Unity Plus Target Audience?

You are absolutely right about the $100k revenue cap helping sell dreams better than a $3k/quarter.

 

Yeah, I'm struggling hard right now. The money is going out much faster than it is coming in. I suppose a lower revenue cap with a lower price of $35 a month wouldn't be horrible, depending on what that cap was, of course.

To the original topic, I guess that target audience is people who don't mind throwing a bit of money Unity's way to keep the company afloat. If I had the disposable income with any degree of stability, I wouldn't mind doing such a thing for a software company that I believe in. Right now, every project I start in Unity makes me wish I'd just bite the bullet and switch to Unreal though. It's frustrating that every point release brings in a mass of new bugs, issues, and inconsistencies. I've never used software where upgrading to a point release or bug patch is so risky. If the new pricing plans are coming out of financial need, they might want to address those issues first.

 

One year ago I would never have downloaded that other engine. I was away from the forums a few weeks and last night after a burst of work doing video and other non Unity related freelance I read all the hoopla. Today I downloaded that other engine. Fire Ricotello and bring back Hegalson. I don't rent anything except my house and I am buying that soon too..for cash.. "I may not have a dime but what I have is mine" - George Strait, American C&W icon .

 

CryEngine visuals are just so damn good. I mean, for serious.

Unity's competition is getting heavier and the indie game dev community is maturing (growing in general competence). There are fewer and fewer reasons to stick with Unity over the alternatives. It's really not the right time to make questionable pricing decisions.

This is, realistically a price hike with a borderline insulting middle tier.

 

Most of the feedback on the main thread about the new pricing seems to be puzzlement over the Plus tier. It *seems* to be targeted directly toward somebody like me, but essentially the message from Unity is: "it's just like the free version, but you get to give us some money!" That's... not quite enough.

The grass is always greener. Do you have a general impression of the pros and cons of Unreal? For PC games, giving up even a single Unity asset I've come to rely on (Rewired for input) could be painful. I don't think there's anything like that in the Unreal world.

 

This is exactly what I've been suggesting previously and I think it makes a lot of sense. But Unity Plus needs to drop the splash if they lower the revenue cap for personal.

 

I would have agreed with you pre 5.3.4, but to be fair, they've become a lot better lately. This new release approach they've adopted seems promising as well, with public betas and seemingly more through bug fixing. My faith in Unity has somewhat recovered.

 

Unity-like engines. Which, at this point are Xenko, Shiva3d (not very good in terms of pricing, but it's flat fee so you can save for it) and recent BansheeEngine which seems to be open source Unity clone, though with modern stuff.

 

Well, that's their choice. In Unity's case they are a big business and they need to make other businesses pay substantial money to replace Unity's branding with their own. It's fortunate for people like me that can't afford all that branding, aka advertising that bought name recognition that people search for, that the importance of branding lets me get the interesting features of Unity for free. People search Unity to make games, not play games.

That said, the Unity splash does not hurt a game in the least. If you are an unknown, you are an unknown, the splash screen is a silly scapegoat. For those that can afford it though their own branding is very important and worth the money. It's probably the cheapest, most effective ad splash they'll ever buy.

 

The point is that it hurt unity's business because people can use something else and don't give money to unity, and unity will lose the benefit of an ecosystem that bring more payer in its trail.

 

Thats not true. Check out GameAnalytics.

 

@darkhog
To add to what you say:
There is a point to say that unity wasn't much a popular engine before, it had to grow there, and now it had forced top engindeto follow their model. Other engine can follow the same path regardless of their current state.

 

Yeah, I've played around with Unreal. I came back to Unity because I needed the game I was working on to be able to get totally dark and for some reason Unreal wouldn't do that. I've got Rewired too, but I also have my own input manager I started and never finished so I could redo that work for Unreal. That's what's really keeping me in Unity. The time I've spend building up a reusable codebase and the money I've spent on the asset store would all be lost. At some point it becomes the sunk cost fallacy though. Enlighten is the other thing keeping me here. It can be a real pain in the posterior, but the results are nice. Not all games really need it though.

