Unity plan pricing and packaging updates
blog.unity.com
blog.unity.com
> Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.
Notably, Adobe Creative Cloud requires you to check in every 30 days to validate licenses. I feel like it takes some work to come up with a DRM scheme for a development tool that is more onerous than Adobe's restrictions, but what do I know?
I certainly have never left a demo laptop unplugged for a week and then set up a demo quickly without Internet access and needed to make a quick change in my engine. That never happens to indie developers, so locking down the editor until they reestablish an Internet connection totally won't be a problem for them. /s
It's optional (Godot is free), but if any developers who are considering switching from Unity want to see Godot development accelerated, consider kicking the project a few dollars a month: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/
From Wikipedia:
> “…it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but never will.”
I think Unity is doing this to toe-to-toe with unreal, both "big boy" engines.
https://twitter.com/JohnDraisey/status/1701620078419251255
> They eliminated Unity Plus subscriptions as of today, Plus members are being switched to Pro automatically. Be careful not to have auto-renew on your account if you can't afford the price. And this is with just 2 people on my team with project access.
I mean... Jesus.
> Finally, Unity Plus is being retired for new subscribers effective today, September 12, 2023, to simplify the number of plans we offer. Existing subscribers do not need to take immediate action and will receive an email mid-October with an offer to upgrade to Unity Pro, for one year, at the current Unity Plus price.
It is a disaster trying to consume this announcement and make future plans based upon it
Right. I had a demo laptop turned off for most of a year, and when I turned it back on, it took half an hour while Windows updated. All laptops are now on Linux.
Every single day there is something to update.
I've yet to experience either of those behaviors in my daily usage of Arch, Debian and Unraid, or in my sporadic use of a few other distributions.
And if getting philosophical if they are Linux distributions or not, ChromeOS and Android (PlayStore).
Can some distros be configured that way? Almost definitely. But OP is clearly a decision maker t their company and would not choose that.
My current Samsung phone does this. I've never experienced this on any other Android device.
Brings liability into question I guess; is Samsung liable for anything if a user chooses not to update?
JetBrains license server is 48 or 72 hours and won’t even let you open the app in any way if you have no connection.
I am also curious to hear from Unity what their reasoning is for putting excessive DRM on a "free" engine.
Unity's recent moves to me speak to a fear that they've more-or-less hit their market saturation point, and now they're looking to extract more from the developers who live in their slice of the pie. I fear this will make that slice shrink, which will create more fear, and then the problem spirals.
Maybe ChatGPT6 can port the UE C++ codebase to C# and we can call it UE6
I’ve not played around with any game development for a long while - does C# end up popular here just because people are familiar with Unity? I definitely get that C++ is not the most productive language - though improving perhaps.
Simply loading the .NET Core CLR is not difficult [1] - but unless things have changed since I last tried binding C++ interfaces to C# is time consuming, especially if you want to be able to implement an interface in managed code.
[0] - https://mono-ue.github.io/
[1] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/netc...
Probably even a C or C++ background would allow you to do that. Maybe even knowing js is enough.
It previously used UE4 and C# integration was all working with that but, as soon as they found out that they could get access to Source 2, they took the opportunity. Makes sense because the team is significantly more experienced with the Source engine since most of them have previously worked on or with Garry's Mod.
Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.
But most of my issues have been with engine philosophy, where Unreal has bent over backwards to expose things to their visual scripting language. It feels like every single feature has a mandate to work in a blueprint tech demo, and as a result few of them are pleasant to code against and almost none of them work together coherently. These are not issues that depend on the language used.
Whether or not it's justified is another manner. I haven't personally dealt with the modern Unreal Engine but natively supporting C# would, at the very least, make people a lot more likely to switch over.
That being said as a non mobile guy who occasionally dabbles in engine stuff I'll be migrating to Unreal for good now. I haven't been a paying customer for a while now but I used to pay for Unity back in the super early days of AR.
Or I guess take another serious look at Godot :D
I'm also surprised though they haven't just gone and added C# support as a first class option, it seems like such an obvious win.
Edit: am I wrong (mathematically?)
Of course if you sell games at $60 a piece it is not a whole lot, and the regular seat pricing of Unity is most likely a far greater expense.
Wouldn't upgrading to Pro be a better option? Yearly subscription for a seat seems to be worth about 10k $0.2.
Also you're cost per install is almost certainly going to be significantly below $0.2 because every install outside of:
"United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, and the United Kingdom" (I wonder how did they create this list, e.g. Spain and Italy seem to have a comparable or even higher cost-per-click than Sweden , Austria, Finland etc.)
will cost just $0.02
Yeah, it almost seems to me that the $0.20 is there to force to encourage plus subscribers to Pro.
Which probably was a poor choice marketing wise since most people will just see a single number and not pay much attention at anything else.
Also it's only $0.2 fore a specific list of countries (US, CAN, AU, NZ, JP, SK and some richer EU countries). Everywhere else it's $0.02
I don't personally like this whole business model that much, but financially it seems to be pretty reasonable (I guess as long as you can somewhat predict your expected install count in advance which might not be that easy in some cases).
The issue is the fact that the wording is unclear. Also a price per install seems like a bad target overall. How is it reported? Now they are saying that there are exceptions like gamepass installs. It is going to be a mess.
Also the change is retroactive. Imagine a vendor announcing that starting January 2024 you will have to give them a piece of your cake. Even if the piece is small, you are still going to contact your layers, and you will loose trust with this particular vendor.
Oh yeah, I 100% agree with this. On the very basic level I just hate the concept of a third party tracking and counting every user I have without my (or the actual user's consent). Not every game/app made with Unity is distributed on the App Store/Steam/etc. and there are plenty of other reasons why I wouldn't want to share that data with anyone (or even collect it).
Looking at their per install pricing if you have large number of users but very low revenue per user it would certainly make sense to upgrade to Pro where you would only pay ~$2k for each seat as long as you make less than 1 million per year. Which doesen't seem that unreasonable.
It's difficult to champion high end features for your engine but keep it suitable for low end smart phones. Epic made a good attempt to win mobile devs back in the Infinity Blade days, but given their recent focus (not to mention lawsuits against Apple and Google), it seems they intentionally decided to deprioritize mobile and focus on PC and console.
Man, you just described [enshittification](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/) to a tee
This will absolutely kill any incentive for the remaining indie devs to use Unity with such a low floor and flat cost. Whereas your game going temporarily viral would have been huge , now it’ll be a huge burden. Meanwhile Unreal is 5% after 1M.
A progressive fee would have at least made some sense.
As it is, Unity lags severely behind Unreal for both features and sentiment. The big markets for Unity were indie and enterprise. They’d ceded everything in the middle to Unreal.
Epic provide megagrant funding to Godot, in what I imagine is a play to eat Unity from the bottom up. Unity will just accelerate that.
And enterprise is fickle. They’ll switch to something else as soon as any project lead feels like it.
Imho this is one more step down the road to the death of Unity. They have brilliant engineers led by very incompetent leadership.
Which is still more than Unity as long as you game costs more than $5-20?
Of course this pretty much makes making any actually free (not filled with ads free) games impossible.
Edit: If I understand correctly the install fee only kicks in after $200k revenue? If so these pricing changes actually seem pretty reasonable..
I guess they don't really value customers who can only generate $0.01-1.0 or less per install. Not saying it's right but it's not like this group of developers is really paying them that much anyway (and noncommercial games/apps don't seem to be affected at al).
I'm sure one reason Unity did this is that are pretty certain that many of those developers won't be willing to share their revenue. In countries like China where even relatively large studios would just pay for 1-5 licenses for 100 employees forcing them to give you a share of their revenue seems hardly possible.
If they are already clients and paying for Plus/Pro/etc. subscriptions that shouldn't be too hard (much, much easier anyway).
Big company selling big games will see this as a rounding error in their revenue. Indies / small company will probably need to shutdown some games because this won't be profitable...
Are they giving away their games for free (so this shouldn't(?) affect them)?
Or or have about $1-2 revenue per user or less and over overall $200k revenue?
I made up the number up but you get the idea. With a % of revenue share (or at the very least do not count installs that generated 0$ revenue) it could be a profitable game, now it risks of being shutdown.
I assumed than US/CAN/etc. user would be worth much more than that?
> marketing to get installs
Not sure how accurate, since this was on the first page I googled:
"Average mobile app CPI – $0.93 (APAC), $1.03 (EMEA), $0.34 (Latin America), $5.28 (North America)" but would imply that those numbers are no realistic.
All Latin America and most Asian (outside Japan and SK) and significant proportion of EMEA users would only cost $0.02 per install. And the users you have to pay $0.20 for are likely to be generating significantly more ad/IAP revenue for you than the rest.
