Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Shortly to enter the "I change" Discussion:

i needet 7 Years, to learn all things in unity i know.
now, i standing here, i have:
- Quest and Dialogue System
- Navigation System
- my own AI System ( and a VERY nice )
- own Inventory and Item Systems
- own Voice Acting, and own Face Rig Usage System
- and a *LOT* of other Systems
- also a own World Streaming System.

I would be abble, to release the first of my 2 big Projects, at Novembre this year.

AND I WANT TO THANK YOU UNITY TO SET ME INTO THE POINT!
now to NEED TO CHANGE TO UNREAL!

FOR REAL!
for ppl doing Things like this, there is a Placce called: Hell.
i hope, you will get a warm Place.

Thank you.
And what this m eans to me ?
i cancel my Idea to reelease

and do it again
in Unreal 5, with nearly 0 Knowledge
but i will start from 0. I dit it one Timme!
and i can made it a 2th to.

the only Thing i relly not like, is the Money, i give to this greedy Unbity ppl (uunity income from this) in Assetstore.
The good thing is: i ccan take a lot of Models, Animations and other, to unreal.
This i can do until today.

but the bad is: all what was Scriptet, is lost
all Particles, lost,
All specials to Unity: lost.

all from Scatch again!
VERY THANK YOU FOR YOUR GREEDY!

Oh, one Thing at last:
This Fork, the Deviil have, this with the big Spikes, the new one :
it s from me, reserved for Unity Chefs.

 

This is very bad.
If my game ever meet the threshold, I'll spend all my free time to change the engine.
And if I ever start a new game, I'll never choose Unity again because of a model like this.
They cannot reliably track real user installs, and yet they base their fee on it... so stupid and unpredictable.
Also as an end user, I'll never trust games made with Unity anymore because of their 'secret' algorithm to identify users and installs.
Such a bad decision.

 

This looks promising

 

I want to get off Mr. Riccitellio's wild ride

 

More news

 

Oh hell no. Just uninstalled Unity. I was preferring Godot these days anyway. Go suck it

 

c. Unitys marketing plan for 2024, colorised

 

The retroactive element of this change is absurd.

This is the mid sized, F2P mobile dev version of selling someone a pacemaker for $5,000, then coming back a month later and saying "You actually owe us $500,000 if you continue using that pacemaker we sold you, because we decided to change the terms and conditions of the contract that you and I agreed to earlier. Don't worry, you have 3 months to cancel and have the pacemaker ripped out if you want, but please note that other pacemakers require 2 years of full-time, family-wide ramp up before they can be used effectively. Also, we're forcing you onto a higher-tier subscription licensing plan to use the pacemaker as you're using it now, but we'll soften the blow by adding valuable new features, including our proprietary Thoughts+Prayers add on (still in development)."

 

#vergonha

Taylor Swift already knew that...

 

I'm feeling the same way. I have been working with Unity since version 3. I shipped almost 12 titles, and I working on two titles right now.

I also, as a teacher, spend about 800 hours teaching Unity in several academies to over 300 students.

I feel lost and betrayed. I'm not worried about the costs. We are a small studio. We can cover the pro license, and we do not even get close to the thresholds. But I really scared about the publisher's response to this madness and totally unpredictable price model.

Why not a revenue share? Why? Why did Unity choose this complicated, understandable foggy install counting? That does not make any sense at all.

Devoler Digital is already asking to include what engine is used in the game pitches.

 

Very good point, thank you.

 

The sneaky TOS change reminds me of something StubHub tried to pull during the pandemic. An event I'd bought tickets to was cancelled. I asked for a refund. They said they would only give credit since that was their policy, which they had recently updated in light of the recent world events. I pointed out to them that at the time of purchase, their refund policy was cash refund for cancelled events. They still declined to refund.

Both the credit card company and the state attorney general sided with me, go figure. I expect it would go much the same here.

 

I don't assume that. I assume this triple-dip scheme was entirely cooked up by C-suite for mobile where they can reliably track installs since everything is centralized via appstores. It's further reinforced by the fact that they offer to waive the fees or significantly reduce them if you adapt Unity's mobile specific services that are not applicable to any other industry. They didn't give a single thought to Steam or anything else really, since initially they claimed demos also count as installs and re-installs are also installs and all the other nonsense.

