Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

The teens I work with will have a hard time trusting Unity. I am going to recommend Godot and Unreal for them. It is sad. We have a very nice discord group that works with the kids. Luckily, we have a few developers helping us from other engines. What the kids are learning is that Unity is a last resort and not to be trusted. Those kids are very talented. Too bad.

So contaminating the future will change things. Loss of many young people.

 

yeap 99% calculations and spreadsheets linked are simply not accurate or based on incorrect inputs and hence getting apocalyptic numbers, ruining companies in 1st month they hit limits. This doesn’t mean I am not against this change, and would not fight to the end until they revert or moving away from Unity for good.

 

yeah but its still stupid. it enrages tons of people and you cant even calculate the costs. no one knows how they will calculate that number and you dont know about hacked or copied versions outside of the store or in emulators.
it makes game dev of free to play (which has become the biggest scene) risky. "downloads & installs" is just a really stupid metric

in viennese we ask if someone has S*** in your head. "hams denen ins hirn geschissen". and that is the real question. if someone has S*** in the heads of executives in their company. its a marketing disaster for them

 

that's not a problem unless you live in us or some other countries that use credit score to deal with stuff.
Most of the world do not use credit score.

 

..... I'm out. I don't care about the hundreds of assets I've spent money on or time dedicated to this engine. I've been on the fence about it for so long just from the networking side of things mostly. But there have been many factors that have turned me off over the years and I've watched as Unity grew and I do feel like I grew with it. But this kind of thing is something that really turns me off from game development companies and it's why I left Torque Game Engine after they kept financially sucking the well dry. Sad the day has come, but honestly, onwards and upwards. Not gonna leave hate, just thank you for the memories.

 

The biggest troll being OP, Unity's announcement for charging per install, a virtually untrackable, exploitable, ridiculous metric.

 

Livestream of that pls and not under 1080p.

 

As far as Unity personal is concerned, it could have went with a login based license that checks every month just to make sure you're up to date, such as working offline where you don't have WiFi. And when you connect to the Internet, that counter resets.

 

No, they ARE outright lying. It is not an assumption, it is a fact.

 

PR disaster for Unity, regardless of anything even if their intentions were good and how much they "clarified" it. Everyone just reads it like "you will now pay us for installs and you will be happy" and is like WTF?!?! You can blame it people being dumb and only reading headlines, but this is not how you introduce a change like this. Seems Unity is desperate because there's very little time frame to start enforcing this, and that too has us worried. What's going on with Unity financials? First the massive layoffs, price increases, now this...

 

I stopped watching Unite because it's mostly just a bunch of marketing buzzwords and other nonsense that don't have ANYTHING to do with game development

 

I have an even better idea, why not charge something like 0.01 cent per minute while users have the games open? Make this retroactive too.

 

How can you know unity will keep it this way... they are already trying to illegaly change the TOS retroactively for games made from Unity 1.0 to Unity 2023+
How can you be sure they will not overstimate the download count since they are using a secret method for download count?

 

if you do not believe in your own vision that is on you, no one will be mad for something that will never happen

 

How much is going to be budgeted for 'anomaly detection' when success means lower profits?

 

Agreed, i'm just making the point at how catastrophic this is. It's not anyones fault but Unitys.

 

yes if unreal came in and was like we decided we now want 10% from all the games you made back in the day people would also be like no. They are retro changing a price from something some of us all ready paid for.

 

You're looking at "sale price" and not revenue.

Think about the mobile market where the games are free but they have in app purchases. Imagine a scenario where whales spend some money, but the average install spends $0.

You measure revenue on value/revenue per install in these circumstances, which is an average of investment across your install base.

Let's say you make an average of $0.20 per install. As in, most users don't spend anything, but one in every 100 users spends $20 ($20 / 100 users = $0.20 per install average).

Let's say this trend continues for the lifespan of the game.

You will hit both the 1 million install thresholds and the $200,000 thresholds at the same time.

If this trend continues?

The instant you hit that threshold, EVERY FUTURE CENT YOU MAKE WILL BE OWED TO UNITY. You will then also have to pay platform fees (usually 30%), taxes, etc. before Unity takes it's cut.

With those platform fees and taxes, you will owe about 30 - 50% more than you're making from the game. Let's say 40%.