I don't know about 5.3.4f1, but the later patches introduced a bug where world space UI canvases aren't rendered to rendertextures, so it completely breaks my current project. The problem still exists in the latest 5.4 beta. So once again, it becomes an issue of upgrading to a point release (or even a patch release) being extremely risky. 5.4's real time GI baking also produces much splotchier results than 5.2 did and the lights are way overblown in some areas. I wouldn't have a clue how to fix the splotchiness, but perhaps I could redo all of the lighting work that I've already done and get the levels back to where the were in 5.2. It's just a pain to deal with such inconsistencies. And there's no guarantee I won't have to do the same, or redo something else entirely when 5.5 is released. This wouldn't really be a problem, staying on a Unity version for the life of the game is generally a good idea, but some bug fixes don't make it into the release in which they were found. So it's a balancing act between which bugs you encounter and which ones you can work around.

 

Thanks! I guess I did know about a couple of those.

 

Hmm, I see this a lot, but what does the free version really do for Unity?

It costs them nothing really to provide Unity for free with the Personal Edition. PE users don't get to beta test, so we don't submit thousands of tickets to cause them headaches. The forum moderators might have a harder time but from what I understand, they are volunteers so no cost to Unity. Most of us get help on the forums or from the asset developers for asset store products. I betcha there are not a lot of PE version folks who go directly to Unity and if there are, I think Unity really doesn't have to provide them with support. That is reserved for Pro and Enterprise users.

We buy stuff from the asset store, which may not give Unity a lot but it does support the asset developers, increase their revenue, and encourage more asset developer to get involved. Now, with PE, some of those folks who use Unity for free have even become asset developers, which adds to the richness of the community. Some of us pay to attend Roadshows and purchase services from Unity as well.

So...my guess is you think that some of the PE users will switch to Unity Pro (or Personal) and pay for the use of Unity if PE were cancelled. Some might. BUT, there are so many free options out there. Once someone moves to another engine and spends the time getting through the learning curve, purchases assets specific to that engine, puts time and personal resources into the game, they are going to stay there. They are not coming back to Unity when they can afford Pro. There is no reason for it. They no longer need Unity. They can continue to develop for free and without a splash screen.

Most new users start with Unity Personal. Some eventually go pro, especially the ones who decide to freelance or who do well with their game, or who decide to publish and buy the Pro version to remove the splash screen.

But..with no free version, many people will leave and they will lose that small percentage that will "grow" into Pro. It might help in the short term, but it would deplete the community of some really good people, hurt asset store sales, and my guess is, they would sell very few pro or plus licenses to those folks.

Remember..when you are not making money, you can't afford the $125 a month. In some cases, such as a small team, you can't afford the $35 x 5 (or 6 or 7 or 10). You need the time to work on your game, or games if they are small games. You need to build your business. Unity is giving people the chance to do this. I just can't see them suddenly pulling the plug on a lot of small teams and single developers. And it would pull the plug on some of us. We would have to stop, change our hobby, give up our fledgling business, or move to another engine. Unlike you perpetual license holders, we would suddenly lose the ability to finish our games, lose all the money we have put into assets and some folks would have to stop supporting their assets...the ones that don't make enough to cover the cost of Pro.

I know it is easy to say that Free is hurting Unity or that you Pro users are paying for us freeloaders. But honestly, you choose to buy Pro. And we are costing Unity nothing. We are not the ones on the phone taking time from Unity staff to deal with account issues because we don't have accounts. If we are, it usually asset store issues and at that moment, we are paying customers. We are not submitting tickets during betas.

We are not the reason Unity is raising the prices. It is so tempting to find a scapegoat, but honestly I think they simply are not well connected with their users. This new price plan makes me feel as if they live in a bubble, not paying attention to what people want. Maybe they honestly believed the community would be happy.

Plus would be attractive to us if it removed the splash screen, maybe...if our community feedback showed us it was a problem, and then only just before release and for the following year. If our game failed, we would be back to Personal. Like any other business decision, it is based on what is the best for our company, for our team.

We may be the target for Unity Plus, but as I have said before, there is not enough to sway us. If I were a single developer, maybe.

