Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

me too

 

Has anyone who is real lawyer looked over the terms that were silently changed from 2022?
Is there a real chance that we can stick with older LTS versions and not pay the fee?

October 13, 2022 (removed) terms
https://web.archive.org/web/20230303043022/https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software

October 13, 2022 (new) terms
https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service/software-legacy

April 3, 2023 terms
https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software

 

They are going to track your hardware ID/mac address. If someone upgrade / switch's computers or installs on multiple computer that is an install. Who knows how many times over the life of your game it gets installed. It could easily be 10 time greater then your sales.

Basically if you make more then $1 million per game you should not use UNITY.

 

from this page: https://impromptugames.com/movingtounreal.html

About the price of Unreal Engine 5:

 

Ok for me that has a f2p low margin game. Say I that I on a yearly basis make $199k and spend $100k on ads, getting 1M installs. So $99k profit. But if I were unlucky enough that I instead sell for $200k I would have to pay Unity $200k (0,2 per install). So with the money I spend on ads I would lose $100k per year.

If I stay under the yearly revenue limit my business model is good, otherwise it is catastrophic. Is this how it works or have I missed something? It seems so.. broken

 

So he either earned 40k and paid 160k in fees if he did not pay for pro.
Or he paid 2k per developer for Pro and kept the rest.

Memes are more funny when they have an actual grain of truth to them.

 

So, the apps have 'lifetime download' counts. Let's say on year one you pass the threshold & have 1 mil games download.

In year 2, you get 5 mil downloads, plus you make $1m within the first million downloads:

Then you sell 4 mil more and make another $1m.

Unity Fees on a Pro Account for 5 million downloads:
(Fees start after the first $1 mil passes)
200,000*.15 + 300,000*.075 + 500,000*.03 + 3,000,000*.02 = $127,500

$2 million revenue - $127,500 (4 million downloads costs) = 6.4% to Unity

This may not be AS bad as I was thinking initially. Still a little bit complex. The reason it doesn't seem as bad up front, is that you have to make $200,000 AND you have to get 200K downloads before the fees start accruing. And you always have the option of $1,000,000 AND 1,000,000 downloads before passing initial flat fee.

----

Still a few issues, what if I randomly pass $1m dollars from 10mil downloads, and then make very little on subsequent downloads? It will continue to eat into my profits for the rest of the year.

Also, if Unity changed the price once, why wouldn't they change it again? And charge me twice as much the next year? I have no guarantees.

---

The benefits of this system, is it's better for games that make more money. Because you're paying the fee upfront on all your users, and can then monetize them as much as you want.

 

Page 100 here we gooo!

 

But what if you did? some group of youtubers suddenly grows interest in your game drives sales but also legit/pirated copies installs.

 

OK, everything fell into place. (no)

 

If you are approaching $200k revenue and have well over 200k in installs, you can pay for Unity Pro and the limits for each go up to $1 million and 1 million installs.

 

Ah ok.

They tweeted some vague clarification (which made the users even more angry):

https://twitter.com/unity/status/1702077049425596900

 

I rely on donations which is still just revenue from users to create NSFW furry-like content, but I get to be on a high horse and say f2p games with microtransactions are bad for existing. But donations aren't mandatory! Neither are watching ads or making IAP. The plot thickens. Better hope Unity doesn't install-bomb you after the thresholds are met.

 

How can you do the math when you don't know what an "install" is? We have no idea how they will count it, you might cross the 200k limit on 50k sales, you have no clue.

 

Thank you for NUMBERS, real math. People begging for a flat royalty because they're caught up in the manufactured hysteria have no idea what they're asking for. The irony being they'll never be affected by any of these plans anyway.

I already don't use UE because I find a 5% flat royalty for software use unacceptable. If Unity did the same, it would be equally unacceptable. Charging a modest fee on every sale, essentially, only on sales that generate profit over a certain threshold, is much more palpable.

