Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Yes, I do code. I am a senior software engineer and all of those potential circumventions are well known.
But do you know statistics?
Unity easily has data on confirmed legitimate players, as well as numbers on how those validated numbers compare to the raw numbers on a typical game. You can also detect things such as play time, inputs given, and many other metrics to determine if someone is actually playing a game or not. As well as the hashed IP of the network the device is on.

You would need a whole goddamn server farm that constantly switches IP space to effectively fool Unity's analytics (presuming it was built competently, which it should be since they make money off of determining legitimate ad views).
It's an easier job than providing DDOS protection, and many companies are capable of detecting DDOS attacks.

 

I am assuming you are making over a million.

 

Flippin accounts more like.. or someone with any clue on games dev

 

The one who builds the app will be billed so unless client assigns you a license from org they own, you will get the bill for this.

 

That would apply and any revenue scenario I think.

 

If you could just upgrade to pro when you hit the 200k threshold then why have that threshold at all? Just make everything 1 million. It literally only exists to trap devs who aren't paying attention?

 

I agree it's very strange how they presented this, it simply wasn't thought through on how this would look.

 

I guess we should just be less trusting of people, what a shame

 

What happens if you pass $200K in revenue and some angry player sets up a bot farm to do deliberately install/reinstall the app on a bunch of virtual phones until you go out of business?

 

Yes

 

It will kill the free to play games. And you are charging on every install but each install doesn't pay to developer

 

Or it may be made to force big sized studio to buy more Pro?

 

So if we release a free educational game that a grant paid for and lets pretend an entire school district installs it multiple times over on multiple Chromebooks that they wipe user profiles... given we never hit the $200K mark because it's a free game, but maybe we collected revenue via the grant... how in the hell is Unity ever going to really know what is and isn't being counted and how is Unity actually going to bill us? If we aren't going through any stores and dealing with IT professionals who are installing the software via their own tools and we block the Unity DRM request how is the runtime going to be counted? Will it just not work because it cannot phone home? What if this was for the federal government... and we're running on internal services that do not talk to the exterior internet... how are we going to manage those situations? Would love some clarity on how Unity is expecting the educational sector and the government sector to pay and/or price this out via funding mechanisms and contracts that for the most part are hard fixed. Do I sign my application with the customers publishing key so when Unity finally hunts them down they just randomly get a massive bill? LOL

 

But also, can it? Do sales not exist? Do deals to give the game for free for one day or something not happen? Subscription services?

But even then, how do I know they will again not retroactively change the rules on me?

And putting all that aside, Unity Pro is already poor value, they just made it more expensive for no benefit (I could give a flying F*** about Unity's AI bullshit), when it was already expensive.

 

And do not forget: do you pay for every install of an apk when you use the Android Studio? Or, do you pay for every single download of your AppStore app? Also, do you pay dot net fee for every single install of your windows app? No? That's because for those platforms the export module of their IDE comes within the package. We should not care what Unity calls their module, they can call it Unity Runtime, or any other thing, we should insist on emphasizing its nature: it is the export module of Unity Editor. We all pay for an IDE, and the definition of IDE needs the inclusion of an integrated export system. That system can not be charged. What they are doing right now is breaking the ethics and standards of software industry. And if this is allowed, many other things will change in industry. This is a stand point to defend our future against greed! So, don't try to normalize this!

 

Why big gamdev using UE ?

From UE

Long ago, UE have less materials, small community... but NOW isn't small and godot too...
but many people use Unity3D bc. habits, they know Unity3D...

Now UNITY3D again greedy o/

bc. cost per seat in BIG company its huge cost

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Unreal and Cryengine basically the only ones that used the royalty model? And they have been doing it for years I believe, and they could get away with it because they had a big AAA engine that no one else could match for graphics quality. And even today I think a royalty share for a software product is outdated and out of place - like literally who else does this in the industry? But at least Unreal made the terms better, they increased the threshold massively so basically 90+% of devs are unaffected. Unity made it noticeably worse, because not only you pay subscription you also pay royalty. And it's MONTHLY, not quarterly like Unreal or Crytek.

 

Then they start charging developers $0.20 each time they hit the Play button in the editor…

 

People already have the tech to spoof Unity installs: https://twitter.com/Alistair_McF/status/1701997285167489522
Unity can't do S*** to counter this.

 

This looks like to me a quick term solution to show an influx of higher tier licenses. It would make sense to right now jump the gun and lock in with a higher license to intentionally avoid this new pricing model if you can afford it. I'm guessing they are counting on that to some degree.

 

What happens is unity gets a big cheque from the fee you'll have to pay, and they laugh to the bank along with their shareholders while you go out business.

 

My guess is this is similar to the patreon question.

Is the patreon revenue for the game or revenue for the company?

Is the grant revenue for the game or the company?

Also there's no reason to believe blocking unity's analytics will prevent counting installs.

 

They've said many times they don't want to charge for this.

 

https://robinhood.com/stocks/U/

Unity stock is down over 5% today.

One would hope that this will spur a publicly-traded company into action.

If your users don't like it and neither do your shareholders, then what are we even doing here?

 

Additional "more concept"
Some game, not have new sales, but players back = new install,
Game what nobody buy, but sometime someone install and play = generate cost xDDD but game don't make moneyyyy <sadge>

 

More than a day has passed since the announcement of this news, but there is still no answer. This time was enough to give an adequate response to the concerned community.

I think the situation is obvious to everyone.

I believe that instead of hoping that the incompetent management of UT will come to their senses and correct their mistake, it's time to focus on minimizing damage and risks.