 

Yeah, it's a good idea to get people into the product eco-system via viable means like a free version. All this does bring up a question, in 4.3 before all the competition and whilst people were happily slogging away making their titles would of been such a big issue?

I'm sure their would of been a bit of grumbling, but ultimatley the only other slightly viable choice was UDK @ 25% royalties. Plus ignorance is bliss, there were never fully featured engines out there like today that covered from small mobile to AAA unless you paid an extremely hefty sum.

So $125.00 years ago for all platforms might of sounded reasonable at one point. Issue being it's not a couple of years ago, Unity have been successful.. Probably too much.! Others wanted a piece of that pie and knew they could do it better. There's tons about Unity I simply don't "get" from a business standpoint, but ultimatley that quandary doesn't matter either.

Like the game market, it is what it is and we'll see what happens.

P.S You may wonder why I have a vested interest (or interest at all)? Well Epic were once happy to charge 25%............ Unity keeps them in check.! I do like to mess around with Unity as well, I bought a metric ton / made a ton of stuff for it.. Might as well.!

 

All I can say is that I have spend some money on the asset store but never paid for unity, they got 30% of anything I bought. Free isn't exactly free

 

They don't have much of a choice at this point regardless of whether it's sustainable or not. Over a relatively short period of time we went from having one powerful but affordable engine (Unity) to having three (Unity, UE4, CE5). That's not even taking into consideration the open source engines that are emerging and stomping all over everyone else.

We'll have to wait and see if it truly is unsustainable. If that's the case they will likely cave over the splash screen issue.

 

The game engine crash of '17?

Has a nice ring to it.

 

More like it evolve to a business plan of engines as a service. The engine is the honey pots, the service is the cash.

If unity had planned well, we could have a guideline to extend their engine through custom plug in sold on the asset store, instead of "script" that "patch" what they can (see terrain engine's alternative or utility). They would have less work as people do the job for them and keep the engine relevant, they could even acquire asset to merge them into the core.

Instead we have a rotten core full of legacy bad decision that make it hard to respond quickly to market. And they don't know what works for games because they aren't making them.

 

I'm replying to your comment, but everybody's pretty much saying that.

My suggestions were just spit-balling to understand how Unity will stay afloat. It's clear that they do have to keep the free version as-is.

Unreal has the big budget games to sustain them.
Crytek I assume is in a similar boat.
Amazon Lumberyard has Amazon's web services to fund it.
And Unity has Pro subscriptions. Hope that's enough. I'm thinking Plus subscriptions will be statistically insignificant.

 

If they managed to attract just a percent of their multi-million community to upgrade, it wouldn't be so insignificant. Of course, it would help if there actually were any solid reasons to upgrade to it.

I'm definitely for the solution to make Unity Plus more attractive while making personal less attractive would drive far more sales.

 

This.

I have talked to various people at Unite 2016 Europe on the new pricing tiers, but I have hardly found anyone that would fit to one of the new tiers:

• Most people didn't need ALL deployment platforms, but only some/selected. Of course, it's a cool sales pitch to tell your customers "you will have support for all platforms!"; but at least I couldn't find anybody who actually develops and deploys on ALL platforms you could think of.
• Most were keen to get rid of the splash screen and work with the dark skin, and they were open to pay for this.
• Few were actually dependent on the additional services that Pro offers.
• I couldn't find anybody who saw the monthly asset bundles to be beneficial to them (most just "pick and pay" what they actually need from the Asset Store; instead of having someone else pick and choose for you; like it is currently with Level-11)
• Many were working on projects > 2 years, hence long periods of financial uncertainty (making recurring monthly payments a difficult story)

In a nutshell, I wonder what the customer research looked like, that made Unity coming up with these new plans. Of course, I don't know the ENTIRE customer base of Unity. And probably there must be people out there, whose usage pattern of Unity fits perfectly to the new pricing plans. But at least from the people I have talked to, none had a pattern that would fit to one of the new pricing tiers. Including myself. All (!) people I have talked to were willing to pay for the features they need. But what people need differs a lot.