What I assume is that they are attempting to monopolize the mobile services industry, seeing as 70+% of all mobile games are made with Unity. And F2P mobile games, which have small margins, typically earn less than the install fee unless they adapt Unity services to reduce that fee.

Furthermore, this has come out of the left field. Biggest Unity devs weren't aware, even Unity employees weren't aware. There was no warning and there is no transition period. Unity can pull any hairbrained scheme at any time. The fees could double next year and they aren't predictable in general. You can't even budget for this. I don't care that Unity are not in the business of bankrupting devs who release free demos, it's still a fact that hey have no way to track that reliably because they haven't really thought of a single thing in Steam or WebGL context.

I don't think a partner that can change the rules with no warning, apply them retroactively to games already released and lacks any proper tooling for tracking any of this is a reliable one. This is not how business is done.

 

you are wrong, devs are not the kind of guys who take bad decisions to make more money, those you are mad are the suits, pretty f old people who know nothing about technology, but too much about how f you take your money spiting in your face and make you stay

 

• If they wanted revenue share, then subscription fee should be gone.
• Revenue share should only apply when the current subscription ends, one cannot just change the terms of the contract whenever they want
• But there is revenue share (or something worse, its called runtime fee) and 4 times more expensive subscription fee.

I chose Unity because there were no revenue shares. Because then I knew exactly what I need to make a game in x number of months. Now, why choose Unity when there is revenue share? There is already a better alternative with revenue share.

 

so, currently i believe for enterprise license its about 5k a year, pro is 2k a year. how was the man in question here previously giving unity 20K? more over how is it now 200k a month?

if its personal license and he has 1M downloads, and lets say the 1M downloads a month, if hes on the personal unity he would pay 200k a month yes, but he would have paid no other payments. if he paid 2k for pro, he would be paying 20k a month .. and if he paid the 5k enteprise 10k a month.. but hes also having to need to keep up the 1M additional installs a month...

show me a game that achieved 1M downloads a month and kept it up? let alone 1M in a month? the most popular game onsteam is getting 45k new a month.... that for enterprise is $450 .. a month..

 

Off-site you invited people to comment on these changes. Well, here I am. This level of greed is so insultingly awful that it actually made me overcome my annoyance with signing up for stuff enough to come and complain at the source.

I don't care that end users are "technically" not paying these costs. I also don't care about any of your horrendous lip service. As someone who is passionate about video games I care that you are making it harder for games and developers to exist.

The costs end users will end up paying are in game development money being siphoned upwards to the awful miserable kind of cynical passionless businessmen who greenlit this decision in the first place, rather than the artists and programmers actually making the games we love.

The costs end users will end up paying are in lower accessibility of creation tools meaning fewer games being made and fewer people wanting to explore a budding passion for game development in the first place.

This decision sucks. Reverse it. No one will support you until you do. The people behind this don't deserve any money or the standing they are allowed to benefit from. In a decent world everyone behind these kinds of decisions would be unceremoniously fired and barred from ever reentering the industry.

 

Thats just heart breaking to hear.

It's simply tragic how some people are so myopic (looking at you Ri**), they do not realize the shiny gold mine they think they have is from other people's sweat and dreams

 

I think it's purposefully misleading us into confusion.

It is not uncommon for betas and demo versions to still be 'preserved' after releases, even if they're not officially available on stores. Also, the official post reads:
"f you can get from the demo to a full game then yes. If it's not, like a single level that can't upgrade then no."

It appears that this statement could potentially have a hidden agenda of influencing how future titles are announced. If that's not the case, remember they're also the ones responsible for labeling a title as "chargeable" or not.

A level? A level can mean many things, depending on the genre. How to how 'Level' an open world experience, for example?
Given the vagueness of their statement, we can STIPULATE that, in MINECRAFT, if a beta/demo is 'chosen', it may end up being subject to charges, even when not meeting the current established criteria.

Imagine trusting our wallets to the ones responsible for writing the bills. No one should be legally punished for non-compliance If Unity is not transparent on how they're tracking the installation for each individual title, specially IF their 'proprietary tracking methods' are faulty or exploitable.

 

I encourage everyone that desires to use Unity in the future to use this as an inflection point to ask for real changes inside this company.