But yeah, if you can't get to $1-2 even for NA/etc. users are you're actually selling your game for $1-2 the 20 cent fee seems pretty extreme.
Plenty of games are profitable at scale with only a few pennies per user.
That's pretty much the only thing that matters. there is a huge difference whether they make $0.5, $1 or $2 etc (and especially how much more do they make per user in a "rich" country since Unity seems to think that they are worth up to 10x more than everyone else.
> Plenty of games are profitable at scale with only a few pennies per user.
Beyond a certain point (over 1 mill users) it will only cost $0.01 per install. So this will affect 1-5 dev/worker studios with very low revenue per user. They could still probably just pay ~2k for Unity Pro per seat and stay under the 1 million revenue threshold.
To me it almost seems that the '$0.20 per install' is only there to encourage developers to upgrade to pro if they have more than a few hundred k. users.
> If it was instead a %
True, I'm not arguing that wouldn't be more fair. It would be quite expensive to enforce and close to impossible in certain cases. So I understand why Unity chose to do this instead.
My point is those numbers can vary GREATLY from games to games, and not only the revenue per user but the cost of user acquisition as well. There isn't one truth, the numbers I gave up could very well fit a real project.
Of course you would be pretty stupid to not subscribe to Pro once you notice your game going to 200k. And let's be real, at 1M$ threshold, if the Unity tax is what kill your game, maybe there wasn't a market fit. But it just feel such a bad and unfair way to generate revenue on free to play games.
> So I understand why Unity chose to do this instead.
Other engines does it just fine, tracking installs (without any false positive) seems a much bigger hassle especially legal wise
I'm not sure that's comparable or even true. No other proprietary engine has as even remotely comparable market share in the freemium/Ad/IAP-funded/shovelware mobile game market.
Also Epic isn't trying to pay for 8000 employees (especially not just with their engine revenue) or service billion in debt accrued from (possibly unnecessary) acquisitions. It feels to me that Unity pushed themselves into a corner by increasing and don't really have any choices but to try and maximize their revenue any way they can.
e.g. Epic seems to have about 4000 employees and compared to Fortnite Unreal seems to almost be just a side gig for them.
Also let's be fair a 5% royalty would be much more likely to scare off their best paying customers. And looking at their current leadership and overall philosophy I find it easy to understand why they might not care that much what will happen to some indy/small developers who can't afford/don't want to pay for Pro or have more than 1 million users but can't generate more than ~$0.2 - 0.5 in profit per install.
A lot of people have been thinking about switching for years, Unity is becoming slower and slower with time, more buggier, etc. I feel like this is the tipping point where the number of developpers is going to go down, so was it worth it? Maybe, maybe it was the correct decision, time will tell.
I'll still continue to use it for on-going projects I have and pay the tax no problem, but I won't pick it for any project in the future personnaly because of how out of touch and ridiculous I personaly feel this business decision is (and other decisions they've made).
- If your company was making over $200k you already couldn't be on Personal/Plus and would have had to upgrade to Pro, so the $0.2 fee seems irrelevant.
- The current limit is based on company's entire revenue, it seems they changed it to per game? If so you're actually now better off if you have many games which make about $100k or so.
- The only issues I see is that if there is huge unexpected surge in downloads/sales which might leave with a large bill (which you could've mostly avoided by upgrading to Pro in advance). Which is not the most unlikely scenario.
You sold you game for a fixed fee to Apple/MS/etc. (Gamepass, Arcade..). I doubt many games there cost less than 200k (thought I don't really know)? So you're probably on Pro. But if your overall revenue for the game is over $1 million you'd still be on the the hook to pay for additional downloads (above 1 mil) with zero increase in revenue..
If a user installs your F2P mobile game on 2-3 devices (not uncommon), you now owe 40-60 cents, not 20. Hope your average revenue is good enough that you can afford that after Apple/Google take their 30%.
I wouldn't be surprised if that 20 cent cost is just there to encourage developers who'd have to pay to update to pro (e.g. a seat for a year seems to be equal to about 10k installs, but with pro you get extra 800k free installs and increase your revenue limit by another 800k so you'll likely won't even have to pay extra for users at all)
And the charge is incremental after the 100k and 200k in revenue, so if you had 101k installs and 200k in revenue, you'd only pay $15.
Of course Unity deserve to be paid and receive revenue, I'm absolutely not against that and if you are on the Pro subscription, it is only a concerned once you reach 1M$ which at this point means the project should be profitable and manage to pay that tax (otherwise maybe that project isn't commercially viable).
But it just feel very harsh for the mega popular indie hit that have very low revenue per user you know... A % of revenue would be better or at the very least only count install that generated revenue or whatever...
And that point you should just switch to Pro and ust pay ~2k per seat each year without install fees.
Of course I guess you need to think about that in advance, but unless there is a massive spike in popularity and your daily installs spike by 10000% or something in a day (which is not that unthinkable) you should be fine.
But there are definitely gotcha scenarios, and tracking installs is highly dubious.
The issue is that, Unity are in a very odd place of the market. They completely ceded high end gaming to Unreal. They have reasonable alternatives like Godot on the other end. So their main markets are:
1. Enterprise - which is fickle
2. Indie devs aspiring for success - who are going for cheap
3. Mobile (which might include 2)
4. A very few AAA games
I think this move will alienate a lot of their indie clients in the hopes of getting more money from their higher end clients. For those indie clients, hitting 200K of revenue is a much closer dream than 1M of revenue, and they'll see that Unreal gives them more "high end graphics".
So I understand Unity's position, I just think they're alienating one of their biggest bases. Even if they don't make money directly off of them, those are the people who often advocate for use of Unity in other areas like Enterprise.
If you were using Unity you already had to update to Pro when you company hit 200k revenue (they actually changed this to per game now, I think?).
So fundamentally nothing really changed to that regard.
They added an option to not upgrade to Pro and pay the $0.2 per install instead. I can't imagine why would anyone do that though.
You'd basically have to have about 300-400k installs and revenue but require 10-20 seats so that paying per install would make more sense than upgrading you subscription.
I can only imagine this might be the case in some third world sweatshop where you pay you developers less than 10k per year..
Funnily enough the changes have also made me look back into Unreal, I hear they have a proper Linux editor now and that their flavour of C++ is a bit nicer than I expected. I doubt I'll switch from Godot anytime soon, but worth a look.
EDIT: I see the point being made a lot that this won't affect many smaller devs as they'll never make enough money to meet the threshold, however it seems to me that if your choice of engine makes you hope your project isn't successful, then it might be time to choose a different engine. Unreal engine devs hope their game will make enough to qualify for the revenue share, not because the revenue share is a good thing for them, but because it means if they're making that kind of money it won't be a problem.
Unity did have some great and useful libraries for doing things like animation rigging and editor customization. RIP
The question has already been "Why aren't you using Unreal?" and that's just going to get harder.
Given the current VC taste for eliminating all things which count against gross margins now might be a good time to be an engine developer again.
C++. Sure, we can talk about Verse or even Skookum, but C# is much easier. Still, if any big game engine would have something like JS it would be even better for indie or small studios.
You do need to be disciplined, however, being able to simply start extending random instances of other types proves remarkably useful when developing.
I'm not sure such a thing would work well on a team.
Has a brief overview in its README if anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/ldyeax/MazeEngine
I have more expansive ideas for it but for now the main demo is this silly museum. https://jimm.horse/maremuseum
It's a fun experiment in seeing what JS can do, it's cool having it run natively on the web, and annotations get you a lot of the way there, but in a context like Unity I'd never pick it over C#. Typescript might be alright but at that point why bother? C# has anonymous types, tuples, and such today too.
It was just about fine if you were doing very small projects but quickly got very hairy, and their compiler was full of bugs.
The name of the game is iteration speed. (I always think of Paul Grahams story about beating out the competition using Lisp.)
I've been working with UE since 2014, originally started in UE4 C++ and avoided blueprints and kept everything in C++. Was great 'for performance' and code diffs but now 10 years later I'm 99% blueprint and only go down to C++ if the performance requires it for the 1% of hot paths. My iteration time in UE using blueprints makes me shutter to think of all the time I spent waiting for C++ to compile.
I tried using blueprints for awhile, but it just feels so cumbersome and time consuming. I can bang out 10 lines of code basically as fast as I can think, but converting those same 10 lines of code to blueprints often involves much more time. You have to click around a bunch, rearrange the routing wires, make it look readable, abstract a lot of stuff into functions that usually don’t need it just because it helps condense the blueprints. Then the blueprints end up sprawling a large area and are very difficult to keep in my head at once (whereas it would normally take less than a page of C++ code to write it out and you can easily hold that in your head).