Hence, where are all the people whose usage pattern fits perfectly to these new pricing tiers? They must be the majority, otherwise the new pricing plans wouldn't make sense.

 

Everybody has access to the betas now. Even the experimental version, if they like.

I think this is a field where UT should focus on extracting money. Sell services, stop trying to bake them into the products. The less complicated the engine options are, the happier people will be. If they need analytics, cloud builds and so on they can get that from the relevant department. If they need training they'll pay for the courses as needed - aren't PE users the ones they should target for that anyway? Pro seems very targeted at big companies now, and you'd expect them to already be fairly well-versed with the engine.

Plus would be attractive if it had anything at all.

 

Edit: Oops, posted mid-writing!

Y'know... this made me think. Also just spitballing here. I'd happily pay Unity something for the Personal version I'm now using. Surely plenty of others would also be?

I think someone in all this furore already mentioned making the free version non-commercial only. With that in mind, there could be a Steam-style once-off or an iTunes-style annual fee for the right to commercially release our games. Wouldn't get in the way of learners or hobbyists at all, and those of us commercially releasing our games are already dealing with exactly that.

It's still royalty free, and it could be made super easy to check up on by including it in the splash screen.

 

I have to agree that this Plus tier seems to be missing an audience. To my mind, it should be intended for those who have been tinkerers but are now ready to take a stab at publishing a "real" game. But the only substantial difference between Personal and Plus is cloud services, which I hazard to guess the average hobbyist-getting-serious has little to no interest in. Indeed, I suspect about the only thing the vast majority of those ready to take the next step are really concerned about is the splash screen. Unity 5 brought them all the tools they need to make a quality game. The only remaining built-in barrier to being taken seriously is that screen, which basically announces to the world "I'm an amateur.".

So, if you're reading UT, if you want Plus to work, the splash screen has got to go. If you're worried about losing Pro subscribers, give Plus a lower revenue cap. I don't subscribe to Pro not because I'm cheap, but because I don't have $75/month to spare. And I most certainly don't have $125/month to spare. It doesn't matter what kind of value it is or isn't, because right now, before I'm selling any games, I just simply don't have it to give to you. If I started selling enough games that I could afford it, I'd be delighted to. I love Unity, I want it to succeed, and I'd be happy to give you $125/month once I'm making even a fairly small amount of money. Make the Plus cap $25k/year. Heck, make it $10k/year. I can work with most any cap, but I have to sell the games first.

In short:
Splash Screen > Players/Distributors > $ Sales > Can't afford Pro
No Splash Screen > Players/Distributors > $$$$$ Sales > Can afford Pro

 

For what it's worth, Unity's going to do a blog post explaining everything behind their reasoning and that will clarify decisions for long term pro users.

For personal users, I can see they see there's little point to plus, and well that'll be Unity's job to make more attractive without alienating pro users.

Personally I can't use anything but pro, I need control over splash, for me it has always been the case - my previous games have put the unity logo in the actual game itself as a gesture of support. But we don't want title screen delaying gamers from reaching the game sooner, and it does impair artistic vision. George Lucas moment? hell yeah.

For totally-free people they can't complain, there is no complaining about freebies

 

One of these days the company will learn to prepare these blog posts before they make the announcements. And have them available at the time of the announcement.

 

I know right? I mentioned that over on mod slack. It's crazy.

 

Its not like its the first time they have changed the licensing model mid Unite with only hazy details available. There was chaos on the forums then too. I don't envy you your job.

But give it a couple months and this will blow over and we can go back to normal. All of this talk about Unity in the general discussion forum is unsettling.

 

How would you make Personal less attractive at this point without causing a lot of people to be unable to finish their games? Unity opened the door, a lot of us came in. Now if you close even a part of it, we are stuck. Going back to the old limitations is impossible. Unity made free and pro the same because they could no longer split the two when they upgraded to 5. I mean, think about it.

So..what would they do? Find a way to take away realtime lighting from us? Limit our builds? Tell us that we can't publish commercially?

