Developers fight back against Unity’s new pricing model
theverge.com
theverge.com
u/spez was right, I guess. "The protest over the API changes will pass".
Unlike for Reddit users though, these pricing changes impact revenue calculations of developers and there are viable alternatives. Additionally from what I gleaned a lot if developers are not particularly happy with the state of the Unity tools, and sudden pricing changes surely don't inspire much confidence either.
So, I don't think no games will release in two years or so made in Unity, but this might have kicked off or accelerate an erosion of Unity's developer base. At least those developers that give Unity the prestige of being the engine of choice for Indie and AA games.
Maybe all of this is, purely from a revenue point of view, still worth it for them though.
Maybe Unity no longer cares about small indie developers so they priced them out of the engine, but only time will be able to tell whether they made a major business miscalculation. It's possible that larger developers are the bulk of Unity's income and they will be totally fine with the changes.
Still, I don't see a world where what Unity did was a good business move due to the trust issues mentioned by so many other people. I think that a model more similar to Unreal's would have been much better received.
I went from probably 150-200Hrs/Mo. To about 5.
I know I cannot be the only one. Reddit will live on; but technically so did MySpace.
As for Twitter I'm one leg into Mastadon, but the space flight news folk is still on Twitter.
Although tbf it’s probably accelerated the shift in Reddits demographic from users that post longform content to more casual users that just browse and upvote/downvote stuff without engaging beyond that. I doubt they care much bc they probably just want ad impressions and to become a titan akin to Facebook/twitter/etc. it seems short sighted but growth at the expense of community seems to be a common theme of vc backed anything
My reddit usage is now about 5% of what it was before. I also use it for Ukraine info, but now I do it at home on old.reddit.com, and not doomscrolling on mobile throughout the day.
Why would you tie your pricing to something like installs, which is completely unrelated to the profits the game is making.
This just means that developers will still have to pay install fees for their old games, as people re-install them on different machines, while not making a lot of profits in sales from that game anymore. Developers might be incentivized to remove older games from libraries like steam.
"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."
Comparing with Unreal that take 5% from your profit, if your game makes more than 1,000,000 USD, Unity still cheaper
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...
Also, retroactively applying the new model to already exiting games was also a bit of a bad move. You make a game and decide the business model based on what you know at the time and what you can predict will happen in the future, predicting that unity would change their pricing model like this is near impossible, so the business model you picked for your old games is now unfit.
Honestly, this is mostly going to hurt indie devs who make it, but aren't quite in the same successes bracket as a game like Cities: Skylines, Hearthstone, Rimworld. And also F2P games, especially mobile ones, where Whales can easily spend $200k or $1mil, but you have millions of installs of people just trying the free game and deleting it, or installing it on multiple devices.
The Runtime fee can easily exceed Unreal Engine's own 5% flat Royalty Fee by a fair margin (easily 10%) depending on the money you ask for and method of distribution, for example, you won't want to give out copies or discount the game as much after meeting the requirements.
Also, there are cases where a developer might squeeze $100k out of sales and then get a game pass deal where they get another $100k that would result in them getting 5 million downloads. That would result in the fee being $1 million because they’re on the lower tier subscription.
They are doing this for two reasons from what I can tell: a) they want a cut of game pass volume b) they want to worse high volume micro transaction games onto their own ad network (if you sign up to their ad network you don’t pay the fee)
The biggest problem is them attempting to bill people who have already released games and might still get the odd download. It’s crazy cause these developers never agreed to the new license AND it’s highly doubtful this would be legal anyway because contracts need consideration. “We just want more money” probably won’t cut the mustard.
It's like if I owned an old version of Photoshop and Adobe contacted me to say that because the jpg I produced blew up on Twitter I owe them $1000. I can't retroactively take the picture down and recreate it in gimp and I shouldn't have to. Most alternative products to unity simply do a hand wave to old products. "If your game was made in engine 2.0 you have this pricing structure, but engine 3.0 users have a different one"
Bad analogy. If you remove your game from any store, and you are not making more than 200k (free license) or 1M (for pro/enterprise license) last year, then you are fine. Nothing will be charged from you. If you released the game, did't update it, no bug fixes, nothing, but still profiting from it, and people still downloading it, then you will pay the 0.20 cents per install... It is just like that. People are jumping in a drama, that affect only huge mobile games, which are full with ads, addictive, that through Gamification try to earn screen time from the users.. Unity is greedy, but mostly the devs being affected by that, aren't those writing indie games.