Developers, Unity Technologies didn't just change their licensing scheme, they spat directly in your face. They are offering concerning or opaque answers to questions that impact entire industries and the livelihoods of people in and around software development. They didn't just take your loyalty for granted, they are treating you like dirt - unworthy of even the most basic consideration of how this my impact you and your peers.

A miss like this should not come without deep introspection by the company, and within yourself - whether you want to work alongside a developmental partner that does not respect your work enough to offer even the bare minimum of explanation or thoughtfulness in their considerations.

 

I really missed the Unity forums. lol

 

They also, at some point, added "applicable fees" to the Unity Runtime specifically, whereas the legacy TOS lumps the Runtime in with your right to use the Editor.

 

i mean unity basically made the following change:

"yeah i have a new install"

"**** i have a new install"

"Im reaching 200k installs its time to unrelease this game. and rerelease it under a new name"


You did the absolute worst scheme for everyone and you will probably lose a lot of people with this.
Thank you unity!

 

The Charakter is "okay"

but watch the Light.
it s on some places to dark
on other places like everytime in unity: overbrightet.

This engine, do not matter if Build in, URP, HDRP have esome kind of real Light Problems.
You will not try to tell me, that it can face the U nreal Wood.

This is just: not possible.
Just watch the Lightning.
unreal is looking like a Reality Photo
unity is looking, like a game made 2016

so: What do you really want to play ?

 

Unity already thought of that and mentioned it's not allowed. Because of course they're going to think of things that hurt them before they think of the developers.

 

Just letting you know I'm still here too, feeling the same way. I'm leaving 100%, pulling my game from EA, learning Unreal, and just taking the hit because thankfully I can. But I feel the exact same as you, can't focus to work, cant bring myself to open Unity, kinda just shellshocked. I sit in this chair 14 hours a day 6 days a week working in Unity. It's all I've known for a decade. Whatever you need to do to cope is fine, just know it IS THAT BIG of a deal to many of us. And it feels good to hear from other people feeling this way. So goodluck wherever you end up, we didn't deserve this, not one bit.

 

Just took a dump in the bathroom and I had to to look twice for a minute because for a second I thought it was Unitys new pricing policy in my toilet. Fortunately, it wasn't anything that bad, just a regular turd.

 

hmm - by their figures. I just did a rough calculation of a game I've played a lot on Steam - that I have probably accessed on well over 50 different computers or the steam deck - all legally through my steam account - every one of those will count as an individual install to the publisher. they'll potentially get a bill for 50+ installs - or it will count as 50 installs to their lifetime number of installs - all from 1 install handled legally via steam cloud. They've already said this is how it will be counted, that eats through those lifetime installs pretty quickly - and will be considered revenue as well at current price. They have no idea how to do this fairly - and its ill-thought through.

 

That's just fantasy land you are talking about. Hitler wasn't the only one to be blamed. Those who followed, whether blinded, ill informed, forced, whatever, there is some form of responsibility. Especially if they knew what was going on.

Where are all the devs and moderators? Where are they? Seriously, they must know what happened by now, surely they had meetings, surely they had some time to think. What do you think they are doing?

Its funny how the victims (us devs) have no one to defend us, but there are people like you who are willing to defend Unity and those who took part in this bs. Are you not getting your priorities wrong? Really, if this goes through, its not just some people whining. There will be real consequences. Like real life damage. This is not just happening on the internet.

 

Just scrap this nonsense, the incredibly stupid install fee model and the 5x price increase just to remove the goddamn splash screen. Not that I will have much trust in Unity going forward, with the ridiculous changes, the virtually zero thought given to them, the basically null communication, the lying about the TOS, etc. It's not going to be easy to look into other engines, after many years of gathering knowledge and having created quite a few tools for Unity, plus still having to use it on current projects, but you made me feel like I have no choice.

 

RE/PS: Is this true? That there could a possibility to stay on the old license we had/have? I am using Unity since 2015 or so, would it be possible to stay on this old license and not 'accept' the new terms of the new license, and stay with the old license that does not have this new clause that incurs a per-install fee?

Or, as the users said above, it is simply delusion to think we can 'not accept the new TOS/Terms of Service' and if we refuse them, we are held accountable/legally...to be sued?...Please, Unity, clarify, so we can take the best decision, legally (of course), with your understanding/consent. Can we refuse the new license agreement, starting january 2024, or we are forced to moved to this new engine-use TOS/license..that has the new per-install fee. OR, can we stay on the old license (I understand, you would prefer (financially) we do the latter..but, for many, it's not possible, so if it possible (legally) to stay on old license...some would (understandably) choose that). It should be a choice that is possible and not (just) a 'coercion' of moving to the new TOS/license...with per-install fees...Thank again.

