Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

This math is really just wrong. Few games will sell for $60 unless they are AAA.

 

I'm quoting this so more people can see it.

 

Does anyone know what the terms and conditions were between October 2022 and April 2023?

The "previous terms" linked to on the current terms say that it was superseded in October 2022 (and say that it's royalty free and you can continue to use current year versions), but the current terms say they were valid from April 2023, so there's a chunk of time missing.

Oh, according to The Internet Archive, these terms were in place until April 2023, which means that unless you use Unity 2024 there is _nothing_ unity can do

I'm sure someone from @Unity-Support (I assume that's a valid @) can get in touch with the layers they were talking to earlier

 

You are right, Unity was simple. New pricing model has made it complex for mid size devs mostly free to play games devs

 

This a meme announcement so I'm just gonna post memes from now on.

 

For Unity Pro, unity is very bad at enforcing it's revenue requirements.

Most devs probably had Unity Plus, and probably not even for the whole team, just the ones doing builds.

 

You're looking at Unity license descriptions. The Runtime Fee is a separate thing.

 

Imagine Unity waking up one day and saying we should charge for installs, because obviously that is a very clear, non-abusable, project planning friendly, revenue coupled metric that deserves to be taxed.

You can use hyperbole, well so can I. Oh wait...it's real...

I mean, sure you're actually right, I don't think Unity will actually do that...even this mad version of the company that's been revealed to us. But then where is the threshold for them to come knocking then? Do you know? Does even Unity know? And even once you set that threshold, how materially fair is this going to be for those on that edge?

And because it deserves repeating, as I said in previous posts, even these calculations and edge cases don't really matter. What matters the most is Unity breached our trust, changed existing terms for existing games/engine versions on us, and has no incentive to keep their word on anything, including any discussion regarding future changes to fees. Well, except losing our business, I suppose.

 

Alright fair enough. What do you think of Unity charging $.20 per install after 200K installs & $200K?

 

This sounds like a great way to absolutely decimate your community trust and get a bunch of developers to hop game engine

 

I was legit planning to get back to gamedev and use Unity for it, but with insane S*** like this going on, how could I ever trust the company again?

 

Everyday unity is going in wrong direction, i have a feeling that worst is yet to come

 

Depends on the studio, you can make assumptions if you want.

That number is is not exaggerated.

 

Imagine some random script kiddos call you and say: send us 30K in Doge coin or we will install/uninstall your game to death

 

If you use there formula they could take 5% to 25% and up for installs

 

You reached Unity's level. You are just pulling bullshit data out of your own ass without any merit.

 

There are people here that are devs and defend Unity. Kill me now! XD XD XD

 

My company does not make freemium microtransaction games. Our games are or will be either be completely free with no MTX or sold for a flat fee.
So even if we didn't get Unity Pro, the pricing scheme has no significant impact on our foreseeable profits.

 

Yeah I just made the chart looking at gross. You're describing the same problem with any gross cost (i.e. if you spend $1,000,000, make exactly that back, you'll still owe Steam 30%, Epic 5%, and the gov XX% and now be in the red). But to Unreal's benefit, it's right on their website to contact them once you're approaching that level to negotiate a lower rate, plus they charge no royalty and a low store percent on sales on their store. As you can see though Unity's is still a much lower percent to pay SPECIFICALLY for higher-priced games, and much worse for lower-priced games.

Big Note On Unreal's Flat Royalty:

The difference I'm thinking about though is that Unreal's royalty a classic design - it's straight up in perpetuity over $1,000,000 gross. You'll always be paying Epic 5% (or a lower negotiated rate) on every dollar you make above that, forever. For this pricing model, Unity is only charging you if you are CURRENTLY making $1,000,000+ a year, which is a big difference, and have already sold 1,000,000 copies. Huge huge difference to bear in mind. EG if your successful game enters year two and drops below $1,000,000 in revenue, you stop paying Unity a royalty fee. And you only start after triggering that revenue, so possibly only for a couple months in an average case as the sales drop. Plus remember it's charging on new installs, so those first 1,000,000 installs or $1,000,000 aren't going to be charged.