Basically, I was wondering if these downsides to blueprints effect you much or if you’ve developed suitable workarounds? I want to like blueprints, but the time it takes to click around and make it readable is painful, in my opinion, more painful than compile times for the C++.
It took me a while to build up enough experience where I could become more expressive with Blueprints than C++. The Lyra example has some good Blueprint hygiene worth reviewing where they organize all variables underneath a function call.. but until you have serious experience with Blueprints they are going to feel like a cumbersome mess.
My advice is to do what you feel most expressive with, doing the thing you enjoy more will lead to more hours of experience. Start with C++ and build up a good understanding/mental model of the engine and then eventually give Blueprints a try in a few more years and you will see them in a new light.
This will work just fine for small indie games and teams where the code is thrown out after a year, but there's no scaling this. I've worked with enough 10 year old Max/MSP patches to know that you will have an unmaintainable mess of wires that is as good as garbage after a while.
Larger teams typically use Blueprints to prototype but then rewrite in C++. This is a perfectly fine use case, but ultimately you still need it "written down" for the maintainability.
tl;dr Blueprints are a tool in the process to writing C++, they aren't a replacement.
Lack of Web and Mobile support
I tend to think the dev iteration speed is the core Unreal weakness.
The problem Unity have created is if something can be made with Unity it will get crowded out with clones in five minutes.
We couldn't even get Unreal to build as an embeddable library for a mobile app nor could we get it to build into anything that would run in a web browser despite more than a week of effort.
We had Unity working for both use cases in under a day.
PUBG mobile, which is in unreal, uses flutter for exactly this case.[0]
Yes. Well.
The idea that developer iteration speed is actually an indicator of project-completion-at-scale speed is really only true at a trivial scale; you know, when you only have developers. Maybe a handful of them. ..and like, one does-everything artist.
When you have multiple different teams including non developers working on actually building a significant game, crafting levels, assets, etc. the iteration speed of your handful of devs is really really a drop in the ocean.
There are a lot of very powerful tools in unreal for teams, and they have consistently invested in tooling (eg. File per actor) and real life production needs (eg. LED stage support) with their customers.
Unity has invested in different areas, with a lot of effort, and bluntly, nothing to show for it.
Aren't they making shitloads on advertising?
And that includes most games.
really only true at a trivial scale
It's not just hobbyists and students.
This really has nothing to do with Unity. Flappy Bird could have been built on any platform and you would still have a million clones of it. Because it takes a day to make it. It's just as easy to clone that game in Unreal Engine, fwiw.
Unity didn't create the concept of the quickly built game, nor is Unity responsible for society incentivizing this type of game dev. If anything, the new runtime fees will disincentivize this type of game, so maybe that's a good thing?
Unity is already imho pretty bloated but at least useable and a sensible choice for both, Unreal is just too massive and more suited for console 3D type of games.
Unreal is just another vendor with a hand in your revenues.
But everyone will be waiting for Godot to have the first widespread hit before jumping in like that.
I do a fair amount of Godot development - for casual mobile games, limited PC games, or games where you're planning on a publisher to fund your port, I think Godot is a good choice.
>Unreal is just another vendor with a hand in your revenues.
* after 1M in revenue, IIRC
We're kinda busy right now so we're paying the fee, but buying a mac mini for builds is definitely on our TODO list now, and once there's some slack in our schedule that will be done.
We've also wasted weeks of time debugging bugs in their cloud system in the past, some of which were mysteriously fixed and they had no clue why. So I'm not even sure we've saved much time over just having our own in house build server.
After reading the FAQ though I’m not sure it’s a good deal.
It also seems like you 100% have to enable spyware
I actually made a post explaining how the only terrain plugin available at the time didn't really work well in neither Godot 3, nor Godot 4: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/terrains-in-godot-not-quite...
Then, a while later, a new plugin came out that's made by the community, which seems to address some of my concerns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwJEXOglBrQ (video by Gamefromscratch)
To me, it feels like Godot has a pretty nice future ahead of it. I'll probably stick with Unity for the time being, since I don't actually expect any of my small game projects to ever get big, so the change in pricing doesn't really affect me at the time. But in the future? Maybe I'll go back to Godot, even their C# support is getting much nicer now!
That said, wow. Charging a monthly fee on game installs is absolutely wild. The personal fee (for first world countries) is $0.20 / month. If you charged $10 for the game, you'd be losing money after only 50 months (around 4 years).
> What is the Unity Runtime Fee?
> (...) Creators only pay once per download.
Why does it say "monthly rate" if it's not a monthly rate?
> You will be invoiced monthly based on the month’s install data. Invoicing will be the same method as for your Unity plan subscriptions, though it will be monthly regardless of your Unity plan payment cycle.
I'm assuming that $0.20 is paid every time it's downloaded based on their wording, so that could introduce a new way to harm competitors. Buy their game and uninstall / reinstall on loop?
Yup, but don't worry. You can get a discount if you use Unity's ad network![0]
This whole thing seems...short sighted.
[0]: https://unity.com/pricing-updates "Can I get a discount on the Unity Runtime Fee?"
The engine now exists as a vehicle to show more ads, since that’s the primary revenue source of the company.
It is really frustrating how ads have ruined so many good products/platforms.
Don't worry, companies like EA are looking at that market, licking their chops, and continue to try and push such concepts as gacha into what used to be perfectly fine video games, and plenty of consumers eat up any excuse just so they don't have to go a year without the exact same videogame as last year but worse.
Is that insane? I'm not a game developer, but it seems like it's in the ballpark of what the app stores are charging, and with a structure that's actually enforceable at reasonable cost from Unity's perspective.
But you're at least the second person just in this discussion to make that mistake, so they probably need to reword that table!
But now that's on top of the app store fee. So, using your example and the "standard (aka 30%)" app store fee, after that 200k cliff, the game makes $0.50 for every $1 sale. That is going to drive people away from using Unity on mobile games imo. Who cares about a $0.20 fee for a $70 (rip $60) game, but for a $1 game where 30% of your rev is already gone... it changes the dynamics.
Maybe that's what they want though? Maybe they are trying to use this to angle as Unity is a "serious" engine now?
My guess is that the answer there is in this bit: "Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games. This program enables deeper partnership with Unity to succeed across the entire game lifecycle. Please reach out to your account manager to learn more."
My guess is that as long as Unity is getting a slice of your ads, you don't have to worry about per-install fees. So this may be more about driving free-to-play mobile devs to use their ad services.
Depending on how the legalese is worded, we might also see the comeback of demo versions and paid versions. So the free version has lots of installs but zero revenue, and the $0.20 bite only comes out of things you're charging for.
Are there any app stores that charge developers per install? It's only per-purchase/transaction, right? The principle behind that is you don't get charged except as part of a transaction where you're making money. If a user downloads your app for free or pirates it or doesn't make any transactions, you don't pay anything.
What Unity is saying that if I buy a new phone and re-download my apps, that should cost the developers money. That seems like a very different situation to me.
So tracking installs and distinguishing between pirated and legit copies, and fingerprinting consumer hardware, and dealing with malicious or troll installs is going to be something they're somehow better at?
I can't prove Unity's motivations, but I can quote directly from their article:
> Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games. This program enables deeper partnership with Unity to succeed across the entire game lifecycle. Please reach out to your account manager to learn more.
and I think it's reasonable to at least entertain that it's not enforcement trouble that's causing them to create this policy. Not for the least reason being that they still have a revenue requirement sitting in front of this policy, and they still need to engage in the exact same accounting and fights to figure out which companies have made $200,000 so they can start charging them per-install.
Note that nobody here really cares about total precision. Especially not their major customers who have negotiating power and who end up paying $0.01 per install. They're going to miss x% of the installs and have y% of spurious extras, and whether or not this approach advantages one side or the other is going to depend on a lot of factors down in the noise. If there's a large enough error it's going to end up as one more factor in the conversation with the account rep I'm sure they'll be having anyway.
> they still need to engage in the exact same accounting and fights
No, I think these are very different fights. A rev share means that every month everybody has to have the fight about what the actual revenue numbers are. I expect the way this work is that Unity will be tracking every game and looking at their app store metrics. If in their opinion they think you're making enough money to be worth squeezing, they're going to have an account rep call you. And if you don't engage, eventually they bring in the lawyers. So it's a one-time pain versus a monthly pain. Then the fight's just about install numbers, which are published and which I'd guess they have the ability to check on via instrumentation.
I disagree, these requirements refresh regularly and are applied per-game (note, I'm not saying that Unity is charging per-month, I'm pointing out that if you make $200,000 one year and $180,000 the next year, you dip back under the threshold and don't have to pay.)
This is still going to be a continual fight. Sure, I buy that you save some effort for studios that are clearly over the threshold, but it sounds like you're primarily talking about smaller companies anyway, and (correct me if I'm wrong) I don't see how it would be harder for a company to say "last year our 5 games each only made $190,000, it was a slow year for us".
