Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

1. Except there's already scripts going around to show that you can spoof the metadata
2. It would never be 100% accurate
3. It's not like Unity would let you audit their numbers
4. The entire history of software development shows that all software is explotiable, it's just a cat and mouse game

 

You guys don't get it, Unity has wanted to embody the expression 'victim of its own success'

 

Following the trend...

 

That is sad, I am sorry. Reward we get from teaching is so great and Unity was perfect for this group of people.

 

ye bots joined forum in 2008-2018 and waited for this day

 

Plus was likely the most popular tier at scale so they decided that eliminating it is more profitable even if a significant amount of subscribers won't migrate to Pro.

 

Soon some angry customers gonna hammer some nails on your cuffon *JOKING* as thats what happn to unity too

 

Unity said they don't have exact numbers, but aggregate. They can't tell much of the details of who is downloading and why. This makes it difficult for them to know exactly how much to charge you.

 

If they want to switch to revenue share model, then quit with the subscriptions. Offer more value too - make SpeedTree free. Give away more assets. One or the other, not BOTH. But they just want to charge you for everything AND tax your revenue. Because to get lower revenue taxes or avoid them entirely, you basically HAVE to subscribe to Pro otherwise you'll be losing money most likely in some scenarios.

 

Secret method means rough guestimation in my mind, without any legal base. I cant even imagine how will justify that.

 

How will they detect paid game revenue? for ads & iap they could use unity analytics

 

No, you're not. But not outright accusing them of lying and fraud is completely different from "trusting" them.

 

This update will ruin my life.

 

Capping the fee at 5% revenue actually seems like a great idea.

 

They're bleeding cash, and giving away the product isn't helping. They gotta make money somehow, they just aren't very good at figuring out how.

 

I always liked Unity's profit share licensing because it left me free to monetize my game how I saw fit: offering it for free, offering it at deep discounts, etc, without worrying about getting billed for this usage.

I understand that it's unlikely I'd ever exceed the $200k per year threshold to activate the per-install fee, but even the remote chance that something I make is a surprise hit, it makes $200k, and suddenly I lose control over how I price and distribute my work? I'm disgusted.

I would never have agreed to these terms and to have them forced upon me after the fact is such a grave violation of trust that I am done with Unity. I will not be releasing any further projects using the Unity engine, and I am actively converting in-development work to another engine, at great personal cost. My heart goes out to those with a lot more money sunk into this ecosystem.

Even if this change is walked back or reversed, the damage to my trust cannot be. It's actual open source for me from now on.

 

let him answer he is an expert and the only one that figured all this out and we don't understand anything

 

I don't have a problem with other methods of collecting royalties.

I don't like separating the revenue owed Unity from the revenue made per game. It forces developers to charge users for every download after a threshold. That's going to change many studios model forcibly.

 

View attachment 1303589

seems like they want 12%

 

If they're not to be trusted, what would be the reason? Besides lying and fraud?

 

Sorry bro, your calculation for your real game that earns money and is threatened by this change doesn't exist in this thread according to the trolls.

 

Then what point are you trying to make here? You're going up and down on this thread, swearing that this cannot be easily exploited, even in the face of no guarantees or transparency of how this data is collected. Is your only issue that people are saying that they're lying?

 

I've seen a lot of companies and CEOs shoot themselves in the foot. But Unity clearly surpasses it. Maybe this is all a dark Unity strategy that is far beyond our little vision. Who knows... The real thing is that I've already installed Unreal, and it seems we'll be together a long time.

 

The only way to fix this mess is simple enough

1) Switch to a % rev share ... see point 5 in the quoted message ... that is completely unacceptable at all in any shape form or passion. Full stop its unacceptable that the % of my revenue that Unity gets to claim as royalty is flexible ... no you fix it at 5% nothing else will be tolerated.

2) The failure of communication and the way this has all been done ... added to the fact this is not the first time unity has overnight literally nuked the way business is done, the way plans work not in some small way a huge literally life-altering change at the drop of a hat with "trust me bro" being far to prevalent.

The only way to fix this is an iron-clad binding agreement that you cannot change the terms and conditions for existing anything. Pulling the rug out from under devs that are squeezing by with tight margins and destroying what little success they found ... you must have been collectively stoned to think it was even vaguely appropriate to put this out there at all much less the hamfisted way you did.

I can not see any path for Unity fixing the relationship to the point we would be willing to build a game on Unity again which is such as damn shame 10+ years done overnight but the loss of faith is complete here. If you don't change your mind drastically your current course would render our projects dead in the water. And you have proven you will do this BS at the drop of a hat without considering all the implications so no ... just no

You can just drop a blog post completely and change everything and then start flip-flopping and expect anything other than a mass exodus.

Frankly I look forward to the day Unity is acquired by just about anyone ... the tech is great, and the devs that build it greatly... the management and the company its self dead stick frankly. Heathen will still be here supporting its community but as a Unity Game Dev ... we are done

 

It says monthly because they need to calculate your revenue in the last 12 months. Every month your revenue goes down, and if you hit your 1M cap again counting this month you start paying for installs again.

And if people here cant be bothered to read the freaking announcement IMHO they dont get to complain.

Yes, Installs is dumb and probably not feasible outside tracking from the game stores themselves (which would be trivial and make this a non-issue for 90% of people here). But we wont get anywhere if people dont stop freaking out and at least read the freaking words like an actual adult dealing with a contract.

 

Good point.

I noticed that, too. It sounds like a user who is breathlessly assuring us that a system which isn't easily verifiable should be fine for us all to use.