Huge Qualifier!:

Plus to be clear, for a full-price steam game sold on average at say $10, you're actually going to have grossed TEN MILLION DOLLARS before you start paying unity a royalty fee, since you need 1,000,000 copies sold! That's a huuuuuuge amount of cash coming in, very very few full price games are going to get that many "installs" (barring the issues with counting installs). However as I'm pointing out, for a F2P game with a, say, $0.2 ARPU, you'll have to get 5,000,000 downloads first to reach $1,000,000 revenue. Then you're gonna start getting blasted with a basically 50% royalty to unity above that!

Ignoring that it's totally insane and questionably legal to change the TOS as Unity has (enough reason to bail probably), it's just an odd plan, I don't really see what their goal was. It's doing two things:

1) Funneling people with moderately successful games to pay for Pro, and most prob wont ever pay a royalty. (Fine, sure). They're also making waaay less money on this $2,000 subscription than what they would make on a 5% royalty, so this is just odd.

2) Targeting studios who have ACTIVELY successful games (CURRENTLY bringing in >$1,000,000 a year and already having grossed the price x 1,000,000 units) to pay a royalty, but a really small royalty for full-price release games. On the other hand, charge a cripplingly huge royalty to successful highly downloaded, low-cost or F2P games.

I guess they think... I don't even know really. They're basically leaving money on the table with a nonexistent, extremely low royalty on successful full price games, then absolutely GOUGING low price games. Even more than Epic, since Unity isn't going to charge in perpetuity, only while the game is bringing in $1,000,000 every year, which is probably only a small window of time for most successful full-price games. But they've bitten off the entire apple when targeting the F2P sector, it's too high for that market. Idk. It's so weird, I can't tell if they basically forgot that big F2P games would get bulldozed and were looking at getting value from super successful $$$ games (seems like no, since the royalty is so low and not in perpetuity in that case), or they were so greedy looking at mobile revenue they wanted a big piece of that (But again seems like no, since they're charging way too high a royalty to stomach for those cases).

It makes more sense to just charge a royalty in perpetuity, but actually that's worse for probably all studios releasing full-price games. At least here, Unity will stop charging the royalty once you drop below the threshold, and like I said for a $10 game you'll already have grossed $10,000,000 before the royalty even kicks in! They could cap the royalty at an effective 5% rate, which would be so braindead because why didn't they just match Unreal's terms? On that $10 game example, you'd gross $10,000,000 first and pay Unity nothing, just a $2K subscription.. For unreal, you'd pay them $450,000 by that point. Unity would be making a boatload more money doing it the Epic way!

In short and again, it is undeniably actually a great plan for anyone selling anything over about the $5 range, and then an absolutely horrible plan for those under it who are making more than a million a year. To be clear Unity has seriously messed up with 1) No clarification and basically noone answering questions 2) Changing the TOS retrospectively 3) A broken plan for F2P games 4) How the hell are they going to reliably track installs, the core of all this?. But people are also not really seeing the math for most cases. Basically it's true; the only people affected by this in a meaningful way are the successful F2P studios.

Updated the graph a little:

 

And don't forget, they can change that charge to be higher later on. After you've already invested the time to create the game on the Unity platform.

 

Riesensauerei?

 

Multiple people including myself multiple times have shown several situations where yes this will hurt or destroy plenty

Major devs, from major darling Indie games have come out and very openly pointed these same facts out

A few publishers have piped up like Devolver and in less direct but still clearly pointed at Unity said the same

Are you actually trying to deny that this is a boneheaded move ... are you really trying to say that 97 pages of pissed-off Unity devs, and the deluge of outcry from everyone from large successful even dare I say famous devs down to tiny nobodies like our selves are all BS and wrong and there is no issue here?

Asking honestly is that what you are getting at?
Maybe I missed some context

 

So that means that everything is fine and dandy I guess cause you have 0 ambition. Awesome! XD

 

Your accusing unity of lying on their official financial reports and thus committing a crime.

I'm explaining a scenario where that number is legit (speaking a bit from some stuff i've seen) lmao.

 

I've got so many questions, but my first feeling is this is not going to stick. They are absolutely crazy to pull this off. Everyone is just going to leave. I have 10 years with Unity and would be forced to leave.

 

No, you don't. You just have no clue what you're talking about.

 

This image is only true if you know how many installs a user will actually have, but that's not knowable, specially with the takeaway 3 you point out. That means that right now this graph doesn't match reality. The fee from installs can be as high as Unity wants it to be as the average revenue can be lowered infinitely.