> They're going to miss x% of the installs and have y% of spurious extras, and whether or not this approach advantages one side or the other is going to depend on a lot of factors down in the noise. If there's a large enough error it's going to end up as one more factor in the conversation with the account rep I'm sure they'll be having anyway.
> Then the fight's just about install numbers, which are published and which I'd guess they have the ability to check on via instrumentation.
I don't think these statements agree with each other. In any situation where it's simple to check install numbers (ie, Steam) -- Steam will also be tracking revenue. Where sales numbers are hard to track would be across multiple storefronts where... I mean, installs are also going to be hard to track. Unless they're planning to require an Internet connection for installing GoG games and Itch games because those installs aren't otherwise tracked. But I feel like that's going to be an issue for users if they do. Tracking revenue on a platform like GoG should be significantly easier than tracking installs, GoG has very little infrastructure I'm aware of to track installs of DRM free games.
I'm not an accountant, I don't want to make a serious claim, I could be wrong about the complexity, but it sounds like there is still going to be fighting over what installs failed, what was and wasn't pirated, etc... is that fight easier to have than "how much revenue did you take in?" :shrug:
Also bear in mind that this is not "you cross the threshold and then pay us for all installs", it's "you cross the threshold and pay us for installs after that point." So it's not just enough to ask if a company is making $200,000. When did they hit $200,000 in the current calendar year? How many installs happened specifically after that point? You still have to have that conversation with the company's accountants and you still have to try and confirm dates. And you have to do that yearly, and if you're already going to companies yearly and working with their accountants per-game to figure out when exactly installs start costing money... I don't know, again I'm not an accountant. I see that as a similarly complicated problem. Maybe I'm wrong.
----
My take is that Unity isn't saying that this makes their accounting easier, they're saying that it's going to encourage more "deep collaboration" with developers who purchase additional services, and that it supports the "continued investment" of the runtime. I'm inclined to believe the motivations that they're saying publicly. I'm sure that if they're pressed they won't reject a framing of accounting/ease of use, but it strikes me that it's not the motivation they're leading with. But I can't read their mind.
It looks completely insane terms for lot of mobile games where monetization is huge challenge and difference between profitable game and company bankruptcy measured in cents per user.
>The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to this game, as it surpasses the $1M revenue and 1M lifetime install thresholds for Unity Pro. Let’s look at the game’s installs from the last month: Prior month installs (Standard fee countries) - 200K Prior month installs (Emerging market fee countries) - 100K
The fee for install activity is $23.5K USD, calculated as follows: (100K x $0.15 (first tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.075 (second tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.01 (fee for emerging market countries)) = $23.5K USD
Have a game that's profitable enough to pass the threshold and then interest drops off? You're suddenly incentivized to completely take it off of the market and remove the game from people's libraries since you'll keep racking up fees from installs even if no one ever buys another copy.
I'm not denying that the quote does seem to imply what you're saying, but I have to believe that's a misprint or bad writing on their part, the implications of the threshold being lifetime sales are so bad. The policy is bad, but there's no way Unity is that comically out of touch, is there?
Yes and no. You need to meet _both_ thresholds, cumulative (lifetime) installs _and_ yearly(!) revenue. I (!)'d the yearly part there, because you still need to be pulling in a yearly $1M of revenue (I'm assuming Unity Pro here cause the math is simpler) after your 1M of installs.
So while there are some edge cases here that are legitimately ludicrous, it's not the case that you're on the hook for the game in perpetuity, because if your game falls off a cliff and you make $500k in revenue next year, you owe nothing in runtime fees. In other words, you're not incentivized to take it off the market after 1M installs unless the runtime fees made it so you started losing money on the game after your $1M of revenue-- there are some examples where this is possible but none of them are very realistic.
What about the contractors we pay to do a few months of work at the end and use their own licenses. What about the folks that do our PS5 and Xbox ports for us?
Unity attempted to clarify their position around Game Pass telling devs not to worry because Microsoft will pay, but that makes me more worried because MS will just pull those games. I think there are 25 million Game Pass subscribers, and that's a lot of 20c installs.
We were hoping for another stint in Game Pass as a follow up to Void Bastards.
The app stores track it, but they don't publish it, so Unity won't have access to it.
So now they are charging developers for something users have an incentive to try to do without paying the developer.
Ad platforms. It's common especially for mobile games to have a monetary rate where you pay per install.
I'd be open to more clarification if there's something I'm missing, but I still don't think this is comparable to app store fees.
/j
And what about the install fees? Let's say my studio fails but people keep installing because of piracy or any arbitrary reason, am I going to get charged for the remaining of my life? It's just a shocking move
"I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)
- If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges
- Same if they install on 2 devices
- Charity games/bundles exempted from fees"
This is genuinely insane — I’m not familiar with any other software in the world that charges a customer for deleting and reinstalling it to the same user/same machine.
The writing was on the wall then. These “pricing upgrades” today are designed to drive more adoption of Unity’s ad network. Popular free games will have to start showing ads via Unity to pay for the new runtime distribution fee.
This has made +10 years of high-quality, unforgettable, GOTY games made in Unity to not have the logo, while all the humble, low-quality, full of free-asset-store assets, practice projects of newbies, show the Unity logo first and foremost.
Literally attaching your brand recognition to the projects exactly opposite of the ones you want your brand to be recognized with.
So if you made $200k off of 1M installs, you’ll now pay $200k and your total profit will be zero.
I guess the assumption is that each install will earn you >>$0.20, but that’s a very generous assumption. What about a F2P game that has millions of installs but only a fraction support the game with microtransactions?
There’s definitely going to be some cases where studios will owe more money to Unity than their game makes.
You’re right, some studios are going to be forced to switch to the Pro plan to save on per install pricing. That just seems like a really frustrating forced upgrade.
My game has been around for a few years and has over 500k life time installs.
I May be getting very small install rate per month now, but would still have to pay a lot.
They are offering a free upgrade from Plus to Pro for one year, but that does nothing once that time elapses - you have to pay the Pro fees or drop down to Personal, which is not viable for most games.
Then you shouldn't be in the business of selling games with a model that bad. Who is charging 20 cents for their games?
The Unity Page does not mention free games with micro transactions, but especially there the user turnover is way higher. A lot of people will install it, play it for a few minutes (or days) and remove it again. Will the developer pay those install fees too?
This entire thing seems not really thought out.
I am also wondering what about trolls, who spoof HWID (or whatever the unique install id is based of) and spam-install it
Except it doesn't. Selecting Unity as your game engine is a business decision and part of your business model. If you cannot make a profit in your game after the fee, it's not Unity's fault that you have a bad business model.
I once crapped out a game engine over a weekend using python. I called it turdPy.
I released it under a commercial license of $20000 per CPU thread per developer device per day to use. With an additional 80-20 revenue share model (80% going to me) once the devs sell their game.
I never got any customers, and I always wondered why. But now I understand that it was because game studios simply didn't have a good enough business model.
Seems like having less of those games on Unity might improve Unity's brand.
To make your case, I think it would be more relevant if Unity decided to charge game publishers extra for publishing games that were only installed for some short amount of time on a device before going uninstalled. That is not the case here.
Anyway, I see where your mind is at, but I think the conclusion you came to is not correct. I don't see what incentive Unity would have to keep low quality games off of their product, they actively would want them to succeed to hit the thresholds for monetization. And besides, everybody already knows to judge the tool based on its potential, rather than judge it based on some mediocre games that came out and flopped, because that happens with any engine.
It's often easy to guess which engine a game is made on, because they tend to share certain elements (UI, rendering techniques etc).
If your engine is associated with poor quality games, than high value games may decide to use a different engine.
You don't even need to get that technical. It seems that using a privacy respecting browser that blocks cookies and fingerprinting techniques will identify a simple page refresh as an install.
That's a change from the past, and the FAQ doesn't provide a reason why. My guess would be analytics over licensing, but who knows really.
Ugh, this whole thing is so frustrating. I’d love to cancel our unity projects and port to godot or unreal, but that’s just not possible in the near term.
Unity is doing everything they can to push devs away.
Is that really such a problem? It looks like it'll work offline for up to 3 days.
Will there many people doing game dev that can't go online once every 3 days in 2024?
Products that require an Internet connection to function are effectively time bombs that stop working at some future date, due to an incident or a change in someone else's business.
I didn't say that was a "problem", but since it's harder to write a tool like this that fails when a server is down than to write one that keeps working... the question is why?
After taking some time to mourn I plan on looking into Godot. I expect to take a big productivity hit but at least I won’t be continuing to invest my time into working on a platform that is so anti-dev.
