Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Actually the bigger medium size studios will get the biggest hit, as require millions revenue just to pay salaries

 

Oh boy.
Godot's discord is on fire.

 

Further evidence for sure.

You cannot factor installs without revenue, as BOTH thresholds must be met, and met at the same time. Installs don't matter if there's no revenue.

I think people grossly overexagerate the difficulty of getting a rough number of installs. It's not that revolutionary.

If they can determine revenue they can determine installs to some reasonable degree.

I understand not trusting them to be competent, but even lack of competency in the past has just resulted in significant leinience.

 

Cause those terms can change on you at a moment's notice?

 

That's not a "debunk" in any way shape or form.
"Install per unique device" is orders of magnitude different than "Installs".

Implying otherwise is just outright wrong, and will make any valid criticism you might have be ignored.

 

It's the few super successful devs that are the cornerstone of what makes Unity viable, they inspire everyone else. If those who this does effect are wrongly cheated and their massively installed low margin per sale profit game means they lose more money than they made, why should anyone else try or even dream to make anything?

 

I think the weirdest part of this discussion to me that I repeatedly don't see people mentioning here is the fact that this change is RETROACTIVE. Just how far back are we talking? Unity 4? 3? further back than that? How many years of people are suddenly going to have bills on the doorstep? I don't care how "decent the pricing can be actually" in some circumstances, I don't care if it's only retroactively applied by a month from when it starts! It shouldn't be retroactively applied, period! You're asking a bunch of people to pay money to you who have already completed full projects that otherwise would have reconsidered and gone elsewhere, that's like getting a meal at a restaurant, eating it, and then the waiter announces the Squash Spaghetti you just ate had a price hike of 200 dollars and anyone who ordered it tonight would be paying! What are you supposed to do, vomit it back up? Would that even count? It's cartoonishly evil, even if it is theoretically manageable to pay, why the hell should games that have existed long before this decision suddenly be paying for things they didn't agree to when it was published?

Anyone defending that needs their head checked, that's some Mr. Krabs-type buffoonery.

 

Not sure how many folks read this, but I have screen cappd it and I just want to say.. "Thank you!"

Thank you for being brace, courageous and showing a backbone and passion for your product. I work in a massive enterprise as well at a leadership level and I can imagine what this means. I hope there are no reprocussions for you but be aware of IP trackiong etc.

Anyways jsut thank you for voicing your thoughts and sharing with us that this is much a mess behind the scenes as it is out front.

/Blessings

 

But then they lose out on the small whiny devs buying Asset Store items?

 

I'm honestly more curious if they (and other developers under the aegis of Chinese jusrisdiction) will take the solution of just ignoring the invoices and daring Unity to revoke their licenses, and reminding Unity that any money they (Unity) make in China is at the CCP's sole discretion.

 

They already track unique installs in their analytics. Go look at them if you don't believe me.

 

This sounds illegal

 

There is no reason to believe this at all, since the threshold doesn't apply to 90% of devs.

 

Who the F*** cares? This change is basically threatens developers and Unity states that it has every right to pull random statistics out of their ass and bill people based on it. Who cares what developer calculate what? F*** this, seriously.

 

I'm honestly concerned about the impact of this change on the employment prospects for those of us whose skillset is mostly in Unity.

After all, now that there is this extra ongoing cost that will need to be factored in when trying to develop games for profit - what reason is there for anyone to actively choose to use Unity for their future commercial projects?

Now, consider the effect this will have on the demand from employers for people who have experience with using Unity.

Why should anyone consider learning Unity?

 

correct me if i'm wrong but i think this will also affect game preservation

 

Unfortunately we cannot ask for this. But we can ask to not proceed with this self-suicide (for unity and for the developers)

 

The asset store appears to be a tiny sliver of their revenue compared to ads. They might be just as happy to shut down the asset store.

 

For the moment maybe. What happens when a couple years from now they retroactively change the terms yet again?

 

If that's the month in which your game goes viral, that amount could be huge then - more than the revenue you've made so far.

"Pro licence as insurance" - doesn't that sound crazy to you? This is stuff I don't want to spend my time and energy on... I'd rather concentrate on making my game.

 

Probably you're right, but we can try. Never lost the faith

 

You are wrong. This has no impact on games with no revenue.

 

He undestands, it's just a troll.

Currently supporting Unity's way of doing things is crazy and shows that those who continue to defend them have no idea of the money needed to run a successful studio that reaches 200k or 1M users. Their hatred for F2P games blinds them and they would like to see a buch of game developer go bankrupt

 

If they simply asked for a revenue split would you ask this? Probably not.

 

Bingo. Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted this. That's the only real point that matters. Unity is plagued with asinine complexity around every corner. The payment models are convoluted. The Unity versions are convoluted. The in-development features are so numerous that they rarely get completed. Top to bottom, Unity is a mess.

 

It applies to 100% of developers imo as a prospect. That is the issue.

Noone makes games to not sell well by default.

 

Do you even actually code? If you do, you would know that there's no way to verify that the number is accurate and free from error. And why would anyone believe Unity's numbers in the first place?

 

If you want to be mad you will be almost certainly ignored unless you can prove you are mad for a good reason.
Otherwise, nobody will take you seriously.

 

If they did it to already released games? Yes?

 

No I would say this is an incorrect assessment. 89 Pages in and people are still confused.

No money is lost at this point. At all.

 

Good idea.

 

Yep, try not to go bankrupt having a pretty successful game for android and webgl that is massively pirated and hacked.