First, let's take off that same 40% from your initial $200k (even if Unity isn't taking it's cut, the platform and taxes are).

At the 3 month mark, you have $120,000 in gross profit sitting in your company bank.

Let's say at 6 months, the trend has continued and you've now hit 2 million downloads and $400,000.

Unity has taken all of the new $200,000 due to asking $0.20 per install beyond 1 million.

You now owe the taxation and platform fees on that $200,000, which is $80,000.

You now have ($120,000 - $80,000) = $40,000 in the bank, even though you earned $200,000 in revenue over 3 months.

If this continues for 3 more months, you are $40,000 in the hole and your company is bankrupt, because your game was a success.

Does this make sense now?

Yes, you could get Pro and change the thresholds, but this delays the problem, it does not eliminate it.

My math and numbers are rough, but the intent is to get the idea across, not give concrete sales figures.

 

Thank you for this post it is excelent, this is what i surmised from the data too. The initial graph was just so damn confusing cause it contained data that shouldn't matter.

 

First of all, this can't be legal, especially not in the EU.
Secondly this is insane.
Thirdly we will take our business elsewhere if this goes through the way it is structured.

 

I agree, they just need to give a DETAILED plan. It works out fine for a traditional $20+ software release, much more favorable than 5% royalty. And yes it's not unreasonable for Unity to want a bigger revenue stream especially if we all want them to keep up with Unreal

The issues with mobile monetization are unacceptable. To me it seems the entire purpose of this plan is in direct response to mobile revenue, but it's just a completely broken system for that, while working much better for desktop and console sales. Whoever pulled the trigger on this clearly confused plan has a lot of explaining to do

 

RIP Unity
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/562790985135030272/1151476335408054373/unitardcoffin.mp4

 

I've been using Unity almost every day for 14 years. Today I have downloaded Godot.

 

Again, do you code? Do you know how easy it would be for a troll to distribute a script that can spin up VMs to pass unique data when installing an app? Do you even game? There are absolutely toxic players that will go after a dev they don't like, and they are by no means rare, especially if you were to scale to the size where Unity's fees would start kicking in (and the thresholds will only get lower and the fees higher). Not to mention, scammers from anywhere in the world can now blackmail you into paying ransom or they threaten to install-bomb you. Who would protect you then? Unity? Why should you even have to in the first place when it's Unity that created this vector of attack in the first place.

Ofc I'm assuming they are outright lying about their ideas and claims, cause it's not technically feasible. Why would anyone want to deal with the hassle of dealing with Unity's accounting department every month an invoice comes and your estimates are way different than what Unity is reporting.

The point is, no one actually trying to run a business making games will consider Unity anymore. And the hobbyists/solo devs will be the ones squeezed last when everyone jumps ship.

 

This is a ridiculous argument.
Any serious competitor will be able to spoof your installs with ease and this is unpreventable by design.
Unity's claim that they have some "magical systems" that reliably prevent this are a nonsense.

You're clearly trolling.

 

yes maybe a $5 dollar game can hold the fee, but how about 1$ or less games on mobile? (And there are a lot of those)

 

Same here. We use both Unity and Unreal. Guess which way this pushes us.

My personal opinion is, Unity needs to just stop this dead in its tracks. They should just do what Epic does, but then undercut them a bit and make pro free while they are at it.

 

All this chat, still no reply from anyone at UNITY here! What gives..

 

Over $5 per install is going to mean that you will need a relatively high selling price on Steam. According to my Steam data people on avenge install our game on 3 different machines and Steam gets 30%. Also most of our sales come during periods when the game is heavily discounted. 50-75% off.

 

Decided to just lay my claim here saying I've been with you guys for like 7 years now but this decision you're making is ungodly stupid, greedy, and short-sighted. If the wave of backlash from every major Unity development studio wasn't enough to see it, this decision WILL BE the one that kills your userbase. I had never taken it that seriously before, but last night I actually bothered to look into Godot as my new primary development engine, and if you asked me that last week if I'd be switching primary development engines anytime soon I'd give you a resounding 'no'.

Did you even think how this is decision going to tank smaller studios? You didn't, did you?

 

Ikr lmao. Devs are supposed to trust Unity to reduce their own revenue by detecting anomalies, when the whole point of the "runtime fee" was to raise revenue as they admitted already

 

People would be angered by it, but it'd be better than this.
It's a cost that can be accurately and simply measured. It's 10% of your revenue.

