Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

But your responses aren't very good either. They seem like low information rebuttals, that just tell people Unity is doing fine. You should give responses that offer concrete data or real life scenarios.

There are many business cases where they new methodologies Unity proposed wouldn't work. Like someone who sells 700,000 games that makes $250,000 dollars.

 

While I have taught Unity for several years in University until now for game development and promoted it as the go-to-engine for game development and game jams, considering future Unity's plans i'll probably be switching to promoting Unreal and Godot instead.
What Unity is doing at the moment is like the moment EA introduced the card system in their sports game : Greedy, unethical, short-sighted and completely destructive.

Use Godot. It has made some tremendous improvements in the last few months and it is an amazing engine, especially for 2D development.

 

can you explain, please?

 

market burned $39.750.588 today.

a lot of $0.20 needed to get them back

 

It's baffling that they weren't prepared for this response before announcing this considering how many mobile developers use Unity.

 

Uncontrolled growth, bloat, incompetent management, hamfisting ... everything but the various serives, features, etc. they have invested in and droped

Its a problem you see with a lot of tech companies for the last 20+ years

Have a marketable idea, "Yes Man" it for rapid growth feasibility and sustainability be damned ... then go IPO with a grossly inflated market cap ... bail out leaving it with the investors to stupid to cashout earlier

Then you have hack CEOs like the one currently running things.
Known for morronic leadership at EA as well as here ... not just trying to be mean ... being very literal here ... have a look at his past works, talks, etc.

Your man is good at spinning a yarn that helps the uninformed invest more ... its not sustainable, it leads to major issues and all collapses ... but for the short term it makes number go up which is the only thing they care about ATM ... the mid-long term goal ... acquisition by a bigger fish MS, Amazon, Tencent, etc.

 

not to mention pirate users who make fake iap purchases which unity dashboard proudly show as revenue but actual store shows zero

 

POV: a unity employee about to release the bot network that installs your game 1000s of time.

Rent is due. That'll be your install fee, sir, plus VAT, tax, and customary tip!

 

With all the effort they put into making this work, you would think they could fix some of the bugs that have existed for a while instead.

Glad we just started dev on our newest title, only gonna lose about a weeks worth of work swapping to Unreal to make it there instead.

 

Likely they look at all official app stores, add metrics from piracy sites, and multiply the number by 1.25, if I were just to guess.

Or alternatively if they're having a slow quarter, they create a botnet to mass install your game and congratulate you on your growth.

 

When you've made a game, you see how much time and money goes into the creation of it. You can make "$200,000", but that's Gross. When you look at how much you make minus the employees and the taxes and the utilities at the studio, that's the net, and it's a heck of a lot harder than it seems to make anything at all.

And that's before the App Store fees, and the taxes on the sales, sometimes credit card fees, and now Unity is exploring new ways to take $.20 for every download after $200K, whether you make $.20 per game or not. So, doing the calculations may seem easy for someone watching on the sidelines, but for someone investing their blood, sweat, and tears, and taking time away from family to make their dream a reality, it's a slightly different equation.

People don't want to accomplish their life dream, just to make $50, or worse, owe $150,000, which is possible.

 

So, if I use LevelPlay, do I get a discount on the installs for my free-to-play games? How much of a discount? It's outrageous I should even be asking. But you have an answer somewhere, right? You already thought this through, right?

But before we get crazy, how about getting LevelPlay to actually work?
https://forum.unity.com/threads/ios...-your-podfile-look-like.1404910/#post-8835505

 

Something worth noting. This reddit thread has archived links to the 2019 TOS which was hosted on github. Of particular interest there was paragraph 8, which Unity has since quietly removed:

Sources:
Reddit thread
Archived blog on the 2019 TOS
Archived github 2019 TOS

 

lol? Oh my sweet summer child...

 

It's probably worse than this.

If you are a company (not individual), it does not matter how your company makes it's first 200k (another game, or some other side projects). So, if you are not starting a new company you will probably start paying fees as soon as the game hits 200k installs. even if it's free. AND you are forced to move to Pro plan and start paying that monthly (which then again raises the install cap to 1m, so I don't know actually how that works in the end)...

 

So true, bro! Those hold ons after every single change in project are still there after 3(!) major releases

 

Oh, I guarantee the mega-hits will be far more upset by that than what they've proposed here. a 5% royalty on billions of dollars of revenue for the lifetime of a game vs a few million based on installs at the enterprise price and 3/4 of the installs coming from "developing countries?"

No way would any huge company take the royalties over that.

 

damage is done, trust is gone

 

Now I have a game that sold a total of $190,000 in these 12 months. In the second year, this figure became $201,000 and now I will have to switch to pro. Well, if I pay for the unit from this sale, it's like 0.20 cents, and Steam deducts like 30%-35% of this figure. Well, I will need to subtract asset fees and advertising fees from this. Asset, Advertisement Let's say $1000, $200,000 left, Steam cuts 35%. $70,350 goes to Steam. The remaining amount is $129,650. Let's say we sold it for $1, we will pay $40,200 for the Unit for now. We are left with $89,450, not counting company expenses etc. taxes. If every user deletes and reinstalls the game, they will pay another $40,200 after 12 months. There is $49,250 left, I'm asking now. Did I understand correctly?