You'll need to do some prompt engineering and must have chatgpt4 to get good results.
In my case, this would be the final straw after years of baffling tech reorgs and broken promises, but I have such a massive sunk cost investment in Unity store assets that I am effectively locked in.
All of that said, I would put serious money on this getting at least partially rolled back in the next few days. The blowback is going to be big enough that the investors might tell the MBAs to stop sacrificing their long-term profits for short-term gains.
Imagine Sony suddenly trying to impose a per-playback fee on all existing and future factory-produced Blu Ray discs.
Imagine Lockheed spending 5-10 years developing a jet fighter, then a year before it's finished, TI tells them that there will be a monthly usage fee for every TI chip used in the aircraft.
Imagine a retailer spending hundreds of millions of dollars to roll out a new Fujitsu point-of-sale platform, then a year later Fujitsu says they're updating the license terms to require a flat fee for every customer transaction. Or worse, imagine that the Fujitsu platform runs on Windows, and Microsoft tells the retailer that the Windows licensing terms have been updated to require a per-transaction fee for every Windows device that has point-of-sale software installed.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm completely failing to see why any business would continue to use a product that requires a long-term commitment when the vendor has acted this way.
Is it a last-ditch cash grab to appease Unity investors? i.e. do they know that it will kill their platform, but they're hoping the tail end of Unity-based games[1] will generate enough licensing fees to recoup some of the investment money?
[1] i.e. games already released, but still for sale, as well as games still in development but too far along to switch to another engine.
* Do WebGL plays count?
* This could bankrupt indies if too many people click the WebGL games
* What Unity Version is this effective from?
* Will games made on prior versions of the editor be affected?
According to https://unity.com/runtime-fee "distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an install."
> Will games made on prior versions of the editor be affected?
From the FAQ https://unity.com/pricing-updates , "Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024?
Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime".
So while it doesn't apply to any past downloads, it will apply to any future downloads of previously released games.
This was not clear to me at first based on their table which currently shows 1-1000 installs as falling into the $0.20, but it's in fact actually the installs AFTER passing the threshold I believe. So assuming it was installs, it would be install 200,001 - 201,000 that would be charged $0.20?
>An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.
Lmao, so if someone pirates your game the developer has to pay for it?
And if a user installs your demo you have to pay the fee anyway.
We had over X million downloads of Void Bastards.
I wonder how many people are scrambling to pull the game out of Gamepass right now :)
Update: I updated my comment to hide the install numbers in case there was some rule that prevents developers sharing those numbers.
I'm sorry but maybe I'm missing something obvious.. Why are they making this seem preferable to developers? Also what does the runtime being installed have anything to do with the cost to Unity? This is mind blowing, i have to missing something.
Watch your games get auto removed after the developer goes out of business or doesn’t pay RENT
I don't disagree that Unity need to make money, but they should go the Unreal route with % of profit or something.
Tons of games don't even make back 0.20$ per user (mobile or f2p), what's going to happens to those? Force to close because they cannot pay the rent?
I wonder if this entire fee will be passed directly to the customer
I think it's a play to force f2p games to use their ad mediator as the install fee will effectively raise the cost-per-install for anyone using competing ad networks.
Vampire squids doing vampire squid things. I'd expect them to get sued, and at least in the EU it seems likely to be difficult to defend.
These days I'm doing WebGL and ThreeJS is not fun either with upgrades, depreciated functions.
The whole ecosystem is a mess these days. I need to shave my beard.
Also this seems to be targeting the mobile market more than other markets because of how large install bases are on that platform. 100M+ users for each popular mobile game * 0.01-0.02 = a lot of money for Unity.
I suspect this will significantly impact the Xbox GamePass lineup soon once it takes effect.
Also, imagine that pirated copies or even multiple installs by the same users counts into hitting that threshold. I could see a malicious competitor pushing a lot of installs to hit someone else bottom-line and sink them financially with a minimum of risk for them.
That new policy need to go back to the drawing board ASAP.
With that being said, I have never had the desire to use it (or any other engine). Perhaps I'm a minority here, but I dislike engines and I dislike the idea of "building my own engine."
I think you should set out to make the game. You begin by creating a window. Then you draw some pixels or render a texture. You add events and controls. You make the game logic and states. Then you have a game. It can take as little as a hundred lines of code to have a basic game up and running.
From there, you make the thing you want to create. No more, no less.
Yes, but without an engine, how do you make this all cross-platform?
Using something like Unity, you can theoretically write your program once and it runs on damn near anything. Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, PlayStation 4/5, Switch, and more.
It's like when a web developer starts talking about how they will handle the c10K problem, or how their todo app is deployed on a fancy kubernetes cluster across the planet running on edge networks and fault tolerant, but they have zero users and no good ideas.
Just make the game you want to make. If it's fun and people love it, build it out more. Rewrite it if you have to. Hell, Minecraft was wrote in Java, then C++. Just make a game.
"Just make a game" is fine if your game is going to be simple and can be done in a month, but there are plenty of indie games that have had only one or two developers for a couple years before even entering Early Access. A game with that kind of complexity helps a LOT to use an engine.
Just pray that you're never employed to be the #2 developer to someone who built their own game without an engine. "Why would there be documentation? Just follow my inner voice."
Did I forget about reflection probes? How about a terrain editor? Maybe you need to bake lighting to make your game look good.
I think this comment might wildly underestimate just how much modern game engines like Unity, Godot, and Unreal bring to the table. They may very well be the most complex pieces of software in the world today
"How will Unity track installs?"
> We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won't go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.[1]
> Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
> A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...
Also what is an install? Why not go with "user", someone installing the game 5 times is gonna cost 1$?
Terrible communication all around form Unity.
Unsurprisingly, the FAQ does not answer much.
Web Games? So every single person that open the web page is going to cost me 0.20$?
That's what they're saying, "each time a qualifying game or app is downloaded by an end user". And they have an incentive to count multiple downloads as multiple "installs".
You are likely already paying a recurring cost to Unity, as per https://unity.com/pricing: Excluding the free Student & Personal tiers, the starting list price is $2,040 per year per user (for Unity Pro), going up to $4,950 per year per user for the top tier (Unity Industry).
So, this is a new charge, which becomes active when the following conditions are met for a particular game:
• # of installs, over the life of the game, passes 200k (Personal) or 1MM (Pro/Enterprise). • Revenue, over the last 12 months, passes $200k (Personal) or 1MM (Pro/Enterprise).
Once both of those thresholds have been met, then you get charged a flat fee per install over the threshold. So, if you meet the Revenue amount, and you've had 200k/1MM installs, your next install requires you to pay a fee to Unity.
This is all covered in the table at https://unity.com/sites/default/files/2023-09/NewFeeTable.pn...
For games that are not being distributed through a channel (Steam, GoG, console/app store, etc.), this is going to be really annoying to track and report on. This is also going to be annoying for games that are distributed through multiple channels. Unity's probably going to get into the auditing game at some point; à la Microsoft, Oracle, etc.
I imagine they could expand on their existing analytics platform, which I believe is already forced into any release from Unity Personal?
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/com.unity.services.analytics...
Innovation requires talent, efforts and pain - and that's a scarcity, especially in the aging company which prefers an illusionary comfort to the true freedom.
My app is totally free, done as a charity/side project for disadvantaged kids.
I've been paying for their Plus plan - $35 a month. Now it will have to be $185 a month, or my app would have to have Unity splash screen...
Very sad.
Would have to figure out another engine to move to, preferably that has good native Web support as well. Any recommendations?
I assume you haven't made "$200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months" from it, so you can relax.
- I strongly dislike the name and logo
- It feels very foreign at first, but easy to pick up
- It appears to me that it is production ready
- Migrating an existing unity project would be an absolute nightmare
- Publishing to consoles looks tricky, but I haven't been far down that path yet
I am going to be spending more time with it now, because I have been growing less and less happy with unity over the last 2+ years. The proverbial straw has now found it's seat upon the camel's back
This pricing change pressurizes modestly successful long tail profits. And so I think yes competitor game engines that are more progressive will be more popular for those segments.
There are at least a few of us here already. I imagine the "hacks" will be released shortly after this is available to the public.
Per install fixed cost is a good way to avoid the race to the bottom and then the F2P nightmare that still plague the mobile gaming market.
Before Apple invented the $.99 pricing tier, most mobile games were sold for $7-$20 and it was, IMO, a much better market.
Like I kind of get where you're going... Increasing expectations so products must be high quality and guaranteed to be profitable. Although that's still a little wishful. And so it might not be realistic.
I personally think this will actually suffocate certain segments of the software market. It's like the insurance donut hole here in the United States where if you're between certain ages you don't qualify for Medicare and you still are paying for it and so you risk going into extremely high insurance cost zone, just because your age happens to be like 58 years old.
