Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Ah, yes, Unity have created next-gen tracking technology that doesn't actually need to track anything. A technology so new none of the industry veterans are aware of it. It just somehow works, just trust Unity, the most dependable company in the world that hasn't failed its user expectations for the past 5 years. That's the biggest cope I've read in the thread.

Should I listen to you or developers or Rust, Among Us and other giants?

 

Hyper casual games are doomed

 

I'm in exactly the same boat. Been mentoring kids on Unity for years. This basically kills the arguments for teaching with Unity. Sad and stupid.

 

Unity after I refuse to pay them more money

 

At first, I presumed that the large gacha developers might rise up in protest and plan to migrate away from Unity. I'm not so sure now.

If we assume that among all of the HoyoVerse games that they make billions of dollars annually, once you factor in that they are on an enterprise license and benefit from the massively reduced enterprise install price, the lifetime install fees for their games might be something along the lines of a few million dollars worldwide, and once the games sunset nobody is going to be installing them ever again.

Compare that to a 5% royalty from Unreal, on their billions of dollars. No, the biggest players will shrug it off like nothing.

 

Allow me to post the context...

This is the flow of the quotes

What are you talking about?

 

I've been a Unity Plus subscriber for many years, simply to remove the annoying and unprofessional Unity splash screen. Is Unity removing this from the free version going forward? I'm not paying $3000 per year just to remove the screen, I'll just move to another engine, that will be saving me money that I should have been saving already.

Also, just think of all the asset sales that Unity will be losing as all these people are now leaving. I have spent thousands over the years, no more for me, starting right now, till I see where this is going. Not to mention the Youtubers and tutorial makers.

My guess is Godot has just had a huge spike in users and support. And with that support will come huge advancements to Godot engine performance as Unity continues to flounder. Unity will be relegated to 3rd or 4th place in engine usage by this time next year.

 

LEAKED: Unitys method of tracking your game installs

 

I've been championing Unity for years at my advertising studio, and you guys just made me look like a goddamn fool. This makes it impossible for me to support Unity any longer. $0.20 per person in a crowd looking at a free WebGL experience - insane.

As it stands, I can no longer champion Unity as a potential engine for our clients. We'll be using Three.js or Unreal going forward, and will cancel our Pro subscriptions.

 

Let's run a little scenario to show how Unity will 100% pull these shenanigans in the future.

What happens when the 10% you're trying to fleece move to other game engines. Who do you go after to make up that income? You will change the TOS again to rope in the smaller developers, you'll have to.

Companies making that much income on single projects aren't known for just giving it away. They have employees too, and now being in business with you is a risk. They can't forecast whatever thickheaded trick you'll pull next that costs them millions of dollars.

This isn't an answer from an employee, it's an employee saying they are desperate to make income and will burn bridges to do it. This is a warning from inside.

 

Also hyper casual dev cannot jump ship to unreal, make hyper casual in unreal gonna be 2GB. I mean that some big a** hyper casual game for you.

 

You know what's 100% accurate to a business? Money coming in (revenue). You know what's not 100% accurate: unique install counts. Why in the world would I ever subject myself to uncertain costs. And no, I don't trust Unity to not lower the thresholds, and I am not going to hamper my idea feasibility because Unity killed my business model pulling levers to increase their own revenue. And my point was about detecting legit unique installs, not DDOS attacks.

 

If the project is free, it doesn't exceed the revenue threshold. You need to exceed both installs AND revenue thresholds per project for this fee to kick in. The fee is also applied to new users after the threshold.

 

Again people are seriously overexagerating how hard it would be to find installs if you can get revenue for a game.

And even beyond that there's plenty of ways to find out. It's not that revolutionary it's just some math and maybe data from various platforms to compare against.

 

i have been a pogrammer for 15 years, never seen anything this disapointing before, unity just destroyed all dev trust by doing this act of pure greed, (as if for each install they have to spend more money for runtimes), and this much.

 

i hope this crysis will refresh unity . ofc big companys allready will leave unity or think 3 times to use it. but users who remained will get all love and attention to their needs

 

so what? make free games? is that it?

 

ETA: Somehow clicked the wrong message....

This is the correct one I wanted to respond to:

Why would we be transparent, right? No need for that, right? Didn't they originate in Europe? Didn't they learn?

 

Don't worry, the trolls in the thread have worked with this tech before. They even developed it for Unity.

 

Where the F*** will they get revenue from unless people self report? Both installs and revenue are unknown quantities for Unity. They can only make a guess on both based from the data they have, if the data is bad or their guess is a complete miss, people will get bills for non-existant installs based on nonexistent revenue. Not all projects are equal.

 

What happens if they decide to change their definition of “free” in 2 years?

 

I have been a unity developer for 15 years.
I created an f2p mobile game studio which has 6 employees
I am a Unity teacher in 2 major schools and I have trained more than 600 students in Unity.

Today, I feel betrayed by this company to whom I have given a lot and of whom I have always spoken highly of them.

My team has been working on an f2p game for 2 years and we have to release it at Christmas.

Our business plan foresees 60M downloads for revenues of $1M which should cover our costs.
With the new prices, if we all upgrade to the Pro version, we will owe Unity $1.2M.
That's more than everything we're going to win!

Maybe the only way out of this is to block the game in all poor countries to reduce fees?

I put a lot of effort and money into this project...
And you're announcing this 3 months before the game's release!