It's like if I took an old version of photoshop and sold the pictures on patreon, but my patreon blew up and adobe decided they wanted a piece of the pie and changed their TOS, and made me take the jpg I made when I was under a DIFFERENT TOS down,remake the jpg in GIMP, or pay them for the privilege of keeping that picture up on the internet, and also any time that picture appears on imageboard I could also maybe be charged for it, but they totally have a way to tell if it was gotten from the imageboard or patreon trust them but they won't tell us how.
Unity has trapped game developers and held them hostage. Those devs made the game under one set of rules and pricing model, and now that the game is out they have a choice of destroying their product by removing it from availability, or pay money they had no way of predicting they would need? Just because you don't like the game devs doesn't mean Unity didn't fuck them over, and it sets a dangerous precedent.
The most objectionable thing about Unity's new pricing is it hits hardest the smaller indies with the lowest budgets. The AAA studios will barely notice it and are probably negotiating better terms anyway.
"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."
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...
So if you sold in the last year more than 200k AND have more than 200k game installs and have the unity personal version, then you have to pay for install...
Unity has clearly stated that they will charge for reinstalling, installing on multiple machines, and implied that pirated copies also count.
If you get unlucky and your game is popular with pirates, you're suddenly paying for a ton of licenses on copies of the game you never even sold.
You can quite literally script a process to repeatedly reinstall a single copy of the game to rack up unity charges for a developer you don't like.
That's not really very reasonable.
The asset store with its integration is another huge selling point. For example, if you're like me, you're more of a coder than an artist. With the u it's asset store you could spend 0.00 - 100 dollars and buy some amazing assets to help jump start your hobby project.
I'm sure some will disagree.
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.^
So, if you have the Pro or Enterprise that most studios have, they should have more than 1 million Revenue in the last year AND have more than 1 million game installs.
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...
Take for example genshin impact: it's made in unity, has a high production value, is f2p with a in-game currency that can be purchased, and meets the threshold for the change requirements. The same company has several other similarly modeled games released across multiple platforms (PC and PlayStation).
Without any sort of heads up this company now will face massive charges because of high install volume, especially if the average user installs on multiple devices, but low individual income.
Should Hoyoverse have to remake all of their games in a new engine or deal with this new price structure with no way to plan for how much the new structure will cost them?
The game is also often review bombed by rival games. What would stop a rival company from setting up a bot that just mass installs on VMs to try and charge up their bill?
If that company sticks with the pricing structure there is a high chance production value will go down simply because costs have skyrocketed.
Unity has basically entrapped developers. Whether the devs are worth saving doesn't come into play - whether you can trap someone into using your product then retroactively charge them for their success is the question, and I think most game devs would say "no".
"Take for example genshin impact: it's made in unity, has a high production value, is f2p with a in-game currency that can be purchased, and meets the threshold for the change requirements. The same company has several other similarly modeled games released across multiple platforms (PC and PlayStation)."
From what I can tell, if you were to sell a $5 game made with Unity and made $200,000 per year, the total charge would be $8,000. But that charge would be $40k if your game was only $1 and $800 if your game sold for $50. For Unity Pro if you made $10 million selling 1 million copies you would be charged $60,000. That same studio making $10 million on a game written with Unreal Engine would be charged $500,000 in royalties. That is far more than $60k for Unity. It still appears that Unity is the budget option, it just isn't quite as cheap as it used to be.
Considering Unity has a negative operating margin of around 50%, it seems clear they need to start making more money. Customer acquisition and R&D costs have been growing much faster than revenue so they need to start making more money somewhere. R&D costs have risen by 275% over the past 3 years, and sales/marketing costs have increased 175%. Revenue has only increased 150% over the same period.
This is FUD, but its covered by Unity FAQ. Either way, I would like to see "rivals", aka game studios, developing such amazing technology.. it would show even more that such "indie studios", developing high addictive, full of ads and "in game currency" are just bad for the whole game ecosystem and society.