And really? You think that we would upgrade to Pro if they did that to us? I doubt we would even upgrade to Plus. If we were a one man/woman team, yeah. It would be an easy decision. But with a team, it gets more and more expensive, and as someone above said....when we make money from our business, we would happily pay Unity.

But now, after a year of using PE, of our game moving forward, we have spent money on better tools, better equipment for our artists, assets, etc. Like I said above, we would probably give up. The cost for team licenses and the tools to actually use a team with Unity (which is another tool we have to purchase), tools to overcome terrain issues, and subscriptions for various services have already increased our budget. We took Unity at their word and dumped everything into making our game.

I would be shocked if Unity agrees with you. I don't think they will pull the rug out from under all of us. They know we would crawl away, not pump money into a company that gives us dreams and then drops us like a hot potato. Who knows what else they might do in the future? If Plus doesn't work, they might eliminate that as well.

Unity really should provide extra services that people like us could use and make them competitive with other similar products but easier to use with Unity. For example, the cloud services would be useful to us if we could scale it to the size of our game and know that if we had 500 users, we could still get a reasonable price, comparative to others out there. There are plenty of other services as well they could provide.

 

Here is my complaint....

Every time there are changes, the free folks get dumped on by the others. I am tired of that. Remember, Unity chose to expand to include all of us.

Many of you I consider friends and I have learned a lot from you. It really bothers me when people think that eliminating free will solve all the problems. You are all smart enough to know that isn't going to solve the problem.

I know it isn't personal and have even gotten some PM's from folks who want me to know that. However, think it through. Unity competes on the market because they bring in new folks, a fraction of which become paying customers, just as Unreal does the same...and a fraction create royalties for them.

For what it is worth, I would pay royalties to Unity with the same setup as Unreal. I don't have a problem giving them even more of hard earned money than some of the Pro users are willing to do.

 

Yeah remember I did fight for full free feature set available to personal users. I argued strongly that free users made the engine look bad - because they didn't have access to the features. So not everyone dumps on you

 

I'm a one man team. I'm in essentially the same boat as you. Being forced onto a pro license would make make game development with Unity non viable.

I think you are valuable specifically. I also think free users are valuable in the general case. Or course I am a free user, so I'm biased.

But I do empathize with getting dumped on. Somehow for a small subset of pro users Unity being nice to free users translates as a bad thing.

 

No, you don't. I will never forget you telling me..."You are going to like this..." just before the announcement of PE. I really appreciate that you fought for us...meaning all users like us, not just me.

 

I believe the role of a moderator is to look out for the users, not Unity. I am a user, after all. But sometimes Unity needs a break too. I'm going off topic now, sorry :/

 

A blogpost where they tell us that they know better than us what we actually need, and how the new pro is more convenient for everyone?

 

I see the Plus tier as another way for them to drive people to start using their cloud services more, the problem is most free tier users don't see those as being worthwhile, because the existing services they have mainly only target big users not personal users. BTW I am not knocking Unity, I like the product.

It is mind boggling at how slow they move though, it points to inflexibility in the company somewhere. There is no reason Unet is still in the state it is and without more options by now. Offering really nice Unet cloud options might be a very valid reason to subscribe to Plus for me if it worked. Not just Unet as it is today though, things I expect from a cloud provider include a Identity access solution/SDK, microtransaction backend, application hosting(not just relay), suitable databases etc. These are the types of cloud services small startups need, not cloud build.

Basically look at the cloud services integrated with Lumberyard. They could even host these services with Amazon and just resell it in a packaged format, plenty of other people are doing this.

 

My wording was weird. I was solely talking about the revenue. By limiting personal more [in terms of revenue], Unity Plus would suddenly make a lot more sense. Especially if splash is removed on top of that.

So:
Personal - Cap at ???
Unity Plus - Cap at $100,000
Unity Pro - No cap

 

Why limit the cap on Personal? Increase it on Plus instead!

 

Thank you for clarifying.

Would lowering the caps on Personal make that big of a difference? From what I can see, most folks HATE the splash screen. I would guess that when they can afford it, which could be at much lower income levels, they would buy pro to remove that splash screen.

Those that can't afford it probably won't reach any justifiable limit you put on Personal.