Nowadays, of course, the $40 game is $70+Battle Pass+Digital Deluxe Upgrade+Day 1 DLC and the $1 game is free but contains a hypnotoad that will mind control you into spending $400 a month gambling for jpegs.
Dirt cheap games appeared "thanks" to Apple.
https://unity.com/products/unity-pro
So I see $2040 per year per seat for Unity Pro. That doesn't quite explain why the per-install costs decline with volume for Pro/Enterprise licensees, but I suspect that's just that the Pro/Enterprise are more sophisticated and have better negotiating power.
So your game is dependent on their servers, and they can kill your game?
There’s no other way to interpret “standard monthly rate = 0.2”
What is the Unity Runtime Fee?
We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that
applies to certain Unity subscription plans
based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported
game platform. Creators only pay once per download.Faux: made to look like something else that is usually more valuable
Common mistake, no worries
Development times are measured in years, and one does not simply plug and play Unreal for Unity.
I’m fully expecting enshittification of the Unity Editor next.
There's MonoGame, but man, it's really a mess, they're still using Microsoft.XNA.Game;
And I always have a hell of a time getting it hooked into Visual Studio.
Recently started a C# project that renders using DirectX onto Windows SDK window.
Hopefully I can continue along with that.
Mobile games are already a risky business with success hard to come by. Marketing costs for games has already gone up due to due to ATT.
They are doing the classic chase current revenue while destroying future revenue thing
- the per-install fee doesn't kick in until you've passed BOTH the annual game revenue and install thresholds (i.e. >$200k annual revenue on the game and >200k lifetime unique downloads)
- the fee isn't monthly, it's per unique download (poor wording in Unity's chart)
- you only pay the fee on the number of downloads over the threshold
This new pricing will actually decrease the price of using Unity for many developers. Before, if your company's total annual revenue was >$100k, you had to buy a paid Unity license no matter what. Now those company's can use Unity totally free until their game reaches $200k annual revenue and 200k lifetime downloads.
This licensing scheme is actually very similar to licensing the AVC/H.264 video codec from Via LA (for example, if you want to ship a build of Chromium with MP4 enabled). In their case, licensees self report the number of units they've distributed per year and pay a small fee on the number of units over 100k. If you ship under 100k units, there is no fee.
Probably true since it doesn't appear like they're a game engine company any more. The enshittification machine is rumbling to life.
A developer decides to make their game that was a hit almost a year ago free? Now they might have to pay Unity more than the $200k they made on the game earlier!
Or if they throw it in a charity bundle, they get punished for their attempt to help people in need!
Last time I checked their storage limit was around 40GB, that's too little unless you are making 2D casual games. I'm making a 3D shooter that takes 300GB+.
"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user."
"Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs."
Ripe for fraud.
If unity is malicious they could actually set up farms artificially inflating installation counts and generating a little extra profit.
If you're an indie studio making small 2d or basic 3d games, you will use Godot If you're a big studio looking for AAA graphics capability you will use Unreal.
There is no other reason to use Unity other than legacy asset store purchases and existing project maintainence.
In 2-3 years those legacy projects will wrap up and Unity will be dead in the water as a company, mark my words.
- cross your fingers for a deal with a major (Xbox game pass, Epic exclusivity) - cross your fingers for a deal with one of the smaller ones that will do proper guidance and marketing (devolver, deck13, new blood, Annapurna, team17, etc) - cross your fingers for big streamers to dedicate at least a few hours to your game - make an extremely niche, moated game that will for sure attract a specific fanbase that buys everything on that niche. And cross your fingers that a competitor doesn't launch around the same date. - make an addictive gachapon filled casual mobile game, and burn money in ads
Only one of these doesn't have you crossing your fingers. (I'm half joking please don't take this too seriously)
EDIT: The more I read the FAQ, the more I think this is a bad deal
To many low quality unity games out there.
This reads as something insane. If a player replays a game on steam, redownloads it, the developer still pays for the installation? I know people who redownload games all the time, like tens of times over the span of several years. I hope it's imprecise language and only the initial install/download is counted.
I hope these changes (whatever they actually are) won't push game developers towards developing games that milk users more, with loot boxes, in-game currency, cosmetics etc, and away from stand alone you-pay-once games, single player or multiplayer, only to be able to pay for the ongoing engine fees.
- What about pirated copies?
- What about maliciously installed copies? (4chan: "alright frens, time to install-bomb <gamewehate.exe>! Remember to click the IP address rotation button each time!"
There is a real risk of this happening.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Eufloria is a good example (for me), as I've played that one on several different machines over a few years. Probably played and deleted it more then 20 or 30 times overall. And will likely keep on doing more too.
Unity is assuming that there is "success" due to an installation. That's a inconsistent assertion. And so, there are flaws with this billing approach.
They are also seemingly making Unity games online-only for the DRM/accounting purposes.
Also, this continues my pet peeve of disguising bad news with neutral headlines. If they had made anything cheaper they would have put it in the headline. "Updates" means "price increases".
Unity right now is only massively used by 1) Indies 2) Mobile game studios
They just made sure that all of those will switch tech.
Unreal Engine has a much better license because it says that "it's not retroactively changable": so if you eg stay at Unreal 5.2 forever no new epic changes to the license will apply to you since the 5.2 license applies to you forever.
RIP unity.
Even if unity reverts this (which IMO they will due to backlash) all new mobile studio game devs will move to some other engine.
It seems they will just bill monthly on the net gain in installs.
They still avoid the topic of defining how a install is tracked (do reinstalls count?) and so far on their forum have not replied to it.
Making the developer pay for user's hardware upgrades is still insane.
On the recent Intel platforms upgrading your CPU required upgrading your mobo too, and there are many people who upgrade almost every generation, i.e. 1-2 years. Burdening game developers with this is unjust. The engine fee should be tied to the game's purchase, or game related purchases(DLC, other paid content).
AMD also promised (iirc) that the AM5 will only be good for 2 generations.
That would really suck for a small Unity dev to get screwed by a Windows update that forces reinstall of their users' game libraries - which isn't that uncommon.
Pretty trivial for a malicious user to spoof, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's something that calculates a new hardware id for trivial changes as we see so often with "don't install this on more than 1 computer" DRM implementations.
https://forum.unity.com/attachments/upload_2023-9-13_1-49-36...
> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform.
> An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.
> Each time a game is downloaded, Unity’s runtime code is also installed. The Unity Runtime Fee goes towards the continued investment in that code to support the billions of devices served every month.
Completely abolishes the incentive of pushing free updates too. You don't want to make new great features that would push people to re-download your game.
> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download.
> An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.
The FAQ clarifies absolutely nothing.
Still bonkers for a cheap mobile game.
I don't know what to do. I have a huge sunk-cost fallacy here.
I guess I'm going to ship it and pray, and then never use Unity again.
Jesus christ, what were they thinking?
Fuck Unity.
Let's look at fictional scenario for Vampire Survivors, and model 5M units sold in the first 12 months at $4.99 per sale. We'll also assume a Unity Enterprise plan.
Units Sold: 5,000,000
Gross Sales: $24,950,000
Steam Fees:
$0-10M (30%): $3,000,000
$10M+ (25%): $3,737,500
Total: $6,737,500
Unity Fees:
0-100,000: $12,500
100-500k: $24,000
500k-1MM: $10,000
1MM-4MM: $30,000
Total: $76,500
Net Sales: $18,136,000
So in this fictional scenario, the Unity fee is 0.3% of gross or 0.47% after Steam takes its cut.
Even if we assume the average consumer downloads the game 1.2 times, that's still only $20k more. The bigger issue is how thresholds accrue, since that could push more installs into costlier lower threshold brackets.
I'm not sure I see the outrage.
Going with % of profit does.
Also it is quite unfair to cheaper games, indie 5$ games pay a much bigger share than a 40$ / 70$ game
Sounds good to me!
You cannot be onsided in business: both parties have to profit.
If one parties is screwing the other party one party will say "goodbye, we will take our money elsewhere".
Also this will apply to every games made on Unity, so if you have a hugely popular game just above the threshold but make less than 0.20$ per user you effectively need to shutdown it down.
It isn't "bad business model" either, there is definitely a market for games where the revenue per user is less than 0.20$ (or whatever number).
Going with % of revenue is the sensible decision, just like Unreal does...
What? Unity is in fact responsible for the fee structure, they made it. It's not a force of nature, you don't get to change the business model under people's feet and then say, "huh, real irresponsible of you to choose a business model that doesn't work because we broke it; not our fault, you should have planned for us changing your revenue structure." Especially since as far as I can tell, Unity is retroactively applying this change onto existing games already on the marketplace.
