Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

but if he paid 20k for the pro license, he'd only be paying 20k in install fees, thats not 200k some 160k short in my maths

 

Please do the math because you are completely wrong.

 

Ask yourself "what would EA do?"
You can complain all you want but at the end of the day, the common denominator in all of this is John Riccitiello, the CEO. He's the one calling the shots and as long as he's in charge and isn't held accountable, this pattern of behavior will continue, the same way it has for years now. Unity wasn't like this before he took over.

 

Maybe I am going too nuclear. Gonna sign off for a bit. Sorry if I offended anyone.

 

Because Johny is still explaining the scheme to them:

 

• Unity Personal will include the Unity Asset Manager free tier (10GB storage total), a maximum of 3 Unity DevOps seats featuring 5GB of storage and 200 Windows build minutes, and Team Administration base roles.

Oh F*ck off already Unity, really?! 200 build minutes what is this crap about?

 

Really, this. There has not even been any kind of basic damage control since their second-shift moderator gave it up last night as a bad job because they were just making things worse and didn't have answers.

The lack of any sort of coherent response to this is telling.

 

Ultimately, the red flag for me is this statement:

"All determinations, calculations of installs, and revenue related to the Unity Runtime Fee will be made by Unity in its sole discretion."

This is fantasy-land, tin pot stuff. Contrast this to the equivalent in Unreal's actual Royalty addendum :

"Within 45 days after the end of each calendar quarter in which you earn Royalty Revenue, you must report the Royalty Revenue to Epic on a per Product basis and pay Epic 5% of the Royalty Revenue."

One of these is more partnerial than the other. And I think this is why - after pausing the upgrade of my Mac this morning in order to install the Unreal engine I downloaded overnight - I'm going to get back on with doing so.

Arrogant, small fry and, I think, ultimately destructive. It indicates a profound and comprehensive lack of understanding of the business models of the customers that are the lifeblood of the organisation, and a casual disregard for the mechanisms that would be required in order to deploy such an approach in any kind of robust way.

It's as close as Ive seen to a commercial model being written on a paper napkin and then sent out in a press release. Dumbfounding, and Im sure there are many who will be having sleepless nights.

 

steam is not a distributor. this is a distributor https://www.devolverdigital.com/

 

They all left , they could not afford the friggin runtime fees

 

And for those reasons, I'm out.

 

well, we submitted a support request to get some clarity as we are at the point of decision in a project and from that response the current word from Unity is exactly what we already have here.

In short, this is a horrible model that will be a problem for F2P devs among others but F2P is us .. so unfortunately that is us no longer developing games on Unity as of now.

I do hope Unity walks this back or converts it to a % rev share model because as it is this will hurt a lot more devs than what many are thinking ... its not hard to hit the rev limits or install numbers shown and those limits for a small team are still just barely getting by.

In short, the margins for a small-time game dev are tight and this is just to high a burden.

Even if Unity does role this back we still won't be switching back, the fact this change has come to pass, like this, under these short notice times and with these retroactive features ... ya Unity is a liability as a partner one we aren't big enough to afford.

 

Yeah, I've heard different things from different people from Unity in different places (even different in this thread! The original post of this thread is where Unity is directing everyone so I'm considering it the official and most up to date information. It's absolutely wild to me they haven't updated it yet though if any of that other stuff is true. Tells me they don't even know internally what they are doing.

 

Yes. It is a fraction IF the installs are measured correctly (actuallythey need to be purchases, not installs). BUT even so, for mobile games it has a lot of gray areas.
And I'm sure we all understand thay Unity needs to make money, but a simple plan (royalty or whatever) that will give Unity more money without a weird unpredictable taxation model will be great!

 

Look agree it's rampant incompetence on this whole thing. But everything said since makes it clear what the intent is.

 

I'll look into updating it this weekend. I had a lot of personal trouble recently. Meanwhile anyone is free to submit patches/pull requests.

Just keep in mind this is limited and not a sliver bullet. It is also targeting birp.

 

You thought they would ?

 

Just got off the Unity Discord. Reinstalls are still a thing as of the time of writing. Unity get serious! You WILL bankrupt as a company if you don't take this seriously.

 

probably this thing here https://unity.com/solutions/ci-cd

 

Again people focusing on installs an not revenue, 86 pages in and people are still confused.