What this is, is a highly exploitable nebulous system where you as a developer will be charged for a metric that you have zero control over.

Even if we pretend that piracy and install bombing won't happen, you'll still be charged if you take your game off sale because existing customers will still be installing on new hardware. (Does a freshly formatted drive count as new? Does a new IP address count as new?)

More over, going free to play won't help either it will only make things a hundred times worse since it's $200k in the previous 12 months, so now you're making no money AND being charged for access to your free game.

There isn't a single business case where this isn't a massive risk to developers, many of whom are already working with small margins or basement devs that don't have any capital beyond their hopes and dreams.

There should NEVER be a situation where Unity is able to charge the developer more than the profit they made from their project in any time period. People will go in debt over this, guaranteed.

 

Is it confirmed that the only way to have a custom splash screen now is by buying the 2k$+ per year pro plan?

 

If I were a shareholder, I'd actually be pretty furious to see leadership dumping their stock before trotting out a poorly conceived pricing plan like this one.

 

It seems Unity is busy with paying some people to reply to this thread to add the water more mud. Who in the world can normalize these conditions? People who do not develop games, right?

 

I said before, I'm leaving Unity no matter what. But now trolls are in the forums so this will be my last post here to. Please consider this:

There is a reason they are decoupling the charge for using Unity from the revenue you make. THINK ABOUT WHY. If they wanted a fair percentage they would have just made a rev share like Unreal.

IMO: This new plan is intended to force you to squeeze as much monetization per user as possible. After all if the cost of using unity is now determined PER INSTALL, your plans for monetization will now need to change to fit this system. THEY WANT TO CONTROL HOW YOU SELL YOUR GAMES.

This is from the same CEO that said we "are F***ing morons" for not monetizing efficiently enough. The same CEO that wanted to charge Battlefield players for more ammo when their clip is empty. It seems pretty obvious to me.

For paid game developer, think about your game hitting the threshold and for a celebration you want to make it free for a week... You literally couldn't without burning a pile of money.

Anyways it far more control than I'm willing to give up. And you might not agree with my theory but TLDR answer this question:

WHY DID THEY DECOUPLE COST OF USE FROM REVENUE EARNED?

 

Unity also explicitly says that the final bill for the amount owed is decided solely by Unity. So, you're banking entirely on the fact that an already proven greedy and poorly managed company with poorly presented and written policies is going to ignore all the pirates, spammers, scammers, repeat installs etc (that you cant see btw, only unity) and not bill you those extra dollars.

Nope, rent is due. That'll be $10,000 plus tip.

So without further ado sir....

 

Unity Want To Be Ninja!

 

If you have a million installs and 200K sales per year that Unity pro would nullify the problem unless you started making a million dollars per year.

It is either $200k and 200k or $1Mill and 1Mill. It is not a mix of the two.

Now how much impact that has depends on how and when they apply that hreshold.

 

This is been making the Discord rounds. Might be handy here.

So You're Moving To Unreal (impromptugames.com)

 

Does FAQs have this question?
What if unity hunger is not fulfilled with per install metric will they switch to game per open based?

 

I do whatever I want using Unity actually, even photorealistic that break the neck like Ennemies visuals or Spaceship demo, or stylized, I am a VFX/Tech so yes, but I personnally prefer Pixar stylized look atm, note using HDRP it is easy create the DA you deserve. And I don't know why you talk about lighting this demo had a terrible look, or I don't know what looking good is.

 

But you're not making a million in revenue.

 

Welcome to unity controversies. My last one was when they replaced the job forum with the S*** social media platform that was Unity Connect.
Like that one, I expect this one will hurt my freelancing career.

 

Does this chart take platform fees and rough taxes into account? Because that's when the royalties from Unity ACTUALLY start looking monstrous, after you realize you're losing 40%-ish off the top of that first $1 million (before Unity starts taking a cut) and 40%-ish off all future revenue post-threshold before Unity takes a cut as well.

 

Share price:

Maybe they can recoup the lost money from runtime fees....well that worked out well, lol, absolutely no extra profit made.

So if we do follow through with our threats to leave etc will someone at Unity will have to leave?