Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I want to pay to remove the splash screen but not for $2000. Why can't we have a more modular pricing model, similar to how services work? I don't need all of the features of Pro. Otherwise you are just turning away countless developers who want more features and are willing to pay, but cannot afford the $2000.

 

I don't pay the fees for now but what I'm concerned about is that if the company keeps making decisions like this, as it has, some of those decisions will end up hurting me. Can I take the risk and continue using Unity? It's painful to think that jumping ship to Unreal, Godot, Defold, etc maybe was the right thing to do.

 

(sauce)

 

In the end we will all vote with our dollars.

Currently I appreciate ALL answers and yep I believe that they are taking A LOT of heat right now. No matter what kind of suit they're wearing

 

No, suits are not stupid. They understand this and knew this would happen. But greed overpowers.
Don't ever think that they have no idea. They know. They just don't care.

 

The only thing I want to know is how do you keep track of installs? Does one self report or do you force tracking in my games? If it's the second option, I can't even begin to tell you how mind bogglingly terrible that is.

 

Is the tracking of installs GDPR compliant? I mean, who does the tracking work and is it part of personal data then to down track single persons?

 

Its been known about since Aug 22, 2023 as that was when this thread was started with the original post ( go look ) and yet not a single reply until today!

Meaning the thread was made 3 weeks ago, before the 1 Sept date on that sell order!

Edit:
Sorry I should have been more clear and said that it suggests this thread was created 3 weeks ago and hidden until today at which point it was made visible.

 

How will you be able to distinguish between new installs and reinstalls?

 

I'm sorry but who is the non-gamer non-developer moron that came up with this pricing plan? Being that you use total installs as a threshold, this is nothing but an after-the-fact way to force money out of those that made your engine popular. Sounds to me like you aren't doing well financially and most game devs should move on to other engines at this point.

 

Yes, my past dev life, all the effort and all the investment, time is going down the drain, but let's respect the poor fellow's feelings. Let's be super civil and be angry at something else, and wait for the Unity Invoice.
Be super calm, chill.

 

> Ok, so instead of showing you the math I am working on getting you a calculator so you can see the math for yourself. Please stand by!

Sarcasm is beyond inappropriate here. A "revenue share model" (which other game engines refer to as a royalty) would be easy to budget. There'd have been a S***storm, but I'd know what to do with it and my business could work around it.

This is an unpredictable nonsense of a fee, and @Mike-Geig doesn't seem inclined to answer any of the pressing questions. But you've got time to throw snark at your own users?

Talk about disrespect. And why should we want to work with a company that actively disrespects us, in every sense?

 

Great job, now you have a lot of developers asking for royalties based subscription instead of per-install cost. Congratulations (I expect this was your plan the whole time, as you already did it before).

But the image damage didn't worth it. Unity is no longer credible to build a business around. Stability and predictability in costs are crucial for every business.

Would you allow a business model in your server where Unity has to pay that server for every Unity install? no matter if someone pays for Unity or not? Would you be so exposed to your competitors to allow them to create a bot with billions of fake installs?

 

Meh, goodbye Unity, it's been a good run

 

But the system doesn't work. Or I'm simply not clever enough to get it.. @Mike-Geig What if a player does not consent to any tracking, no data will be send to Unity and what then?

 

No this is incorrect, you would only pay after $200k and after 200k installs, then only installs after that number assuming you're still making 200k per year on that particular game.

 

Anyone who comes up with this scheme and truly believes it wouldnt backfire is, in fact, stupid

 

Yes, many of us here are curious. How will Unity actually count these installs? The actual mechanics, as you call them.

 

- How do demos factor in? How about prologues? Are those going to push us over these threshold faster?
- Does gamepass or bundles count? Epic free game deals? These bundles and deals help folks survive game to game, but now you're taking a chunk out of that as well?
- How is piracy factored in? Our games are pirated vastly more than purchased - that would be hugely punishing to have to pay a fee for a pirate install.
- Per install fee is ripe for abuse, disgruntled people could write a script to install/reinstall just to cost a studio money.
- How do you track this? How can you respect user privacy tracking this? How do we know someone can't reverse engineer this to hurt a studio they don't like by faking installs?
- Gamers already hate any kind of tracking/phoning home, how can we convince them this is in good faith? We would need them to trust both us and YOU. This would now be a new business risk to us.
- Plenty of people (me included) will install a game, play it, uninstall it for a while, install it later to play again. That's going to add up.

It's tough enough being a small developer, this makes things even harder and more complicated for us. We're not making multi millions in profit, we're just trying to make games and survive through the next game. Unity definitely has it's strengths and weaknesses but honestly for us one of the biggest strengths (beside C# availability) vs competing engines was the straightforward payment model.

Will the install fee increase in 2025 or 2026? Will you later add actual revenue share in 2026? Will the thresholds change? It's very hard to plan a business with this kind of uncertainty.

If Unity's goal is to make it easier for us to make great games for players, this is a big step in the opposite direction. I'm really disappointed here - I like unity and I want it to be a slam dunk to choose for our next project. I don't think we can say that anymore with this new model.

 

I just spent 5 months and a ton of money on unity assets in the asset store on an ambitious solo project but am now thinking about rewriting it all in Unreal. What the hell are you guys thinking over there in Unity HQ? This is terrible.