 

My guess is that they don't know what to say.
Now they are probably in panic mode and considering the options they have. We will probably hear something in a few days. What it will be? Who knows?!

 

I have been learning Unity for 10 years, and was finally getting to the point where I felt I could build something worth polishing and selling. I'm going to look into Unreal now, because this is a ridiculous pricing policy.

 

This is utterly unacceptable, everyone involved in this decisions must be demoted immediately. You can't spring this on us after we ve already been paying customers, and you have NO right to track out installs. And paying for installs is painfully stupid anyways, it's needlessly over-complicated and unfair against cheaper games.

 

Please stop LYING to us devs. Unity has no way of differentiating aninstall from Steam, Itch.IO, HumbleBundle charity, or a pirated copy. NO WAY OF KNOWING.

Your "runtime fee" is an unsustainable revenue model, and probably illegal in most of the free world (Unity is modifying a pre-existing contract after the fact). You are punishing us devs.

• As a dev, we will no longer use Unity moving forward.
• As a publisher, devs with a Unity-based game will be dropped
• As a governmental commerce ministry or department, Unity will be investigated and likely fined for it's illegal practices resulting from implementing this "fee"
• Big publishers will be the first to sue Unity. You'll probably settle with them.
• Smaller publishers will be forced to sue Unity. That will drag on - and Unity will ultimately lose these cases. You can't retroactively change a contract.
• Rescinding this poorly thought out plan will only be the start. Unity needs to make real amends, because...
• This is not the first time John Riccitiello has decided to take a steaming dump on developers. His first time was because we aren't monetizing well enough. This time, he's raping us and stealing our wallets, punishing us because we aren't doing the same to our users.

Sorry, that last item was my emotions. That's what you'll need to overcome. The more this hits, the more BS Unity spews in its "FAQs", the more difficult it will be to come back. Burned once... shame on you. Burn me twice... shame on me.

I see no progress from Unity on this. Look around. The whole company is on fire, falling to ash around you. In the past 24 hours, I bet you have lost at least half of your customers. The other half just haven't heard the news yet.

 

How could they when there's still a page per minute.

At this point any responses would be burried, hopefully they have a new blog posts or video or something to explain things.

 

https://www.change.org/p/return-united-remove-runtime-and-installation-fees-from-unity-engine

 

did you stopped a moment and think that maybe you got this wrong? because is "installs" that is one of the main issues here

 

People defending Unity can't fathom a mid-size studio that has to pay for seats in addition to overhead that now have to deal with this S***ty install tax. Either you make $70 AAA games or make zero-negligible monetization games only.

 

And you have to be online and it stops working after 3 days... this is stupid, especially since I travel sometimes and don't have an active connection. I will also keep my dev computer offline to protect my hardware.

 

Also, that game has years of development, while the heretic demo does not... lets not mix the devs with the suits. The suits are responsible for the featureless and aged unity has become

 

I have no idea what build minutes are, this is mental!

 

I'm not active on the forums, so this will likely be my last message on this topic. I've been using Unity since around 2006, although I'm not sure how old this account is. I'm currently on vacation and decided to log in just to state that this decision has resulted in me reevaluating my options and that I will now focus future development efforts elsewhere.

I have spent hundreds of dollars in the Unity ecosystem, whether through Humble Bundle or individual purchases on the asset store. I never felt pressured to buy anything and actively pushed my peers towards Unity and the benefit provided by the asset store. However, I am suddenly left with a sour taste in my mouth. Even if you roll back this decision, I refuse to ship a game that requires always-online DRM.

My account will remain active as I finish current projects, and I thank you for the years you've given me to work on personal and professional projects alike. But it seems it's finally time for me to move on.

For transparency, I will state that I have three or four accounts, but I will only post once on this topic so as not to muddy the waters.

Cheers.

 

This can backfire, if nobody signs it then the Unity management can say look at this, only 20 signatures, it's a loud minority we can ignore. if we are going to pass around a petition, regardless of if it can help or not, everyone needs to sign it.

 

If you do not like my stories, oh well. I left my job as a lead writer for a UK company. Their game eventually failed, long before Unity was possible. I planned to make the game. I spent two years learning Unity with a baby in my lap. I learned so much, and met so many great people. I went to Austin with my team. I met some devs there. We loved every moment. My kids learned before they even started college. They made a game, showed it off at a convention.