God didn't make the business model bad, Unity did. And when those games launched, they launched under a different business model than what Unity is proposing. It is in fact not their fault that they didn't have the psychic ability to consider, "what if Unity randomly decides in the future to charge us every time a user installs one of our free games even if they only play it for 30 seconds?"
No, the developer that chose Unity made the bad business model.
If I buy a Porsche in order to do Uber, it's not Uber's fault that I'm going to lose money.
This is absolutely Unity's fault. If you buy a car to use Uber, and then half a year later Uber decides that your brand of car is no longer eligible to drive or that it needs to use a different fee structure, then it is Uber's fault that you are losing money.
If you launch an ad-supported game in 2020 under a revenue share and in 2023 Unity decides that it's bored of revenue shares and it wants you to start paying per install, it is Unity's fault that you are losing money. There just is no way to spin it otherwise. Are you seriously trying to blame developers right now for not being psychic?
I guarantee 100% that if we were having a conversation about Unity a year ago and someone said "I don't know if I should use Unity because what if they charge for installs in the future" you would have been making fun of that developer for having that concern. I promise you that a year ago you would not have predicted this change and you would have dismissed concerns about a theoretical structural change away from revenue shares as fearmongering.
> If I buy a Porsche in order to do Uber, it's not Uber's fault that I'm going to lose money.
Also once again, Unity's pricing model is not a natural consequence of the laws of physics. It's made up, Unity made it. The reason you'll lose money driving a porche for Uber is because the car will physically degrade, not because a bunch of board members at Uber got together and thought, "how can we extract more revenue from porsche owners?" Unity's revenue model is not the natural result of entropy, they decided to make it what it is.
> you would have been making fun of that developer for having that concern
What a ridiculous statement, thinking you can somehow figure out how I'd reply "100%" just from reading this thread. You haven't provided anything so far in this conversation that has pushed the conversation forward, other than some ad-hominems. Great job.
> It's made up
All pricing models are made up.
Am I wrong? :) I mean, feel free to prove me wrong, were you a year ago thinking about the possibility of Unity dropping a revenue share model completely? Was that a conversation anyone was having anywhere at all? Forget about your personal response, you might not have been thinking about Unity at all a year ago. Fine. Can you find a thread, anywhere at all, advising mobile developers not to use Unity because they might abandon revenue sharing?
I mean, apparently this is a thing they should have considered, right? So do you have an example of anyone, anywhere, considering it?
The closest I can think of is the general advice to game developers not to use proprietary tools period, but I don't think that's what you're suggesting given you're not on here now saying that nobody should use Unity because of the power imbalance.
> If a company makes a product, say physical goods, and the price of manufacturing goes up but the company doesn't increase consumer prices in response, is it the manufacturers fault?
Nothing physically has changed to force Unity to change prices, nor is Unity claiming that's the case. Also yes, in a scenario where you have an agreement with a company and the company changes the underlying prices of that agreement without warning, you would be correct in saying that it is certainly more the supplier's "fault" that a company goes out of business than the company owner. You might claim that the supplier didn't have a choice, but it would be ridiculous to claim that it's the buyer's fault that the prices changed.
And again, I have to keep saying this: there is nothing physical going on here and Unity the company itself is not claiming that they're changing their pricing model in order to cover new costs. Analogies to material costs don't really apply here.
> All pricing models are made up.
Yep. That's... that's what I said. And if you're asking "who's fault is it that the pricing model is what it is" it's probably the fault of the person who created the pricing model.
"Who's fault is it that this book has these words in it? The author's?"
"No, it's the readers' fault!"
Come on.
Can you prove you're right?
> I mean, apparently this is a thing they should have considered, right?
I'm unaware of any business that doesn't consider pricing changes to strategic costs as future liabilities, especially when you don't have a contract with fixed terms. I don't see any evidence that Unity made guarantees that it's historical prices would remain consistent into the future. They're a public for-profit company, not a charity.
> Nothing physically has changed to force Unity to change prices
So not only can you predict what I would say, you have some sort of insights into Unity's cost structures and what it requires for them to keep Unity updated and competitive?
> but it would be ridiculous to claim that it's the buyer's fault that the prices changed.
It's not ridiculous to blame the seller that doesn't increase their pricing to keep a tenable margin. If my costs of goods increase but I keep my prices the same, it's my fault.
:) I thought so.
The only people making arguments about future Unity changes were Open Source weirdos like me who were warning against proprietary software in general, and we were regularly dismissed and called impractical. Nobody was considering that Unity would drop revenue sharing as a business model. If you go back and look at advice about the mobile markets, this was not a concern on anybody's mind.
Yes, people considered that pricing itself might change, but professionals in industry were not advising about the possibility of Unity changing away from a revenue share model, nor was this ever coming up as a concern in conversations about Unity's efforts to appeal to mobile developers. It's actually fairly easy to tell what people were thinking about Unity's pricing model given how recent the change is -- you can just go back and look at the many conversations people were having about engines.
I'll tell you what you won't see: you won't see a lot of people floating the possibility of installation-based pricing.
> I don't see any evidence that Unity made guarantees that it's historical prices would remain consistent into the future.
This isn't about a pricing change, it's about a change to the entire pricing model.
Nonetheless, you raise a good point. Unity could make arbitrary changes in the future as well. Doubtless, you would agree that it's irresponsible for devs today to use Unity under the current terms given that they have no control over what Unity's future pricing will be and given that pricing changes can be retroactively applied to games that they release before those changes?
Certainly you'd advocate today for the same level of responsibility and caution that you're arguing mobile developers should have had in the past, right? We have no idea what Unity's pricing model will be in 6 months, there's no guarantees in the contract -- and like you say, we need to consider that fact when building a business. So it would be the height of irresponsibility to advocate that everything is fine and the changes are no big deal and developers should just continue to use Unity.
Would you advise Unity developers today to decrease reliance on the engine and to be extremely cautious about building a business on top of a platform that can make arbitrary changes to pricing structures and that can apply those changes to existing products? Sure Vampire Survivors is profitable now, but as you correctly point out, there's nothing in the contract stopping Unity from changing that in the future.
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> So not only can you predict what I would say, you have some sort of insights into Unity's cost structures and what it requires for them to keep Unity updated and competitive?
Scary, right? I'm almost as psychic as you expect mobile developers should have been. ;) In my case it's not magic though, there's a trick to it. I get my information from having being active in game development spaces for a while and being familiar with the conversations that professionals were having about engine choice, and also from reading Unity's own press release and reading their own supplied justifications for why they're making the change.
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> If my costs of goods increase but I keep my prices the same, it's my fault
For anyone unfamiliar with how F2P and ad-supported games work, you can't just increase the cost of purchase for them, that's not really a thing, ad-supported games don't have a purchase cost to increase.
Because I'm not throwing out low-effort "woe poor game developer" vibes and am instead expecting more? I've actually made effort to model how this could work, rather than exclaiming "this is going to ruin indie game developers!".
Bad faith is making unsubstantiated claims and then getting mad when asked to back it up.
I still run into Gold Miner clones at casinos even to this day.
Have you?
If this is your background then this conversation is even more ridiculous; you should understand what it means to have more installs than profitable users because that was literally your business model. So why are you having trouble connecting the dots here about why developers would be concerned about these changes? By your math you were making pennies per-session. How are you having trouble understanding why even a 2-3 cent additional cost for each session would be a problem for that model?
Unexpected changes to supply chain happen. Cost of goods go up, or sometimes even disappear altogether. That's business. It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice, but the onus is on the game developers to adapt and change their models to the new reality.
There seems to be plenty of outrage without me, so I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company. There's more than enough room for us to have different perspectives.
What's ridiculous is that you seem to think that there's only one right answer or reaction to this, and that it just happens to be yours.
That is... certainly a way to phrase the conversation we've had and it is certainly a way to characterize the complaints that developers have with Unity's changes, as if they're simply looking for charity handouts.
I would suggest that part of the free market and part of Capitalism and part of business is that when platforms make decisions that hurt a lot of developers, sometimes those platforms get criticized publicly for those decisions. That's part of how business works; bad publicity is one of the penalties businesses pay for bad PR decisions.
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Of course you don't have to sympathize with developers, but it's disingenuous for anyone to claim that these changes won't impact developers or that critics of these changes are just ignorant of actual game development practices.
> It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice
is a pretty different phrasing from how you talked about those developers in your other comments, and it's ironic that you seem to hold such disdain for them given that your own industry experience would not have been possible under the same terms that you dismiss in other comments above as having virtually no impact on the majority of games.
Again, I'm not trolling for sympathy here, I really don't care if you care about developers. It's just not good for you to spread misinformation about the potential impact of the changes or to act like the pushback to the changes is based on inexperience or ignorance rather than legitimate grievances about their potential impact on whether or not Unity is usable for entire segments of the market.