 

All of my games on iOS are sold under the "Family Share" option, which means one family member buys the game and the rest of the family can download and play for free. This means that for my $1 game (of which I get 85 cents), I can potentially be charged $1.20 from Unity for distribution to 6 different devices in the household. No thanks!

 

Yes, I code. There is a thing called a Device ID which is uniquely assigned by your OS, as well as a hashed Mac Address and IP address. The Device ID alone is enough to provide an accurate estimate.

 

I pretty much called this. jumped this sinking ship 2 years ago to Unreal. All the malinvestments into overpriced companies and noting to show for. merger with a malware ad company. Lack of investment or substantial progress in the core engine. The writing was on the wall. The CEO is pushing for an Ad based business model. Dude is still living in 2008. Unreal is pretty much solidified as THE 3D engine I hope Godot can do that for mobile and 2D. Drop the GD script or whatever it is and stick to C#.

As far as i know apple, steam, Play store etc dont share user Id or any kind of data with a 3rd party. I could be wrong here since I've never developed mobile. In this case the game the dev and distributor would the the party bound by contract and thats where the data about installs etc would get shared. Unity is going to charge the distributor directly but like whats stopping distributor from ignoring unity's requests? I mean its the developers that have a relationship with the distributor not the game engine. There is simply no reliable way to track Number of unique installs on mobile. Probably the same goes for console. As far as pc goes you would need kernel level access to track unique installs. Even that is no guarantee. Most games would get insta reviewed bombed for having malware like tracking installed with their games.

So for tracking the numbers unity is basically asking their developers to "Trust me bro". From Jan 1 every single unity dev over the threshold could basically get a surprise bill in the mail like a negative lottery where you owe unity whatever they say you owe.

This literally creates a possibility where a developer could owe more to unity than they make. This is such a cluster fuk of a situation. The way i see it there only 3 possibilities.

1) The person who game up with this is an idiot (best case)

2) They failed to clarify or elaborate things (considering the radio silence in the middle of the work week, this is very unlikely)

3) Unity is financially desperate (considering they blew billion on bad acquisitions, Running out of IPO cash, Unity is still not profitable, lay offs, stock tanking from nearly 200$ to now 36$. This is most likely)

This might be the beginning of the end.

 

I can understand people complaining about retroactive.

But would you complain if it was revenue quarterly from now on after a threshold?

Cause thats basically the same thing.

 

Not to mention that NOT EVERYONE USES UNITY ANALYTICS...

 

check twitter big devs are ready to leave unity too

 

Apparently support for consoles is on the horizon/already feasible. I've been looking at Godot too, if I have to change I just want to go all the way open source where this can't happen instead of take the chance with some other corp account likely to do the same thing at some point since, let's be real, they're all friends at the top and are probably having a laugh about this at dinner together.

 

Yeah, last I checked twitter, this topic, every single outlet are full of notable and less notable devs stating that they're ditching Unity. Good luck with the ignorance.

Unity should not ignore angry devs. Not today. And I'm a very-very-very big Unity fanboy, just ask @AcidArrow how many times we argued about state of Unity and stuff. This is a monumental F*** up, even I can't and won't ignore.

 

And almost no one makes $200K off a single game in a year.

 

Game preservation isn't just vaporware, it's "versions of games that no longer exist", "DLC that can no longer be downloaded", so on and so forth. A game can make revenue and need pieces preserved, Mario 64 makes money all the time but they never release the versions that have speedrunning glitches like the backwards long jump in them anymore.

This decision has already had a catastrophic effect on game preservation, plenty of projects have been announced to be ported to other engines, or downscaled to release earlier, and I'm sure some have even been cancelled. The floor in the cutting room is covered right now, nobody can tell what color the tile is underneath.

It's not all about money, in fact, for many people that use Unity that would be affected the most, it usually isn't.

 

For me, it's not so much about the numbers. It's about:
1. Unity going back on their word when they said, in writing and officially in the TOS, that we would not be forced to adopt new TOS terms unless we upgraded.
2. Total lack of transparency in how installs will be counted.
3. Total lack of control of potential costs from installs.
4. An accumulation of other frustrations and mistrusts toward Unity that have formed over the years but have been unaddressed by Unity (incomplete features, bugs, calling us ******* idiots, the last TOS fiasco that resulted in the covenant referred to in #1, etc.)

 

That's not true in most UE where civil laws apply (not common law).
Also there is no reason to think people will go alone against Unity, there will of course be at least 1 or more class action.

The most important things are that there is no legal basis for changing the rules of games that have already been published for literally years and there is no legal basis for being able to decide the amount to pay based on a haphazard download count. They are simply two things that do not work on any level anywhere on earth.
If not, tomorrow I'll create a free game, have half the world download it, then force everyone who downloaded it to pay me €1 by changing the TOS even if they've already uninstalled it... also while I'm there I will contact anyone that I think downloaded the game, charge them too because I cannot know if you downloaded it or not but I'll charge you anyway because my "secret data" say you did download it.

 

You guys crazy? You money greedy dumb F***s? Pay per install? Seriously?

 

This seems to be the most reasonable explanation. They want to move away from game sector and diversify it (military, manufacturing, film/vfx)

 

This is just sad. Our game is one year in development and suddenly the conditions change. We can't change the engine at this point so we are forced to accept the new conditions. Such arrogant behaviour makes me really angry. But hey at least the CEO can buy a new yacht.

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/cult-o...s-to-delete-game-on-jan-1-amid-unity-backlash

This is terrible and it will have irrevocable consequences

 

You do when Unity will tell you that you do. It's their sole discretion. According to these changes.