Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

This seems illegal to me.

 

Maybe they thought they had to make pricing a real cluster f#@k to match the rest of the software?

 

This is a S*** show...

Why they can't be normal and ask for a % of the profit in quarters after certain threshold like Unreal?

They don't even know how to track this out correctly, and even if they did it's a crap. The resources that should be put in the engine, will be put in this tracking system.

 

I started 2 days ago, couldnt reach up, read for too much )

 

I think people understand these points just fine.

The issue is that some games will be high-installs/sales, high-revenue, but also high-cost, and therefore low-profit. And that low profit would make it nearly impossible to afford the fees as currently stated.

 

My honest opinion is that if unity wants to be unreal first bring nanite & lumen to unity3d not

They can & will get % after they bring lumen & nanite to unity. Without those cutting edge spec why would someone pay unity if there is unreal with those features & same price

 

I remember them being very expensive but now i can't for the life of me find out what their actual model is.

 

Marc Whitten, Unity Create president, in an interview with GamesBeat. “From our perspective, we’re working on ensuring that there’s an accurate exchange of value between Unity and its customers. But with that said, this price increase doesn’t impact the significant majority of our customers.”

O RLY??? Let's not lose sight of the move to push all Plus users (most little to mid indies, i.e. the significant majority of your customers???) at $420 per year per seat to Pro tier at $2040 per year per seat. an almost 500% increase UP FRONT to even use the editor in any meaningful commercial setting. You know, to "simplify" things.

 

Unreal is not an easy switch. Unity is better in various ways for various use cases. C++ is not C#. Blueprints are not magic. I get that everyone's gung ho about sticking it to JR and jumping to a new engine but it generally is not that simple, especially for casual or AR/VR devs. The grass is always greener but trust me, Unreal has its share of madness.

 

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Hey Unity developers. Before charging a per-install fee, how about you improve your feature set first to be worthy of such a fee?

Compared to Unreal, which does NOT charge on a per-install-basis, your engine is utterly lacking, even in the most simplest aspects. Why is there no pre-installed fully-functionally character asset with a mesh, movement scripts, animations and controls, why does the nav agent component not have subscribable events to get notified when the agent has reached their destination, why are there SO MANY basic aspects that have to be checked manually on tick instead of being provided by the engine via events, why is your network solution still so very much in its infancy compared to other free solutions such as FishNet, why are so many feature sets of your engine just barely functional and very cumbersome to use, yet you still want to charge premium fees?

If I get charged on a per-install-basis I expect nothing less than the utmost top-of-the-industry feature set in every aspect, which you obviously don't provide at the moment.

 

Oh, auto upgrade. It is just there are some edge cases you would still rather not (Big team, spaced out sells per month and stuff). Legally for them it is prolly not good to auto bump people. Probably just flood their email with 'yo, you might want to upgrade.' Prolly good to give a grace period, which considering it is monthly might be in place anyway.

At the end of the day it isnt Unity job to baby people.

 

Anyone even considered how much time is being spent / wasted on this forum thread, instead we could making games! Now we're all worrying/talking about this BS, it's nuts, on a game engine forum..

 

So the logic is, make a guaranteed $0 because you're afraid that you MIGHT have to pay a couple of cents per each sale you make past a potentially $5+ million revenue threshold?

What are they teaching you kids in school these days?

 

Last i checked they only made like $100K a year from unity subscriptions. They make NO money from successful games.

 

In that situation, the developers buy Unity Pro. They would need to reach $1 million dollars and 1 million installs before getting any install fees.

 

This was a response from a Unity Lawyer earlier in this forum:

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

 

Is this a threat?

 

But the issue is that any new developer may come to such scenario, so is a concern for all users. Noone will start working in Unity if knows that such a scenario exists and may put him out of business, or in millions in debt even at some point.

This essentially will kill Unity as noone will trust to use it.

 

If you switch to unity pro you only pay for unity pro.

 

They make a lot of money from successful games that rely on ads and include Unity Ads/Levelplay, and those are the ones that are going to be hurt the most by this move

 

Guys official lawyer response of Unity.

Just let it go. We had a good run. Stay if you want to.
Original post in page 45.

 

game devs need pay fee . so unity can buy more film making stuff

 

A simple google search would tell you this but if you sell a $20 game 10,000 times, you've made $200,000 gross, which is what Unity calculates revenue from. You can immediately lop 30% off that number for the storefront cut, you can bump that up to around 50% for taxes. This doesn't even begin to cover existing operational expenses like employee and contractor pay. $200,000 gross is, when it comes to sales, not a F***ing lot.

"So just get Unity Pro," you may say, but this becomes more of a problem because now you're dealing with $2000 per seat per annum. These are not big numbers, but they add up. And, because sales are calculated by lifetime, games with long tails get increasingly punished by these punitive charges. These are just games that have a set purchase price as well. We've already covered extensively how F2P games can have a wildly ranging ARPU while also having huge install bases.

None of the math here is good.

 

So.. Another day... and absolute silence from Unity.

Make plans to get off this crazy train folks. These guys have shown their colours for the umpteenth time. It just gets worse from here.

 

They don't need to do this. They can just make up any number they want .. because Trust us Bro

 

WHO ON EARTH GET SUCH IDEAS??
LIKE ARE YOU HIRING TEENS THAT JUST COMPLETED MANAGEMENT SCHOOL??
HOW CAN SUCH A LARGE CORP CAN MAKE SUCH ECONOMICALLY WRONG DECISIONS??
HOW....

 

POV: unity employee calculating your games total installs.

