself of cost per install is revolting, that will set a dangerous precedent that they want to apply RETROACTIVELY! WIthout even being transparent about install tracking nor the means to protect dev from bad faith actors!

 

Like Gigaya, the demo game they couldn't even make in their own engine?

 

Which is not avilable to small indie dev since source access cost a lot of $$$

 

Yay just got the motivation to learn Unreal. This pricing "plan" is far too unpredictable to build any business on.

 

Indeed if you want them to take notice you need to cancel your subscription and move to another engine.

 

Their clarification is that they have a proprietary system to track statistics. Which means you will have to accept whatever number they tell you at the moment. (I'm really tired of writing pulling out of their asses this many time, but that is the most accurate definition).

 

No, like a full game. Well, Gigaya could have done the same job

I love your wording btw. Gigaya, the demo game they couldn't even make in their own engine
I guess there were clear signs everywhere. Gigaya, IPO, Ironsource, GI system, etc.

 

I know is not your fault but:

what about gaining more users offering better features and better documentation, better public image instead of milking the ones who are here for pure obligation (because i can not find any reason why someone wants to use unity today with other game engines like unigine, godot or unreal that are way superior to unity right now)?
Or what about not disrespecting the ones that uses unity spitting in their faces with more taxes when we all want to leave this ship but some are here because they want this sinking ship to be at least close to what it was before? Those are pretty good alternatives, aren't they?

I can explain this, those good news were buried in years of unfixed bugs forever beta features and years bad decisions like cancel projects or games... (remember gigaya?) This rant is not for today's news, i'm 100% sure of that

Sorry, but this is a "trust me bro" from a guy who was on the most hated AAA gaming company...

deja vu

Are you guys going to take my ideas? because gaining more user with trust is a pretty solid idea IMO

 

just open github and type "Unity Technologies" then fork what you need

 

People don't realize that hackers don't even need to actually reinstall the game. A simple packet sniffer and some minor reverse engineering is all that's needed to send the "correct" information back.

 

C++ source bro.

 

Build version that someone can forget to change or enter completely random string? One innocent human mistake and suddenly you're thousands in debt. The responsibility should not be on the dev to ship a demo with some silly checkbox ticked and then get penalized or accused for fraud when you forget to change the said checkbox or some regression happens for the main game. This is absolutely a big deal. Even more so because they haven't thought of anything Steam related.

 

No you don't. I'm certain that even in a country like the USA it's illegal to send an invoice with made up numbers.

 

Even regardless of whether Steam, for example, would pay the fees... Anything that causes less games to be put out and make it onto the marketplace affects their bottom line as a vendor!

 

If you think this is bad you should see the Discord.

 

What a glorious day. The ultimate motivation for switching to another engine has arrived.

 

But hey, at least the solo dev with no overhead, looking only to make $2k revenue/year is fine right (for now).

 

C++ source of VFXgraph while it being builded? no they won't give you that knowlegde, and I understand that too

 

What is the average number of installations per sale? It is going to be greater than 1.

You will be paying these fees long after your game is released. At some point you will need to remove your old games from the sales channel because you will be losing money on installation fees.

This is a very hard model to understand. What you will be paying depends on the behavior of your customers over a long time period. Sounds like something. John Riccitiello would come up with yikes.

 

Don't ask too much, seems like making only a demo was already too hard to them.
We could also add all the announced features that never made it; the new audio system, the new navigation system (funny how they updated their roadmap, now everything is under considerations), the new terrain system, even the development of their new UI system has slowed down dramatically. The only two features they've been able to ship were DOTS (ok-ish, but still useless to most people, and there was already some framework to achieve it), and splines (lol)

 

From the chart I made you can see that the pricing model looks like the company wants to push developers to buy the Unity Pro license.

You mentioned the very profitable game studios pay very little to Unity. Why does your pricing model seems more focus on the developers whose revenue between $200k to $1M?

 

It seems to me that it was also worth ask to fire the Unity CEO. Because without his dismissal, a simple cancellation of this decision will not be able to regain the trust of developers.

 

Whelp... I guess Godot it is. I know it's a long shot for any game I make to make $200k but on the off chance it does happen, I'd like to still have a home to live in and not lose everything to Unity install taxes.

 

Here's my two cents (obviously not for Unity shareholders).
Trust and money. One is already lost, now the fight is going for the latter. My guess is that a lot of indie devs and small companies will switch to other game engines (personally looking at Godot), in the same way as they switched to Blender a while back. But it won't matter for Unity now, because right now these changes are aimed at really big companies. It will take some years until this migration will produce enough momentum in educational materials, released games, etc. and the same big companies will start hiring experienced "Godot"-developers and switch their pipelines according to the new wave.
Maybe I'm wrong, but from this point of view it is sad to see the first symptoms of inevitable decay.

 

Done!

 

You guys have to know this pricing model makes very little sense for devs, right? Right!?

This WILL kill Unity development.

 

Again i think it's unreasonable to assume Unity is in the business of brankrupting devs over a demo.

 

I think this will be so people will lock into their ad+IAP solutions and they'll lower/retire the fee.
For pay to play games it's ok pricing.
But damn if it doesn't feel like unity is spying everyone that installs a simple game.

 

This is catastrophic. I don't know how anyone in Unity's sales team remotely expect anyone to take these clownass ToS updates seriously and have a healthy longterm. Instead it's going to be a mass abandonment of the platform over the course of the next 2-4 years as current Unity projects wrap up, because why on earth would any new project starting out agree to such a ridiculous and poorly thought out concept to track/enforce?