 

starting a terrifying trend for software and technology in general. F*** greedy ass dehumanizing corpos. this is a complete breach of trust and completely inane bullshit that doesn’t even seem to have been fully thought out. had everyone in the room had a few lines of coke when they came up with this idea? F*** every single person who brought this into fruition you greedy bastards. unity can eat S*** and die.

 

Since Unity seems to have run out of good ideas, here's what you COULD'VE DONE for us, instead.

Make a simple way of handling purchases and tie that to our existing Unity accounts. Right now we either have to roll our own or be beholden to the various stores. I prefer to sell my stuff straight to the user. If you guys offered a super simple way of handling the credit card transactions, you'd be raking in money AND helping your users.

Instead you're just screwing us over, and you know it. Did you SERIOUSLY not run these numbers by anyone? Who approved any of this? Do you look at this feedback and think these are somehow acceptable losses?

Look, I met Joachim Ante at WWDC in. 2006. I made sure LightWave fully supported Unity out of the box for Unity 1.0. We were the first 3D product to do it. I've been a Pro and Plus user consistently, ever since then.

And right now, these dumbass decisions have me actually considering Godot.

 

The revenue threshold is per game, not per company.

 

Why not keep the price model simple and predictable??
Just copy your competitors price model, 5% of everything over $1.000.000.....
This new price model makes absolutely no sense.. its like Microsoft would start sending bills based on how many installations of .net runtime.....

 

Good bye, and thanks for all the corporate greed.
Learned my lesson, only took me 15 years with Unity 3D.

 

Here's what I don't understand.

If I release a game and it makes 200K in a few months and hits the 200,000 install threshold, what happens if I then make the game free to play? I'm already over the 200K threshold for the year, so now every install is costing me money but I'm not making any money from the game. That seems...crazy?

Worst case scenario is you make a game that hits the threshold early in the year, then winds down for a few months so you make the game free to thank the community. Then some youtuber covers the game and you wake up to 15 million downloads. The heck does Unity expect to happen then?

 

Your scenario is the only scenario that actually matters here for concern. (assuming you mean millions of downloads PER MONTH)

This is deffinitely something for them to work on.

 

From the article:
"I asked if Unity was backing off on its mission to “democratize game development” with this new fee. But Whitten said that this means Unity is doubling down on that mission. He noted that was why the thresholds exist, as Unity wants you to still keep trying to be a creator even if you haven’t found success."

"While there were plenty of folks complaining yesterday, Whitten said the company was focused on connecting with game creators and making sure Unity was delivering the value that they need. He said the company will continue to address complaints."

“There’s always more that Unity can do,” he said.

 

It still costs money for pro. Do you want then to charge the dude making his first game for itch.io because it just turns out a lot of devs are dumb and cant read or do math?

 

Because they don’t think they can directly compete.

 

all Unity is doing here is shooting themselves in the foot, along with everyone else within a 5-mile radius

 

This is horrible! One can only hope that they revert this decision asap!

 

Unity has pulled a card that even unreal could not pull with all that lumen & nanite sh*t still they cannot go against their own users. What if unity was as good as unreal, thn terms & conditions could have been like a dev can breathe 100 times a day 101 they have to pay 1$ in microtransaction.

 

Thats not a bad idea, considering the edge cases where the numbers get stupid.

 

Unity is charging their install fee once they determine your company is taking in $200,000 || $1,000,000. Except, the storefront takes their cut, staff needs to be paid, any other capital costs for running the business need to be paid, and then Unity comes in with their hand held out saying "you forgot one." And then if there's any pie left, you get to pay applicable taxes on it. Nice. If you're a solo dev that manages to make a smash hit, that reaches 1M installs and $1M revenue, perfect. Otherwise, get bent. Also better make sure you don't announce your success and hope the storefront doesn't report an estimate of your revenue above the thresholds, cause now you got bad actors that can tank your business with install fess.

 

I don't think so? If they're so wildly misinformed, it is because the only information they have to work with was this initial announcement, which was extremely lacking in details and at best offered vague, non committal assurances of the many concerns people have with this. Sounds like to me this is important feedback to come up with a more solid plan and explanation on how this all would be executed.

I also don't think the only avenue of criticism they're listening to are only forums or social media. There are many developers they have close relationships with that are probably none too happy about this either, not to mention big platform holders like Sony, Microsoft and Apple. UT is a multi billion dollar company, they're more than capable of separating the wheat from the chaff.