How can you honestly destroy the professional lives of thousands of people who helped and supported you to make a little more money? You are already making more money each year (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/U/unity-software/gross-profit)

You must have thought carefully about your plan before posting your new prices.
You have therefore voluntarily chosen to destroy a large part of the creation of video games.

 

They've changed their licensing terms, telling people that it is retroactive when they've said before that we can use the same terms we've started with in the LTS version that we're using. This is wildly unprofessional behavior that would be difficult to force them to comply with their previous promises as many could not afford the legal costs that would incur.

It is not paranoid to be worried about this. They are proving to be an unreliable partner in a significantly important part of our businesses.

 

yes, but after that threshold most of the profit belongs to unity, and you are not counting all the huge dev cost of a game

 

You know something..

If they had just come out and said, here's the deal - we're introducing a rev-share model from this point forward, and here it is -

Past 200K - 2%
Past 500K - 3%
Past 1M - 4%

I would have had a lot more respect for them for being upfront, less confusing, and honest about this entire ordeal. I wouldn't have been excited about it, but I would have at least respected the decision. They're a for-profit company. I get the need to be profitable. Even if their new plan has been proven to take less from the developer than the above, I wouldn't be as upset.

Instead, they lied about all this being retroactive, confused everyone, and blew away any semblance of trust they had left from some massive names in the industry.

 

how do you think they will determine revenue?

 

That's the biggest problem. They can pull anything at any time and it'll apply retroactively to all games irrelevant of their status.

 

I'm sure that unity will come up with an algorithm that calculates how much they think your game is making based on installs and assume that is correct. If it's a free game then they'll assume your lying about it since per CEO developers that don't monetize are f***heads

 

So, another day passes by, reek of this momentous business decision is all over internet - even Forbes writes about it - Unity stock is down, Johny bought himself some new shiny stuff, after selling some Unity stock in advance of this solid and confident announcement - Johny, I want to be like you: always on the top!

@Mike-Geig are you officially confirm that only ONE, initial install of the title on the given hardware platform counts towards fee?

@Mike-Geig what's going on in general? Last time you were very chatty about boarding air-vehicle and being busy drinking latte at the airport - have you landed safely? We're worry about you mate.

 

This is just ridiculous, you're killing the audience that brings you the most money

 

If it's like before it will be lax

Revenue requirements aren't new for unity they've just been bad at enforcing it.

If you have a problem with this then you'd have a problem with any revenue royalties.

 

Unity is forcing me to change my business plans.
I'm going to go into selling hammers instead.
$10 per hammer, .05 cent every time the purchaser hits a nail with it. I'LL BE RICH!

 

My point is that they both require solving the same problem: Determining unique devices and separating out real users from bots.

 

Problem is, then, why not just use revenue? "Installs" just seems like a way to justify double/triple-dipping by charging multiple times per sale instead of just revenue per sale, and especially if they're not willing to share the methodology to justify whatever numbers they charge you on.

 

zero feedback from unitech and no locked thread?
hehe, they are afraid

 

I retroactively decided that you owe me 5K. Where can I send the invoice?

 

Unity pro, this is why unity's explanation was ASS.

 

They own the storefront and the platform in Apple's case, it's basically a monopoly. And that already has been under much scrutiny (see Epic's battle in court) and they lowered it too for smaller devs, at least Apple and Google have. Just because greedy Apple introduced it first, doesn't make it OK to tax devs even more. There's already country taxes, VATs, US tax withholding, platform fees, it's enough already now the shovel makers want a royalty too from a nonexistent gold rush.

 

Weird, the first 80 pages were just developer venting their frustrations. Now all of a sudden random accounts appearing and responding to every piece of criticism all of a sudden... seems very inorganic. I guess Unity is testing out their new AI trying to do some damage control.

If you vent a reasonable frustration and an inorganic response comes, its probably from this guy.

 

Man, you NAILED it!
I wonder if this is even legal.

 

I had Unity Ads running in my game. They barely gave me any money after thousands of people were playing my game consistently for months on end, and it got some good ratings. Barely anything at all, less than $100. And we're supposed to trust that Unity is just going to charge us the right amount? Because they're a big corporation?

 

Their costs + their desired profit

 

When the install count is the determinate factor in the fee calculation you're gonna need to do better than a math-based guesstimate. There are many situations where it is literally not possible to track installs, such as direct distribution. And others still where install count is not at all correlated with relevant revenue numbers, like if your game takes advantage of family sharing.

It's almost as if implementing an install fee is a terrible, impractical, unworkable idea.

 

Yes, and profit is likely to reduce over time as CPI increases as it becomes harder to get installs as more of the people who could potentially install it already have.

And an ad company that makes money from those installs, but are less likely to with this change: Unity.

 

Hi, this basically means that if you are making a free2play game without pay2win mechanics that earns 0,19$ per user and less, you will have to pay Unity MORE THAN YOU EARN.
- So, any free2play game needs to be pay2win, and you should be afraid to release ANY free2play game.
- So, thank you for killing any hopes that Engine Evolution will become a smaller studio.

 

We have Unity Pro and we exceed the threshold, we make about $0.04 per user and get millions of downloads so we will owe about $120,000 per month, sure a lot of people won't be affected but some of us will be and its devastating for us. 5% would be an amazing offer at this point.

 

DM me the invoice but I've played your WebGL demo an undetermined amount of times and you now own Unity 10k. Good luck.

 

What's unitys explanation of getting rid of Plus, forcing smaller developers to now pay $2000 a year?