On top of this and the repeatedly worse and unfocused ideas the company has been trying to go with, I'm personally at a point where I absolutely can no longer defend the development platform I've spent over 10 years now becoming an expert in. I personally cannot even consider using Unity for any new projects now. Even if they roll this change back, it's still such a catastrophic OOF to even suggest it in the first place, that all trust and credibility is in ruins.

Literally the only thing that would repair this death knell is the firing of John Riccitiello and the sale team responsible for this.

 

Stop this Unreal vs Unity nonsense. I have used both and can tell you Unreal is a great engine but unless you re not making a hyper realistic aaa megascan flip, it has its downsides if you dont have a solid team. For instance making robust shaders in unreal requires you to modify source which alone is 200gb and you have to read into alot to understand how epic structured things. Unity has its strength and so does unreal. Devs are just being screwed over badly right now because Unity is pretty much showing that they will do whatever they want to get more money out of the blue. All of this just has shown me that we badly need Godot to succeed and make Godot the blender of game engines.

 

He tried to warn you about the proprietary devil but you wouldn't listen!

 

At this point they deserve the bankrupcy.

 

The way independent developers create content on the internet today is by distributing their work as much as possible and hoping that it will make them profitable, someday... John Riccitiello and his ilk have obviously not been in that place for a very long time, if ever. The new policy is like a spring-loaded trap designed to cripple anyone in that position who reaches success. I would consider it devious and dastardly in its design, if I believed it were something that had been thought ought in a game theoretical manner involving at least a single engineer, or economist, or lawyer worth their salt.

 

Why? Assuming they won’t screw us over requires good will and trust and Unity is not doing much to earn those these days.

 

Hey don't leave out the amazing DX12! The GPU baker that took Unity 3~4 years when a single guy on asset store got it done in a few months. Let's not forget the amazing new water system that was released in 2023 that looks 10 years old.

But seriously the only addition that I really appreciated in the last 5~7 years is DLSS, but you know Unity didn't make it XD

 

It's ok cause they don't like that genre of game.

 

Another thing that'll happen if this pricing change goes through: a huge number of game devs in the Chinese market will start using pirated Unity engines that don't track installs. It will be impossible to prevent this from happening. There is absolutely no way some asset-swap game Chinese mobile game with 50m downloads will be paying this installation fee, that's just not going to happen.

If a situation exists where the pirates get better service and a better deal than the paying customers, it'll end up being a larger loss of income for Unity, and lead to exodus.

Besides, the legalities of this move, retroactively changing the TOS of older versions of Unity that covers newly released Unity projects, is very suspect. And you can't gain public favor for your company by fighting your customers in court.

Just turn around, Unity. This will lead to a severe loss of revenue for you, and ruin your market share. Call it a mistake in a corpo-speak press release and make a new plan, before it's too late.

I like the engine. I want to be using it for years, if I can...

 

While I actually think they aren't in that business, but I also think they are utilizing the threat as a weapon right now which is more than disturbing.

You can, just cough up all your money.

 

If unity so desperately needs money, maybe they really do (layoffs?), then this can only mean that whatever they come up with after the disaster feedback has ebbed away will not be much better; After all they will likely need even more money when some of their paying customers have changed their focus to other engines.

 

Mike, I know you've been thrown into the deep end here, and I know you didn't mean many of the things in the way they were interpreted, but your communication style in some of these early posts suck (haven't read much farther than page 10 yet, so I don't know if this changes).
I think the "Alright, instead of presenting my math, I'm gonna give you a calculator" post and the reactions to it exemplifies it. After thinking about that post for a bit, and trying to see it in good faith, as well as reading onwards, it's obvious you meant "I'm going to create a calculation spreadsheet/application so you can double check yourself and not have to trust me", but what it SOUNDED like at first was "What, can you not do basic math?"
I guess that's what happens when the company makes such a stupid decision that everyone just sees everything any representative says in the worst possible light. But your posts here, for a large part, were easy to misunderstand and sometimes not really specific.

 

Even if it's just a drop in the ocean...

As long as this decision is not reversed:

- I will pause my work on my project and take a closer look at Godot and UE in the next few days
- I will no longer make any transactions in the Asset Store
- I will no longer create videos or other content about Unity
- I will inform as many people as possible about this decision and highlight various disadvantages for both devs and gamers

I love this engine, but these decisions are simply harmful

 

I think you underestimate the power of money. Money can make things happen very fast, much faster than people's expectations and even their will power. For one, me, tried Unreal Engine so many times, giving up so many times in first 30 minutes. I started in Unity, and I always preferred Unity over Unreal. Last night, after this runtime fee bs, I worked through 5 hour Unreal tutorial, and thinks its actually not that bad. And there are things immediately better already

 

Why aren't dev pulling their stuff from the asset store in order to set a sign?

 

My small mobile company is choosing now to what engine we will migrate

Thanks Unity for your services

 

Googles Stadia failed too.
And never once did a media autopsy mention that it could possibly be because Google has shown itself to be untrustworthy.

But lots of commenters on the internet let it be known they would never pay Google to hold their games for them.

 

Una burla y una muestra de desprecio a todos los desarrolladores que venimos trabajando con Unity hace casí una década, buen momento para analizar UNREAL o GODOT. Unity demostró ser un fraude.

 

Does anyone remember the Gigaya?

 

I doubt they even need to hack it... is the Chinese government going to collect for UTech? I doubt it.