 

I think they made a mistake in the new fees, it should read "New Runtime fRees"!

 

With the pro seems like 5% but with a monthly fee

 

Does Unity also track uninstalls? If not, the terms are unacceptable, since they're prone to malicious attacks. A simple virtual machine with a script that randomizes hardware UIDs, and installs the game/app would increase the install counter, while not providing the creator with additional revenue. This means every product that surpasses the base limits could be attacked by a fully automated bot network, which would install the product over, and over again.

And if I'm adding a comment: removing Plus will decrease your revenue. As a creator, I can't afford Pro, and many others will be in a similar situation. Just a heads up.

 

Well, I think your company's revenue threshold, not a project. like the TOS says:



And...

 

The concern here is free to play/download games that have in app purchases, which means that the revenue per install is variable (no upfront purchase cost). Games with upfront costs are fine with this model.

If your average earning per install is under $0.20 (which is a massive amount of money for a mobile game), you will actively be losing money per install. You will go bankrupt unless you pull your game off the market.

 

That's not possible to track uninstalls given the nature of how these applications work.

 

So basically you could have someone passively depleting your income?

 

Some scenarios work really well for devs.

But the problem is, there are some scenarios that don't work well at all.

An your base scenario mentions users paying $60 per game, which Unity doesn't shine in that arena. Their games aren't known for being AAA and 4K 60fps.

99.9999% of developers will not be able to sell anything made with Unity for that amount.

People will definitely have to rethink what kind of audience they're going after with the new pricing structure. Unfortunately for many people, they didn't have the privilege of knowing what Unity's new ToS would be when they started working on their game, or even when they released their game not knowing those terms would change.

 

No, just make it with another engine i suppose.

Noone wants to risk go to debt and to jail with this new Unity fee.

We are talking about going to prison if your game sell millions and cant cover Unity flat fee per install.

And who shoots for making unsucessful games that will gurantee not sell millions ?

It is a life breaking risk.

 

I'm just feeling sad now. Gonna try and be positive about learning new tools, but it's still depressing when you remember why you're doing it.

Feel bad for all the regular Unity staff too, I'd bet 90% of them think this is awful. Those comments from that executive about democritising game dev are completely delusional.

The most frustrating thing is it's all so unnecessary. I think it would be quite easy to turn the company around, changing the leadership seems to be the difficul part.

 

Yeah, but 200,000 installs != 200,000 buys, so the game at 5$ logic falls off, if we count an install as "An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.".

 

Indeed. My studio make a successful game and we've always thought Unity is too cheap. If they had announced a percentage cut, we'd have been fine with it (especially if it was 5% or less). They would probably make more from us than install fees. Instead, they decided to make us hate them.

 

Good summary.

 

Please just stop using pay2install games as an example. It's a fact that those are not the majority of games that are on mobile platforms, of which 70% are made in Unity. Use the much more applicable example of free2install games that have an ARPU of ~$0.05. Once they reach 1M in revenue and installs, they will get absolutely shafted with Unity's fees. Hell even an ARPU of $0.10 would not be enough to cover everything depending on the size of the studio.

 

POV: the groundbreaking technology unity has to calculate your games total installs. Pirate proof!

 

Yes it is, Unity clearly screwed up their announcement and the alleged employee earlier in the thread even said that it was released early in spite of internal feedback echoing the legitimate concerns here.

But that doesn't excuse the chaff from people who just assume the worst. I do want unity to get better and I want the company to be profitable. Encouraging everyone to jump ship based on misinformation is counterproductive to that goal.

 

A very small (9 person) indie company would currently pay $18,000 a year to Unity for seats. That $100k number is insanely wrong.

 

For me, Unity is not Unreal and it doesn't have to be. Speaking for myself: I don't really care about Lumen and Nanite to be in Unity and if someday I want to use those, I'll switch to Unreal for that specific project and that's it.

For me, Unity is about simplicity and getting things done (or at least that was a few years ago). That's were it should shine, I'm not saying that Unity is not capable of producing great AAA titles, I'm saying that Unity doesn't have to be unreal to have a similar price model, and people will probably pay it if they can get games shipped.

I don't really understand why this S***ty install fee is on the table, it's like Unity doesn't think their engine is worth it, or something.

 

You have to pity the poor bastards who have to pretend like this is a good idea, despite the entirety of the global staff being aware that some dude from EA rocked in, absolutely tanked their stock (while selling the dip himself), and now their job security is heading downhill so fast it'd make crypto look stable by comparison

 

Exactly, this thing make zero sense whatsoever.

A cut from revenue is something that could be considered and would make much more sense and be much more clear and fail safe.

 

games using unity Ads apparently get some kind of discount.

And people have long complained about unity focusing on ads and microtransactions.

 

I understand perfectly your point of view and I'm aware that unity is at net losses and I love the engine. I haven't been able to ship a game yet due to time constraints but I definitely use it for some interactive experiences.

My take:

Charge like 59.99/year for personal, 19.99/years for students. Include some assets in the sub that you make deals with and that are instrumental to unity being a more complete experience (odin serialization, console pro etc). That alone would spread and unity is mature enough to be able to work under those conditions.

Additionally, implement a 1-5% revenue tax depending on revenue thresholds.

No matter how conservative your estimations are it still boils down to "trust me bro" and that's anxiety inducing and that's the last thing vulnerable developers need. Let's be real, installs as a metric is an idiotic measure that completely misses the point on the element that the pricing is based on.

Some of us LOVE unity, but this measure could be the first of many retcons to previously agreed terms, not to mention that unilateral moves are not well esteemed in any community.