The proper context is, no one wants to pay ANYTHING. Which is understandable I guess. But it's not gonna happen, period. Unity needs more money, this is how they'll get it. They're not going to backtrack anything. How people expect Unity to keep up with Unreal without the revenue stream to pay for it is beyond me. As is the expectation to have access to powerful and robust software like Unity and Unreal, use it to make potentially millions or billions of dollars, and not pay a cent for it. This is how business works, if you can't stomach it you should stick with being a hobbyist. Of course the plan as is is way too vague and completely untested but the fact remains, software like Unity can't be maintained let alone expanded for free

 

Dude if you haven't figured it by now. You can "clarify" all you want people aren't going to eat it up

 

guys please... charging 5% like unreal is a bad idea for unity because unity is way behind unreal in terms of technology, you will end up paying more for less, literally.

 

On top of the pro
subscription

 

The pricing plan wasnt conveyed correctly to him as it wasn't for many others so he didnt know about pro, instead he paid the 160K of his hard earnings to greedy, explotive unity, the banks took his home and his son ended up in an orphanage. The cold, unforgiving new York streets became his home now.

 

Basically I'll be forced to use Unity Pro now

 

I'd like to acknowledge that this is still garbage. You can polish your turd all you want there buddy, it's still a turd.

 

What you are missing is that a single user can make a bot to trigger milion of installs, and you can't stop that in any way, once your runtime is out, you are done.

With Unreal you pay 5% from what you actually earn, with this scheme unity has a backdoor to your bank account, the can charge you 10x your entire lifetime earnings.

 

How is this not forcing our hand to price-gauge the hell out of our players if their LTV is too low. If I have a lot of tier 2 and 3 countries downloading my game, Unity will still just charge me more than I make or at best I will break even, not taking other running costs into consideration. Why not a new revenue-share tier? Why the sudden shift? This is insane.

 

This, even with the updated terms (they were updated March/April 2023) they can only apply it from unity 2024.x onwards, not that we'll ever get a reply from someone at Unity....

 

What about the Plus users who are now faced with a 400% price hike for effectively the same service from Pro?

 

Web and streaming games - we are not going to count web and streaming games toward your install count either.

well that stops 80% of my current stress.

 

You didn't even mention absurd fees for low revenue per install games, which is like the biggest issue...

 

No update on the sneaky ToS changes. What a surprise

 

If you had deleted your Unity account, then that's up to them. They might have your project archived or something and notice the increase in installs and send you an email. But if they can't contact you then they can't contact you.

 

Why not charge 0.20$ on each sale then? What is the upside to this "on new installs" non-sense?

 

Axing plus is the sh*t icing on the sh*t cake for me…

 

It's so sad that you're making things worse by not answering the real questions.

 

happy 100th page fellas, here's to 100 more (god forbid)

 

I appreciate the updates to the OP but this still leaves me with a lot of questions about installs and changes to the information regarding them.

My main question is essentially what is the definition of an install? Philosophically it's a copy of the game on a machine, but defining it technically gets a lot more complex. If I sell a separate DLC that uses the game, is that DLC sale another install? If the DLC alters the exe or some other files, is it possible for it to be an install in some cases? If so, will we or won't we be told as developers what we can't alter?

As an extension of that, what about an update to the game? Steam and other platforms will frequently have auto updates enabled, will our customers auto update and trigger a bunch of install fees?

To build on these points, if patching isn't an install, and dlc isn't an install, then what about a situation where my game is a single installed launcher that can then download relevant code/assets as needed? To give a silly example, say I made and sold an app that was all the old microsoft games like solitaire, chess, and so on. I sell a single install which is a launcher/in app purchase to add additional games. It's technically one package, and just updates/dlc's but clearly violates the spirit of per game installs.

I'm not trying to angle shoot here despite how this sounds, but rather trying to understand what my costs will be as a developer with different methods of adding content. As a developer I want to stick with Unity, but that also means that if someone is investing in my game as a publisher, or business decisions are being made on the models to use when making a game these are the types of questions that are going to need solid answers.

Edit: Furthermore, I wanted to address the change in information on multiple installs. Previously it was reported that multiple installs versus an initial install couldn't be tracked because the data is aggregated and not something that Unity would be collecting to an extent that information on individual devices or machines would be tracked. Now that the information on this is different, as developers we need to know things such as if this affects GDPR data collection when we say what our app grabs. This also doesn't really address community concerns of botnets. I can appreciate that any security on that front might not be something you're comfortable talking about, but security through obscurity is not recognized as a good practice anywhere except content recommendation algorithms. And nothing mentioned on this front so far addresses concerns like VM's and mass installs. The community could really use some additional information here.