 

Per developer seat. 4 Enterprise developers, or 10 Pro developers, would hit $20,000.

Pretty much the minimum number of seats for small developer teams.

 

... and the thread has been Godwin'd

 

I was harassed out of a unity asset discord channel , the only woman among many, and my son saw the words they called his mom. It was not fun. Discord is toxic. I actually like the Unity forums. Feels good!

 

They fired someone complaining about a C suite that suggested folks to just "get another apartment" in San Francisco to deal with the commute. In what universe could any Unity employee be able to influence these decisions? In any corporate environment, even?

 

My basketball friend tells me to just learn Unreal and port the game. Most people don't understand what we are going through. If we ever cross paths, allow me to buy you a drink.
Best,

 

I know some are loosing money and time. There is no denying, this is not optimal.
I have the exact same feeling as you, Unity was my workplace from early mornings to late nights. I know this piece of software inside out.

And now. A new adventure starts.
If you can afford it take all the lemons and make yourself a big lemonade! A fresh start GL

 

They clarified nothing. Clickbait article. They are saying the same thing but with different words.

• Unity says only initial install will require fee, unless game is installed on another device

if the game is installed and uninstalled then the next install is "initial". if user changed his phone, and it does this on average every couple of years then is another device and it triggers a new initial install. First point, No change, no clarifications here. We already knew this.

• Demos will be largely exempt and developers will be able to inform Unity if game is for charity

"Demos will be largely exempt" based on what? Lets decipher this. We assume demos are used for new games to be released. The "installs" fee didn't triggered yet because the game is new and no one have it yet. This is why the demos are "exempt" because it didn't triggered the fee number trap. BUT demos adds up to the number of installs providing unity a quicker path to trigger the fee trap. "if game is for charity" imagine the paperwork involved. entire games for charities? maybe some game companies give some money to charity but the entire game? That is rare and so is not the focus of the issues here. Second point, No change, no clarifications here. We already knew this.

• Install fee applies to distributor, so developers with games in subscription services will not be charged

And distributors will take the money from the dev fee. This is a straight lie btw. "developers will not be charged"? A big fat lie. They will be charged by the distributor which will cut the dev fee. Third point, No change, no clarifications here. We already knew this.

For the future wait for unity to come up from the hole they have vanished in for the past 24 hours and don't trust third party news websites that post articles just to have some clicks

 

Anyone here making a living off asset store?

 

3-4 years ago

 

I don't see how the math works with these fees at all.

Most games depend on a lot of downloads, but only make a few pennies on each install. The key is that there are a few players that spend a lot of money on IAP, when the vast majority spend nothing at all. So if your game gets to 200k installs and you make some money, great. Then everything after that will be a loss... a BIG loss per install. So after 200k installs, you need to pull the game from the stores immediately.

This new model sounds good to Unity because they think "We'll make a ton of money!", but it doesn't work at all as a developer. You want your game to be good enough to get to 200k units, but then you will need to pull it. At that point, even Unity won't make any money.

There's a reason other companies base their fees on how much money you've earned and not the # of installs.

 

I know I'm beating a dead horse here but Unity should backtrack their proposed changes immediately and apologize to try and keep as many developers around as possible following this train wreck. Those responsible for rolling this out may need to be removed in order to regain trust.

Passing this abysmal pricing plan off as a good alternative for developers instead of a percentage based royalty share based on total gross revenue shows that they take us for fools. They are twisting the arms of small studios who are already having a tough time in this economy. Even further they obviously have not thought through integral parts of this plan's rollout and must have expected developers to just bend over and take it when issues were to crop up. In my opinion they are making it up as they go.

Their lack of situational support regarding a static $0.20 install fee leads me to believe that they are trying to take over the free-to-play mobile market completely and it will backfire super hard. Free games with in app purchases are not inherently bad and are a great option for small teams who want big organic growth with a quality title, but with this new pricing rollout no other studio using their tool will be able to compete. The risk of mass installs will shutter studios left and right, myself included. I believe everyone is aware of the possible damages at this point and it's obviously NOT WORTH IT. I can't believe we even have to be discussing this at this point.