 

This is still double dipping.. you pay upfront cost with no guarantee that your product will succeed

 

Okay so reading the blog post there seems to be a few people slightly exaggerating numbers. Obviously per install sucks due to bots and people uninstalling and reinstall maybe to free up space. But here is the maths behind it, please correct me if i'm wrong:
First i'll use a base $60 game as an example.
So if you are on personal/plus the threholds are 200,000 for revenue and installs.
So to meet $200,000 you would need to sell 3,334 copies.
For installs you would need another 196,666. So you don't pay anything to unity until bots come along and cheat the system.
If your game does sell 200,000 copies ($12,000,000 revenue), you still wouldn't pay anything. Because it only starts counting after the threshold is met. "The install fee is only charged on incremental installs that happen after the thresholds have been met."
When your game has 200,001(lifetime) installs, you pay $0.20 from your $12,000,000. But if your game is doing that well then might as well purchase pro license, which means you don't have to pay anything until you reach 1mil installs.
Now this is best case scenario where its a 1:1 paying customer and install.

If we look at a cheap mobile game maybe $5
Your game would need to sell 40,000 copies to meet $200,000, which is less than install threshold.
200,000 installs would be $1,000,000. So now the threshold has been met so any installs after will cost.
200,001 installs would be $0.20 from $1,000,005.
400,000 installs = $40,000 from $2,000,000. Which is 2% of revenue.
Also, if your game isn't meeting the $200,000 threshold each year then the amount of installs doesn't matter, so reinstalling wouldn't be too big of an issue.

The main issue which this is that its installs and not per account/person. We can't properly calculate the maths if someone is reinstalling the game. Sometimes a game doesn't properly run and we need to reinstall it which would count as "An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device."

 

Yeah, this kind of dumb talking point helps no one. Wanna talk about install being sus? Sure, lets talk. But going 'omg what happens if unity suddenly wake up one day and say I owe them a billion dollar for my itch.io game with 10k downloads?'

Like, bro. Cmon yall.

 

If you have reached the 200k threshold then by definition you can easily afford the pro license. That's the point. Wait to buy it until just before you hit 200k. There is no downside. So the only reason you WOULDN'T do that is because you forgot, or didn't know. It's arbitrary and appears exploitive of unwary developers.

 

It's realistic! The best Deomocracy money can buy!

 

You're wrong bro. The same dashboard that shows unique installs is %100 perfect and accurate. /s

 

I believe they had a clear understanding of what would occur, and it appeared to be more of a charade. I doubt they presented it to the chair and board in this manner, and it's unlikely they received immediate approval for the idea as it currently stands.

 

Just downloaded Unreal Engine as well. Even their shop system is superior. Love it.

 

Quick PSA folks: those of you who are members of IGDA, reach out to your local chapters about this and work with them concerning lobbying relevant state/public agencies or organisms which might have the power to regulate activities of companies such as Unity in your country.

Likewise, if you belong to a national game developers association, please do the same. It seems that in the EU, a concerted response of all the national game developers associations will be brought forth the European Comission, asking for the intervention of regulatory and legislative powers over this nonsense.

We should have more of these actions going around. Unity must be made accountable and realize that their actions have consequences. If they thought we were just going to rollover and take it, they have another thing coming.

 

Gross is the total amount a game will make in sales
Net is what you actually keep.

So, you sell a game on Steam and it earns $100k in sales. $100k is the gross revenue. After steam takes their 30%, it's down to $70k. Then, whatever the cost to make the game is subtracted, maybe you did it by yourself and made everything or used free assets, but you have a deal with a publisher and they take 20% of all sales. Finally, you need to pay taxes, for simplicity let's say it's $5k.
In this scenario, gross would be $100k, net would be $45k.

 

Doesn't it seem a little high to be charging people $200,000 per 1 million downloads after a $200K threshold?

Anyone else think $200K for 1 mil downloads is high? Unity isn't even involved in the downloads process.

I mean, they know there's a free to play market right? And it's not easy to keep revenue high after your first 200,000 downloads per say.

 

Revenue share makes perfect sense given how under the per-install system you gotta report revenue to Untiy anyways.

They need to rectify things so that is impossible for fees to punish someone under any circumstances. Nobody wants their game to blow up and trigger a bunch of conditions that make them charged more than they are earning. Any system that allows this is reckless and flawed.

 

Well, that would be correct if idea was payment for sale. The ridiculous pay per install on the other hand not only can generate multiple 'cost generating' events from one purchase (or even without purchase at worst scenario*; also the purchase and generating cost are not bound together, so old sales can generate cost down the road) but also is based on some semi-magic 'trust me bro' statistic which is presented to us by Unity (which also is known to be imposible to be factual data - it's more or less correct evaluation).

You can cry all you want, but the fact is, they went with the most re*arded version of the concept.

*even player that installed a game on two devices - pc and laptop is making chart look not necessarily like on the image above

 

Choosing to rely on the software you built yourself, charging 5% on the profit, while offering all the features of the engine to the users. This is professionalism, like UE does.

We don't have much confidence in the software we build, but the idea of making a lot of money in absurd ways is pure amateurism. It's truly amazing that Unity is still a viable company to this day. Vision 0, Skills 0, Mindset 0, Respect 0.

 

Yeah we get about 6 million downloads per month, I don't think this will cause problems for your model.