And he keeps going on and on about it.

Like, what would motivate you to keep pushing the issue that a system which is hard to track is actually a completely acceptable solution for many small businesses to count on?

 

One interesting thing came to my mind:

If a user unticks all the consent check boxes on an admod GDPR consent screen, google silently stops showing ads to that user.
This is because GDPR is preventing the ability to detect fake clicks and this is impossible to fix, even for google and their massive ad business.

For that same reason unity will never be able to reliably detect fake installs, no matter what they claim.

 

They're not lying, they will probably do something super reasonable, like ask ChatGPT 3.5 "how many installs do you think game X has this month?"

 

I read it. You can see that my interpretation of it was what was the issue. I think it's okay if I voiced my opinion and then followed up with more comments to verify.

 

Its what I said about inorganic, suspicious posts. I can't see any reason for a poster to reply to every single critical post with these type of messages unless they're a blatant unity shill trying to do damage control.

 

Unity adds fee for installs for successful small devs, triggering a backlash

https://venturebeat.com/games/unity...-successful-developers-triggering-a-backlash/

 

Asset sales are going well. Those who earn 100 thousand go to the pro version. Last year, someone sent me an e-mail about a game of mine, and I did not share it with anyone. The e-mail said, "Keep working like this." After this incident, I'm sure it came from someone within Unity.

 

We've had a lot of issues with getting applications to run without issues via school networks. We've gone through stores to help reduce these issues but in a lot of cases the schools are restricting A LOT of the network calls. We are swapping over to a web distributed option where we self host a WebGL unity build and then whitelist that service. I know other people are talking about the WebGL side of this - going to read more into that as well because curious to see how they treat that vs an installation. Anyways thanks for the reply as these are questions I've heard internally within our administration.

Ya this is always been a weird area of research funding that uses a product like Unity as a sort of packaged solution. In most cases Federal we are probably going to run into issues because they are basically "buying it" from us so it's something we will just have to get outlined in the contract on delivery and let it be their sort of issue. In some of the local stuff we do I think we will be fine and I'm not actually concerned regarding those efforts.

 

"It's not that bad" says people who don't know the difference between gross and net.

 

Oh, I agree completely. I think even before this announcement devs were getting ripped off across the board for their hard work. I just meant that that's why royalties were used, because it fit in with existing monetization systems with the rest of the industry; not that they're good, positive, or something we should strive for. The platform royalties in particular are obscene and ridiculous.

 

They should change their name to:

Unity - Trust Me Bro
...and
Unity - Trust Me Pro

 

They earned like 1.5 billion dollars last year and had some 7.7k employees. So why isn't they able to turn a profit?

 

Don't worry bro, Unity has got the magical never before seen solution for you.

 

Incompetent leadership that are simultaneously fleecing the company.

 

Yes, because it muddies the waters and hides legitimate criticism with hyperbolic fearmongering.
The only thing hyperbolic fearmongering does is give Unity a reason to ignore any actual criticism as simply being "misinformed".

Criticism deserves criticism too. Inaccurate, imprecise, hyperbolic, or misinformed criticism can actually be less likely to lead to positive changes than if it were accurate.

 

One angry users said in youtube comment that "They should be paying devs every time they open unity" well said

 

Unity earned billions, so obviously they have no money and they need to gouge more from us.

If we are making over 200k or 1million we obviously have a lot of spare money to give to Unity on top of the subs we already pay them, retroactively.

These two things make sense somehow.

 

You seem to miss an important point here: There are scenarios where the games do make money over the threshold, but the number of free users is so high that the runtime fee will chew the revenue up completely (if not get you into bankruptcy zone). And you have no control over it. Let alone any additional costs you have to develop your game. This is why people are freaking out.

 

Buying overpriced companies from your CEO buddies?

 

How are they going to count it then? Telepathy?

Come on, I'm seriously curious. If you air-gap your game or run it on a locked network (of which there are loads), exactly how could Unity ever know about that install?

 

And raise the cap the higher up the threshold ladder you go. That way you extract more from the mega-hits (who won't be as upset with a higher take) and you won't bankrupt the mid-tier devs.

Look I get it, you need to make money. Here's a plan: First, stop buying useless bullshit subsidiaries. Boom billions saved. Second, replace the free plan with like a $10/mo plan. No more freeloaders, reasonable enough to where most semi-serious devs will happily pay. Boom more revenue. Or just scrap the subscription plans and increase the rev share to offset. S***ty, yes, but at least it's comprehensible.

But that's not what JR wants at all. A sustainable, profitable business is not his goal. His goal is malignant, useless GROWTH, because that's what shareholders have been taught to expect. The actual play is to inflate everything to give the impression of financial success. Buy Weta? Sure, why not! We're hemorrhaging cash but this will increase our valuation! Number goes up! Ironsource is useless bullshit that no developer wants to be associated with? BUY BUY BUY! Number goes up! Look we're growing!

Unity is not in the business of improving developer relations because up to this point that has not been a relevant factor in their valuation.

 

Who also know how Unity's proprietary anti-exploit algorithm works.

 

Another way to stop bleeding money is to cut costs, for example by not trying to develop many new (and sometimes unwanted) features at the same time.

I'm guessing that part of the motivation here is that they invested into Unity Gaming Services (UGS) but currently it's not used by enough studios to be profitable (the chicken-and-egg problem - who wants to risk their game on a brand new BaaS that might not last 5 years?). So now they're hoping that they can use their new pricing model to drive users to UGS for a mystery discount on the Runtime Fee.