Everything being said so far is purely conjecture, and my guess is as good as yours as to how it will play out. People keep talking about all these poor F2P or ad supported games that are going to be harmed, but it's all just conjecture and guesses.
Personally I think app stores are filled with too much trash and I'm not going to be sorry to see some of it go. Obviously it sucks when anyone has to deal a situation that affects their livelihood, but them's the breaks.
Consider layoffs. I've been on both sides of the fence, so I can appreciate the companies perspective of preserving cash flow while acknowledging the hardship it places on those affected, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it or join in on the chorus of outrage that wants to attack companies for what people want to perceive as malice. It's just business, as impersonal as it sounds.
> The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal. [...]
> Everything being said so far is purely conjecture, and my guess is as good as yours as to how it will play out.
For the most part no one is calling you out for being mean or not liking F2P games, you got called out for very confidently dismissing worries about the changes as uninformed fearmongering based on back-of-the-napkin math where you forgot about the existence of one of the largest gaming categories on the market, and then doubled down (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37483482, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37485433) when that error was pointed out, and then blamed developers in those categories for not predicting the changes, and then revealed that your industry experience was in those same categories and that your games made the exact same choices about both funding models and proprietary engines/licensing that you were criticizing mobile developers for making.
I'm not trying to call you out for being mean to mobile game devs, I pointed out that "they should have seen this coming" is kind of openly ridiculous to say about an out-of-nowhere TOS change that almost inverts Unity's funding model -- especially given that it turns out you were in the same industry and obviously worries about funding changes didn't stop you from using proprietary engines.
Yes, sometimes businesses fail and bad stuff happens, I don't care what your attitude is about that. But "the universe is chaotic and sometimes difficult choices about funding need to be made" is a far cry from "well why did those mobile devs make the same decisions I made, they should have been more responsible."
> I can appreciate the companies perspective of preserving cash flow while acknowledging the hardship it places on those affected [...] It's just business, as impersonal as it sounds.
So this is not why you were called out, your attitudes towards the amoral nature of Capitalism aren't really the issue, you were called out because a bunch of developers said, "this is going to impose a hardship on us" and your response was "no it's not a hardship, these people don't know what they're talking about, this criticism is coming from people who don't know anything about making games, the new terms look quite reasonable."
And so the shift from that kind of confident statement about how these changes are a nothingburger to "well none of us have any idea what's going to happen" is the part that draws attention. If your original comment had been "it's anyone's guess what the impact of this will be" you would have saved everyone a lot of time.
How's that affect twitch streamers?
And despite your belief that you were not dependent on any sort of intermediary platform I believe many games on that platform including Gold Miner were made using Adobe Flash, so you were in fact using a platform that could've been nickel and dimed just as much as Unity is now. Except you had the advantage of those games being made at the advent of the internet before rent seeking companies clawed their way into the middle.
The fact that you've been spreading misinformation or being downright disingenuous about many of the points you've been making makes me believe that many of your points are false.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Along the lines of CEO John Riccitiello infamously saying developers who don't monetize are effing idiots: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-r...
"If you are six hours into playing Battlefield, you run out of ammo on your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that time".[1]
You've got the order wrong. This is about people who already chose Unity, and then they changed the fee structure. Changing engines is beyond nontrivial for a project in flight.
What if you get 5M installs and fail to monetize it or if the game isn't well suited to monetization?
And assume that you, beforehand, breached 200k, then monetization drops for some reason.
Then you own unity ~85k$ and you so you go in net negative.
That is the real problem here.
>a company that’d need to be on Pro licences anyway
They also got rid of the income threshold for Personal licenses.
The other route if the game was F2P or ad supported would be to use a similar process to the big guys and soft-launch to judge the product and monetization on a smaller scale.
Start with 5 million installs, and then your new installs are another 5 million copies, which incurs a worst case ($0.20/install) $1 million fee from Unity. You would still have to have earned $200,000 (worst case you're personal user) in the last 12 months.
So with this, you would gross -$800,000. And this is before app store fees, taxes, payroll, and no accommodation for pirate installs in the new plan.
I don't see the benefit to the developer. Mark Whitten CFO of Unity, says the developers are excited about this. The 6 Plus pages of 99%- comments on the unity forum shows a lot of excitement, a lot of negative excitement from developers.
I don't see the value to many developers. It seems like a huge mistake.
I would like to see that same breakdown for the much smaller games that barely pass the sales threshold. That is the main Unity audience. Vampire Survivors is a huge outlier that didn't even start using Unity until after it became a massive hit.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/vampire-survivors-makes-its...
You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true.
Let's pretend you sell 300,000 units at $0.99 with the Unity Personal Plan.
Units: 300,000
Gross: $297,000
Unity Fee: $20,000
Why? Could you explain why 300k units w/ $200k gross would be impossible?
Is it not legal to sell unity games below $0.99 each, maybe not even in other currencies?
I'd rather be enlightened than shit upon if there's a reason I'm missing why the worst case scenario is 6.7% and not the apparent 10%.
You could also add to that why 6.7% is now possible which is more than 2x the 1-3% from earlier?
Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers and accuse me of pulling numbers out of thin air with the technical worst case scenario?
> Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers
Where did you pull 10%, happy to go over your math/model.
The example numbers I posted would give 10%.
The pricing was easy enough that the 10% worst case could easily be pulled from it.
I wouldn't trust the numbers from someone who needed a model to go over to see that and I seriously thought you were joking about not getting where the 10% worst case was from.
From https://www.statista.com/statistics/263797/number-of-applica...:
> As of July 2023, nearly 97 percent of apps in the Google Play app store were freely available
I don't think "arbitrarily" is the right word to use here. Your mental model might have been $0.99 as the pricing floor, but that mental model does not represent the reality of mobile app stores. Paid apps are a minority on both iOS and Android, the dominant revenue model for mobile games is to offer free downloads/installs with advertising and in-app purchases.
Your "mental model" didn't consider 80% of the market by revenue?
Not every project needs to seek to make money. Sometimes you want to put something out there for the sake of putting something out there without worrying that you are going to need to pay up for it.
While we are at it, I want to shill my personal favorite engine...Godot. I know its fairly well known in the HN scene, but I think that this should be a push to use more free and open-source technology in game dev, rather than relying on a bunch of corporate black boxes that can turn predatory at any minute.
Is it a hobby if you're making more than $200k in a 12-month period? Most hobbyists will likely be unaffected by this, and those that are will see very small fees less than what Visa charges to process a credit card transaction.
There are scenarios where the $ number goes negative, for your net, for a modestly successful game .. is negative tens of thousands of dollars.
There is no provision against software piracy, or competitors/griefers artificially inflating your install account.
Show me legitimate scenario where this is true.
Charging the developer when a customer re-downloads a game they already bought sounds incredibly asinine to me, no matter how small the fee actually is. No download store charges for this privilege, and they're the ones actually footing the bill for the bandwidth and infrastructure to make that possible. Unity is adding accounting complexity and fees for something they do none of the legwork to provide.
I don't think they're that crazy, but I wouldn't be surprised if JRR didn't even think that far.
Get fucked dude, you have no idea what any of our backgrounds are.
As an example where their new pricing scheme especially breaks down: You actively lose money (beyond just lost sales) for including your game in things like charity bundles because Unity will still ship you a bill for every install. This means if you had a modest success the incentive is to never give away your game even temporarily.
They also removed pricing levels that hobbyist developers used, which means they also have to pay more in subscription fees (up to $1k+ more) in addition to the fees above.
5 million x $0.20 = $980,000 in Unity fees under 2023 pricing vs. $2040 annual pro subscription under 2022 pricing (for exceeding $100k in sales).
In other words, this is an instantaneous 480x fee increase, without any corresponding increase in the value of the services provided.
Do you understand why people are outraged now?
So you think they would have left money on the table rather than spend $4k to upgrade to Enterprise?
The game's sales blew past the Unity threshold in hours when it first became a hit. Yes, they would have switched to Enterprise after that. And you know what? It would have still been too late to prevent them from owing several multiples of what the Unity fee used to be.
Units Sold: 250000
Gross Sales: $1 247 500
Steam Fees:
$0-10M (30%): $374 250
Unity Fees (personal or plus):
250 000 : $50 000
Net Sales: 823 250
It's a big bite for something that's impossible to code out of the project.
Imagine if Oracle charged a dollar every time someone ran your software the first time on the JRE in that machine. installation on a new machine? pay again. Old customer reinstalls the JRE? pay again. main executable or JRE update? pay again.
Not so funny anymore.
You could also have saved $8k by upgrading to Unity Pro for $2040, though of course you run the risk of paying for that plan and not selling 250k units.