 

Yes, but what about Steam Deck? What about multiple PCs? What about Family Share? GeForce Now?

Do you know why Steam Cloud feature is on pretty much every game? Because people have multiple machines to run the game nowadays. Can you tell me that I won't be double charged? or even triple charged?

 

I think he means an interactive tool to calculate the costs associated with a certain amount of installs, not a physical device.

 

Exactly this, the ones they are hurting are the ones that are half way up that ladder to being a full on game studio. "We want to empower game developers" my ass, only so far as to leech on the work you did with their software and hit you with what amounts to "junk fees" since you are not providing anything at all, per install, when we are the ones compiling the client and distributing them. Let's see how long this lasts with the current legislation that is going through senate.

 

I'm sure they think this will quiet down just like all the other stuff that came before that caused an outburst.

 

The Pro license doesn't offer us anything that we want and don't already have in the Plus license. So, it's not so much "retiring the Plus" license as it is a 400% price hike. Unfortunately, given the lack of direction and scattergun approach to new features, there's really nothing for us to justify that massive price hike. Moreover, the fact that this, combined with the per-user cash grab, is likely to drive away mobile developers in droves means that, in the long term, mobile platforms will inevitably become less of a priority for Unity because you will have driven away most of your mobile customers.

So, while the per-user charge is unlikely to affect us, the combination of that and the huge price increase makes Unity a very unappealing option going forward. I think we're probably going to renew Unity Plus through March 2025 and plan to fully migrate to something else by then.

 

Mike-Geig are offline games going to be per install too? How can that be tracked?
Is it only games that will be distributed throught services like google play or steam?

 

Over the past decade, I've paid for Pro, then moved to Plus as it was affordable but doing away with Plus is a horrible thing for Unity to do to smaller indie devs. How can you have the revenue model AND the software model?

You guys are really unfair to the users that have supported your company.

 

This is now a "suggest a new game development engine thread".

Jokes aside, this is the last straw for me as many are also saying here. I've been a Unity user and plus subscriber for years but this is it for me. Any good alternative engine recommendations? Been seeing "Godot" here but don't know much about it. I'm thinking Unreal Engine, how similar is it to Unity?

Looking for any engine that is at least as powerful as Unity (no strictly 2D) and the one the most "similar" or easiest to pick up as a unity user.

Thanks!

 

Yes how are you counting installs, self reported by devs? UGS? Tracking that a player has to accept?

 

@Mike-Geig what happens to devs that don't get profits from games they developed for a client? Also what about contracts that have already expired, who gets charged for that?

 

@Mike-Geig is revenue threashold calculated per project, per platform or per SKU?

 

I swear the post was hidden, I look at the forums daily and did not see it :/

 

As a long time Unity user, who uses it as a previs tool for my designs, this announcement screams the usual corporate-minded, tone deaf, just for profit attitude that I'm not surprised by. Alienating your user base who made this engine what it is TODAY, by making boneheaded choices is not a way to earn or keep trust.

 

RIP to all of my free webgl games that have been helping me keep buying food thanks to donations to continue making them. Now this is the only engine that gives me the risk of going bankrupt

 

About the treshold is described in the documentation.

We need clarity on the mechanics of counting installations. I have already realized that repeated installations are not taken into account.

But how are you going to protect companies from "install attacks"? What prevents me from finding out how the mechanism for calculating the unique device identifier works for you, and then launch a pipeline of installations on a whole farm of devices and thereby destroy some company, generating a million other fake installations?

We need a detailed and transparent description of the mechanics.

It is also unclear what you said that such a fee will be less than 5% compared to UE. I want to see an example for a typical f2p game that get in around $0.15 per install and at the same time has say 10 million installations per year.

 

Honestly not surprised anymore. Every since the company went public, it turned into a global market commodity. All eyes on squeezing out more revenue each year to appease to the shareholders (a legal obligation).

There's such a huge gap between the people working at Unity, wanting to make cool stuff, and the suits at the top shuffling spreadsheets and gawking over profit strategies.

Fast forward to next year: monthly subscription fee to access the editor. Why not tap the vein directly?

 

Suspecting this will get converted to a revenue share % as some folks are saying will be better deal. Will that be a win? and for who

 

Imagine having to pay to install your own game on your PC

 

And share it in PLAIN ENGLISH.

 

I've invested nine years into making a solo game on my own on this engine and now I might not even be able to get a freaking dollar optional donation for a free to play game when it's done because of this greedy nonsense. Utterly disgusting.

 

At this point I legit think it's not that bad at all (except for F2P games) but the concerns for Demo's and WebGL need to be addressed.

 

This is an absolute blow to indie devs like me. Unity plus is a near-perfect tier as I get all the functionality I want at a reasonable price (33/month). Now I'll have to pay 5 times that for a pro account, plus install fees, for no new (useful-to-me) functionality? Yeah no thanks.

 

Unreal can be learned quite fast (mastering it would be harder, of course), but at least you will have a predictable cost. Once the threshold has been reached you would pay a 5% of your gross income (not counting VAT or other taxes, which is nice), with Unity it will be a nasty surprise each month. Good look creating forecasts with that.