 

I think you answered it yourself. People playing free or cheap games are not playing for expensive, highly profitable games, that make unity developers more profitable so Unity can be more profitable. I think you nailed the motivation... it's logical. There might even have been a way to sell it based on that logic.

But that's not how they tried to sell it, and there's no coming back.

 

That was not what the post you replied to said.

And at that point, whats 60K?

 

The more I watch this go down and people's reactions and use case scenarios, this is.....

AN EPIC FAIL OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS!!!

 

As they said they won't change the TOS retroactively?

 

So well known that all the other companies much bigger than Unity can't reliably detect/guard against it themselves. Yeah sure. As other's have said, Unity should just license this tech instead if they want to increase their bottom line. And even if they do have this blackbox tech, I'm supposed to trust Unity to implement it fairly? How about I implement the detection and Unity gets to view my code instead of them getting to impose their own "proprietary" algorithm.

Edit: https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ackaging-updates.1482750/page-92#post-9306665
this crops up too while I was typing my reply. Yeah totally non-exploitable. Just trust Unity.

 

It's an expected system in the industry since most common distribution platforms (Mobile stores and Steam for instance) already take 30% royalty.

 

what were you even thinking, you were the best engine for mobile games and you went ahead and did this.
well that is going to change now. this greed would the worst thing you(unity company) could have done to yourself,
I am in the middle of a new hypercasual game which now have I pause production so i can decide if i want to change engine or not

 

There's no reason to believe this would prevent unity from counting installs. I believe they already said the tracking isn't needed to determine the number.

 

if unity does not change their statement regarding mobile free to play. or offer an alternative to that ridiculous install metric. it will be shame on unity time with people just posting this for weeks.

i mean its damaging already because its so stupid. why would you not take a revenue based model over this.

 

I know you think that all the forum users are stupid. Stop trolling.

 

and how can you predict what we make for each install? a hypercasual game, for most of its life time, could make very little profit marging for each install.

 

This new pricing model honestly seems fair. In fact, it doesn't go far enough. We should be charged $.10 per component, $0.05 per line of code, $.20 per game object in each scene.

Hell, even a dollar for each time we open the unity editor while we're at.

All prices not including VAT, tax and non-optional 200% tip.

 

You can be paranoid if you want, but this is similar to their Ads things. They get sued over charging people.

It's in unity's best interest to low ball.

 

If Unity want to do this they need to make it work for small margin mobile games as we've run the numbers and we'd have to pay them 50% of our pre-tax revenue, we chose not to paywall things in our apps and now we're being punished, Unity is forcing us to monetise our apps differently than what currently works for us. If we have to change how we monetise we'll be review bombed to oblivion.

 

Unity already gave a response to this from their legal team saying IT DOES apply retroactively:

See here from earlier on this forum:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ackaging-updates.1482750/page-45#post-9297488

 

DDOS attacks are detected and mitigated all the time. As for the trust that they will implement it fairly part, that's a legitimate criticism, but it's also true that revealing the detection code would make it easier to circumvent.

Regardless, saying you want to know how you'll be able to trust them is legit criticism.
Saying that they are lying and can't possibly know accurate install counts is not.

 

You don't need tracking if you plan to pull numbers out of your ass.

 

Unity will not be using direct telemetry to gather install numbers. Meaning you can still release a completely air-gapped game. No need for build scripts blocking Unity Analytics, just turn em off from the dashboard. Anything else would be a violation of like a thousand privacy laws.

As to how they DO actually calculate installs their answer thus far has been either "it's a secret" or "we're not sure yet". Some platforms like iOS will be pretty easy to estimate, but others (esp multiplats) will be impossible. Margin of error will vary greatly based on your distribution method. There is no other way they can get these numbers, I am begging someone to explain how it could be any different than this.

 

I posted earlier - curious - regarding federal projects and/or educational installations in which outside internet requests are limited and/or null and void... how is Unity going to manage this and/or will there be some sort of "offline" license for these use cases? We have massive projects that have been in proposal tunnels for the past couple of years all built around the concept of utilizing Unity as a core service. We have considered other engines but due to their affiliation with internal countries we cannot in due faith utilize them and we have been counting on Unity. These new licenses and pricing options no where explain use cases tied to secure environments and/or educational use cases. The revenue cap to me is built around your normal pay per customer download of a game... but this isn't how the federal government works and/or the educational sector. We could hit that threshold via the grant value but does that even count in this case? Just curious on who we need to speak with regarding educational/federal use cases in scenarios where online connectivity is heavily restricted and/or might not be even allowed.

 

Unity is not currently acting in its own best interest.

 

Just to add my voice to the feedback. A per-install fee will most likely make my current title be the last game I make with Unity. The only way I could see a per-install fee working is if they cap it at 5% of revenue (to make it a managable/budgetable risk), and if there was some guarentee or action that could convince us this won't happen again, like the CEO and other execs who allowed this idea to launch being replaced.

 

thats after open metric, in future games like hollow knight might have to pay for multiple endings too

 

True.

If a game takes 2 million downloads to make $200K (which is very realistic).... that's $.10 a download.

The moment you hit $200K, you'll then be charged $400,000 for your next million downloads.

If your revenue stays steady at $.10, you'll actually lose $200,000 for every million downloads after that.

And your revenue could go down, too. Meaning you go even more massively into debt to Unity in exchange for giving 5 years of your life to make a game with Unity.

You basically can't release a free game that makes $200K anymore.

 

You keep changing what they said, then say the changed thing isn't true. They are not confused.

They said makes, you said sells. Making $0.10 per install on hypercasual games is someone doing well... Until now.