 

That is almost exactly what I had spit balled. My original suggestion:

Spoiler

$0 - Unity Trial Edition. Fully functional for desktop (including dark UI, yeesh), but with a "Unity Trial" watermark in the corner of the screen at all times and a forced "Unity Trial Edition" splash screen. Can't publish on any platform. No iOS or Android support at all.

$99 / year - Unity Personal Edition. Same as today's Personal Edition (can publish on iOS, Android, and desktop), but with a 25K revenue cap. It'd have the forced "Made with Unity" splash screen.

$299 / year - Unity Plus, same as the planned Unity Plus, but you can turn off the splash screen. 100K revenue cap.

$1499 / year - Unity Pro, same as the planned Unity Pro. (includes iOS and Android, no revenue cap)

My assumption was that plenty of folks would pay at least a nominal fee for what we get today in the Personal Edition (I would pay for Plus if it was like my suggestion), but from the responses and people bringing up how intense the competition has become, I'm thinking I was wrong there.

The idea of the free version being for non-commercial use didn't go over well. It seems that at least some people would switch over to Amazon Lumberyard or Unreal, etc if that happened, even to avoid an $8 a month fee for commercial use. That surprised me. It's hard to get a handle on how many people would actually run away like that based on such a small sample size though.

 

Honestly, I would happily pony up $35/mo for free + no splash. $125/mo for a year is a really hard to justify price for removing a splash screen. $1500 was the perpetual license price, that was pretty fair, especially when you were getting access to render textures. $1500 a year to rent software, where all you actually get in return is no splash screen just feels really bad. If I need to support software for 2 years - am I seriously going to have to spend $3,000 just to avoid a splash screen?

It's frustrating and annoying. Unity deserves to make money, but the setup they're using here just feels awful.

 

No, more about why. You still need to decide. Sounds like you have.

 

Okay, not sure about. The trial version would just be a waste of time. Why stick with a trial version when one can get other engines for free? Same problem as a non-commercial version, only worse. You couldn't even use it to make demos to get people interested or gain funding.

$99 a year, With a team like ours Plus would be at least $300 a year, maybe more, which is okay. However, it won't be okay for everyone...especially when you can get other engines for free. 25k revenue is pretty low and other engines do not have revenue caps. It wouldn't compete with UE, even with the royalties.

$299 for plus would be about $25 a month so better than now. But..if they won't remove the splash at $35 a month, why would Unity do it for less? And..if people won't pay $35 a month just for a custom splash, would they do it for $10 less?

$1500 is exactly where pro is now and lots of folks are complaining about it.

So not sure this would help at all..maybe the Plus would be a good compromise, maybe not. I wouldn't pay $25 a month or $300 a year to remove a splash screen.

 

It's obvious why, they need more money and there's nothing wrong with that. They need to make it enticing though..

Probably would of been a good idea to do the blogpost before Unite.

 

But..wouldn't they have made more money if they had left it as is? They would have gotten more money from the added mobile platforms. Now they are losing some Pro Desktop only users as well as some who prefer the perpetual license. Also...seems for some people, in some countries, subscriptions are difficult due to fluctuations in currency exchange rates or like the guy in Greece, rules in his country that limit out-of-country transfers of money.

I have a feeling that these were all targeted to new users of Pro and that current customers will get great deals and discounts to keep them...but won't be allowed to talk about them.

All this worrying will be for nothing.

 

Compared with other game engines this new price model is crazy, but well, i hope that Unity team will be can repair this mistake.

 

Well, all those who earn more than this hypothetical Personal cap would have to upgrade. That would make a difference for Unity.

I bet the majority of indies don't make more than $100,000, and at the same time don't feel like spending $125 just to remove the splash. So if you can get rid of splash at $39 per month rather than $125, I think that would convert more Personal users into Plus ones for sure.

 

Nah, they definitely won't. If you change current personal edition from being free to paid, make it a subscription instead of one-time payment and have audacity to still demand the splashscreen, all those people will simply quit unity and switch to the nearest freely available engine. Or worse, create a competitor for unity3d.

It is a good option to take if you want to kill unity, though.