I am not leaving Unity. We have too much done, too many worlds to make. I am not worried about our studio.

 

It will be a statement well vetted by their legal team.

Lots of "unfortunately"'s, "miscommunication"s, "still remains dedicated"s, and of course at least two "robust"s at key moments in the statement.

But I am sure their lawyers have demanded radio silence of the employees.

 

Nope. I do all of my builds offline... it feels intrusive as hell

 

They'd be torn to tiny pieces.

 

I would not be at all surprised if some schmuck put “installs” in the initial release intending it to mean installs that can be easily validated from store front stats, and Unity have since been required to talk about magic dust validating non pirate installs in order to save that persons face.

 

Honestly this level of blatant greed on display from Unity is actually impressive

I mean that in the most genuine sense, it's full-blown just impressive.

And I work in the crypto industry. Seriously, I've seen greed and retardation at monumental levels. This is a whole new level that honestly I don't think I've even witnessed at peak NFT mania times.

Someone who pulls in $200k on an f2p title over 4-5mil downloads (i.e: not aggressively monetized) will actually lose money per install, as their ARPU would be well under 20c.

They'll need to either deny entry to low revenue nations ("sry bros, can't have the poors playing"), or flat stop allowing for new installs/switch to a pay-up-front model.

Truly impressive stuff. Imagine if the drive for blind greed instead went into something like Project Tiny or their WebGL engine.

 

This isn't a discussion. This is a decision made by Unity to appease shareholders by finding more facets to squeeze profits from. We were never a factor in this decision. I fail to see the purpose of this thread except to trick people into thinking this is a discussion.

If Unity were serious about its longevity, its entire model would be simply "if you make over 100k, you owe us 10%, aside from that, enjoy Unity for free" and that would be the end of it.

Many of us were willing to pay money for Unity Pro back in the day; back when perpetual licenses were a thing. Then you took those away and did not honor them going forward (effectively, nullifying/stealing my $1,500 I spent on a perpetual license). Then Unity moved to a subscription model that most of us refused to partake in. And apparently your takeaway from this was "we're just not being oppressive enough, we need to ratchet it up."

The ineptitude is unbelievable. At least it would be if I thought it was ineptitude and not malice.

 

I'm not oblivious to that point. At the moment, I can't afford to pay for Unity Pro.

If my game goes viral overnight, and I get enough revenue to buy Unity Pro, will it reduce the costs after I've gone over the Personal thresholds? I sure hope so.

 

there is also Unigine which is also c#

 

It looked like they were saying monthly rate of $.20 per download (attached).

I guess it's actually $.20 per download per user, and not per month per user? I guess they're just saying that they bill monthly, but not that they charge for the active users monthly? Odd that they included the phrase 'Standard Monthly Rate' for this metric.

And I said $20K to account for someone paying the max amount, like multiple enterprise licenses for a game, to give Unity the benefit of the doubt in the equation.

If it's 200,000 download AND $200K combined, and only THEN they charge $.20 per download total and not monthly, then I can find a way to make this work. Still not ideal. And when you factor in the price cut from the online store, it's really stretching some developers thin.

Unity needs to offer multiple plans - this does not work for every situation in the slightest.

 

I miss you Ony! Thank you.

 

So anyone can bankrupt any other game dev by repeatedly installing and uninstalling their game. And you really don't see a problem with this Unity?

This is beyond poorly thought out jesus christ.

 

If the developers making statements of Twitter or whatnot want there to be any chance of any sort of change happening, they need to post real, detailed, accurate, and comprehensive numbers indicating what their costs would be before the change and what their costs would be after the change.

As of right now, I have seen practically nobody doing this. Almost every napkin calculation people have done in protest of the issue has been inaccurate. If you want your criticism to be heard, show the actual numbers to back it up.

 

They have repeatedly said that this is not the case.

 

I think your confused yes this will be fine a lone hobbits that makes no money but a small studio of ten people of wages of 100k a year will have to be over this number. To the small hobbiest side if studios stop using sales will stop in asset store and hobbist wont be given new tools to use at a cheap price.

 

All of that marketing corporate bs... this has tainted the waters of game development for too long.

 

we have been mocked by unreal users and developers for years.
turn out they where right.
stay trashy unity, gona develop my last game and jump ship.