This graph makes it look like right now it's already like that, but that's not the case.

Once Unity fixes those holes that will stay the case.

 

big mess

 

Okay, Unity. I have an idea that will not bankrupt people if they reach the treshoulds, just create a strong clause that states that the total charged for downloads must not exceed a percentage of 5% of total revenue, the 5% is just an example, but with a maximum debt ceiling, people will feel more confident, and also avoid problems if you have many downloads and little revenue.

 

Oh come on, you bring legality in this? Unity is illegal even in California with this absolutely insane announcement. I cannot believe that they will not get sued for fake pirated installs at some point and they will lose. Better for them to go to court upfront and spare some poor dev the drama.

 

They're not devs, they're unity shills trying to damage control. Just had a unity guy delete my post with an absolutely seething comment because they know they've F'd this one up, BAD.

 

Translated as: get bent f2p market, idc that Unity is shafting you. Keep crying.

 

Yes there does actually seem to be some scenarios where you could be better off with the new pricing structure.

With the new pricing scheme, if you have micro transactions that kick in a few years down the road, you're still paying fees to Unreal, but those are already taken care of with Unity.

Would be nice to have some guarantee that you couldn't wind up paying 50% of your gross revenue to Unity, just in case you wind up selling millions of games that make like $.005 each.

 

Tracking uninstalls is possible in the same way as tracking installs. Either we agree that both are sufficiently possible, or both aren't.

 

This is what people have been asking for and it also solves the problem even for Mihoyo and Nintendo etc.

But Unity is so greedy they want every single cent they can get. XD

 

Because no big corporation would ever do anything shady amirite. Lets just trust Unity to bill us whatever amount they want and hope its the right number.

You're not fooling anyone, John Riccitiello.

 

So far they haven't mentioned that only paid installs will be counted.

 

Noo, so that CEO / shareholders can have a big party at their luxury property

 

LOL. Read what they are saying again, this time carefully: they aren't planning to measure any install-rate. They will use data-models to GUESS how many times your stuff was installed and how much revenue you should have had. In plain language: they will be pulling bullshit data out of their own ass and will bill you with it. This is when you don't get just flat rate, but flatulence rate. And they admit it. (Not the flatulence, but the guess-work).

You're just randomly blabling about nothing relevant. You have zero idea who uses what licenses... in plain language, you're pulling out bullshit data from your own ass. Just like Unity.

 

Well, I can't say I hold any love whatsoever for f2p microtransaction games due to how predatory they can be. The companies that Unity is targeting are the ones who will literally hire psychologists to figure out how to make their games more deceptive and predatory. I'd much rather have less of them and Unity get more $$$ than have more of them flooding the market.

 

They won't get anything from any version until 2024.x, read their terms from April, section 6

 

Given their CEO dumped stock right before making this announcement, there's already a criminal element. Unity's stock cratered 5% today, indicating that the CEO was aware of inside knowledge that would greatly affect Unity's market performance following this announcement.

Retroactively updating a ToS without user agreement is also prohibited across most developed Countries (ala, Europe).

Hardly a wild accusation to throw about that the company has willingly engaged in criminal activity tbh, granted even the most brain damaged of individuals would usually know not to F*** about when it came to reporting revenues.

Mind, usually that same logic applies to insider trading, so, could well be the case.

 

The problem is you are referencing the editor terms and services, not the runtime. Two different things.

 

What? Epics royalty is in perpetuity...

 

To all the desperate damage control people here. You don't realize that this is the end. It's over. It's done. Finitto la musica, passato la fiesta. It is THAT bad. People who still come here do so for the LULs. Everyone's moved on already, unless they are over 70% into their project and can't leave.

 

Some stupid people here are defending this S***.
They don't even think about:
1. The TOS could change again to hurt them too
2. The reinstall after the first sale mean you will have to pay a lot more money than if it was a one time thing
3. There is no way to track those installation count, so Unity can lie

So shut the F*** up.

For everybody else, I think the only way to fix it is to learn a new engine, in a year or two there will be nobody here.

 

He's been selling stock for years. It's not news. Every time there's Unity drama, people bring up CEO and other C-suite selling stock when it's happening all the time.

 

and ofc you trust them? hahaha some people will believe anything, even if its happening right now