I don't understand how anyone working for Unity thinks that this model is good and can stand to back it up. This runtime fee in combination with "behind the scenes" tracked installs on Unity's end will absolutely lead to studios going bankrupt after building an honest breakout title. It's insane that this is how we, the developers who keep Unity relevant, will be treated if this plan goes into effect. We cannot just take Unity's word that they will not take any advantage they can get to squeeze funding right out of a studio. I see them justifying the death of small developers as a sacrifice to keep their oversized company afloat. They are obviously way in over their heads with this decision and I feel bad for any developer working on their team who truly cares about the work they do. Unity was not always this way.

Please for the sake of the engine and indie community that backs it (whoever is left) your team must change this model to a fair percentage based royalty as seen with competitors. Unity should only make money when the developer makes money, end of story.

I've joined the rapidly growing crowd jumping ship and am looking at Godot as an alternative for my future work. It is so sad for all of this to happen but in my opinion the team can still turn this around if they do it soon.

 

Yes, people need to calm down a little and do some actual math. Even if you do make it to the 1 million threshold (which any dev should consider a blessing), you’re still not paying any fees until your first install after that. And even if we go extreme and double the installs of every person who bought your game after that threshold, it’s still a FRACTION of the 5% royalty Unreal would charge you.

Of course we need to keep expressing our vehement dislike of everything else about this plan. The vagueness, the “proprietary” methods that keep businesses from accurately calculating expenses or accurately raise disputes or even know if they’re being ripped off, blindsiding devs with such a drastic and short notice change in their contracts, the potential of our software being injected with Unity’s proprietary data harvesting to track these metrics, the billing methods, etc.

But we really need to end this “I’m afraid of being successful now!” nonsense. It dilutes the conversation we need to have about much more serious and real issues.

 

Why has no one from unity came back and said anything at this point?

 

I join all the other developers. That new financial model might not matter as of now for me or my team (or many others), but the concept is highly flawed. There is too much uncertain, unnecessary complexity that opens a lot of room for exploits and vulnerabilities. This assumes that users and Unity algorithms can be trusted; that users won't do mass leeching attacks (mass installing of applications), that pirated copies do not count, that these installation estimates are in fact correct and that even small exploits of the systems will be noticed and corrected. Is it realistic to cover it all? On top of that it is yet another thing that is needed to be collected and processed in black box of Unity. All this can lead to tons of issues and the trust of developers in Unity seems to be falling as of this announcement. Trust that is lost is hard to recover and if users are leaving, and the value of the Unity as a tool for all developers diminishes as well. I struggle to grasp why it was considered that it is a good idea to count runtime installations in specific and the hope to create reliable infrastructure around it.

I don't put my faith into this. My and my friends, team I talked with are all entirely against. I can understand that Unity might need to generate more income than it is now... but I think that there are way better options to generate revenue. Even Unreals 5% royalty (even if in some cases might turn out more expensive) is much more simple and therefore more reliable in the concept. Simple solution with much less points of failure, easier to maintain and minimizes requirement of trust. This plan should be undone, changed into something reasonable.

 

Staff were being harrassed at one point the other day so I don't blame them for steering clear.

 

Gamedevs instinctively worry about edge cases. They can think of dozens for every normal use case.

Clearly, whoever came up with this scheme did not think of the edge cases.

And that is what is so terrifying about dealing with megacorporations. Their design teams never think about the edge cases.

Then one day you find yourself on the edge, and poof, the product you paid for or relied upon is gone, sometimes at great detriment to your life.

And the megacorporation never even considered your edge case, and therefore has no corrective mechanism, and many times, no reporting mechanism to bring the edge case to their attention.

An old fart like me remembers the time when you could call and talk to a person, who could both rectify, and report the issue to their corporate bosses.

That time is long gone.

For example, a mass email that states, "please reach out to your account manager if you have any issues"

1. What if you no longer have an account manager?

2. What if, for some reason, the account manager is no longer receiving your emails?

 

I am really curious how will unity go to steam or MS or sony or whatever and tell them: "we have a contract with your devs to give us x money" .... how the hell? steam or MS did not sign contracts with Unity...
How can they do this?

 

You haven't done the math.