 

What about that constantly online Unity Personal licence and 200 hours of build time? I usually test my games offline on my dev computer for my own personal safety and I log on to my WiFi to check for updates. I'll be pretty upset having to log in every 3 days just to phone home. And I personally despise the Unity hub

 

Why did Unity CEO and other superiors suddenly sell stock shortly before this update?
If they anticipated backlash why they had to proceed with this step into oblivion?
Pure blinding greed.

 

Dear John Riccitiello,

I'm actually in disbelief at how foolish a decision a company your size could make. Make no mistake about it, this is a fatal error that you will not recover from. Even if you posted a YouTube apology video of you crying about your mistake tonight and promised to reverse this decision, it's already too late. The trust is gone.

This change is a blatant, greedy move to abuse developers already invested in your platform and we are not going to tolerate it.

I'm actually excited to learn and contribute towards Godot and its community moving forward.

Kind regards,
-David

 

Reach 100 pages in 24 hours of anger, at this moment Unity cant will recover the trust of their users.

 

You didn't.

You didn't.

 

You got one thing right, more than 90 percent of customers wont be affected because 90 percent of your customers will be using unreal and godot tomorrow.

 

Does "reinstall" here mean that a single user has installed the game multiple times, regardless of the device on which they re-install? So if a single user upgrades their PC and re-installs the game on that new PC, does this count as a "reinstall"? (and therefore does not apply to the lifetime install count?)

With regard to the point about fraudulent install changes, it may not be cost effective to "work directly with you". That requires time and money both on the part of Unity customer support and the developers (many of whom cannot afford to expend this effort). Now, this manual, anti-fraud work must be factored into a game's budget, and it makes working with Unity even more expensive.

 

Until we change the terms of the deal again in our favor.

 

What would stop You from updating these terms again after 6 months and 6 months after that again? This is in itself a cashgrab and double pricing of paying customer. How should anyone expect that you not just want more and more and more and more; because some smartass has made a nice excel table where you benefit the more success you have?
How can you look in a mirror ever again.....

 

I'm curious how you will know that. If we want to have our game in a bundle, should we make a special build that can exonerated from the fee, or can we use the same build ? What if we distribute a Steam key in the bundle ? Will you be able to know that a game installed from Steam is from a charity bundle ?

 

they will update their TOS so that they can increase price every other week

 

No one is going to pay this, the vast majority of internal dev discussion now is "let them sue us and we'll dig up the messages where Unity have said they would not retroactively change the TOS." No one will update past Unity 2023 and will switch to another engine for future projects, your actual engine development may as well stall now.

You are delusional, you're destroying your brand and throwing away the talented dev team you've accumulated under the bus for short term and misguided greed. Even if this is a bait-and-switch situation where you have a less terrible plan under the table the damage is already done, and you've failed.

 

Only the immediately resignation of John Riccitiello can restore trust. This was already overdue when he insulted us as "F***ing idiots", but now it is high time that he is removed from his position.
Of course Unity has to be profitable and I think we all agree that we love Unity and appreciate the development team behind it! But it is the worst possible way to completely destroy its user base with such perfidious business practices.

Unity is lagging behind in many ways. Instead of focusing on alternatives to Lumen or Nanite, they promise us some crappy AI solution or microtransactions and advertising services. It hardly matters what developers really need these days.

I'd be perfectly fine with Unity saying they'll take 5% of revenue, I'd be perfectly fine with them raising Plus and Pro prices, I'd even be fine with them lowering the limit from 200k to 150k or even 100k as long as it remained a lower percentage(and of course never retroactively!), so developers could firmly calculate what they'll pay. None of us want Unity to go bankrupt or Unity to stagnate because there is no funding. There are many ways to make Unity profitable fairly. Squeezing out its user base is not.

 

Ha, I just found an old installer UnitySetup-4.6.9.exe, if I install and use that will they know about the runtime fees?

 

This is absolutely unacceptable and does not address ANY of my concerns that I have asked. The biggest one being:

How will you handle situations where install rates outpace profits? Let alone revenue?