Changes to Unity Plans and Pricing
unity.com
unity.com
> While we always recommend you supply your own data, in the absence of that, we will use our own data from Unity services that you have agreed to integrate into your project, and readily available external data.
> Does the Unity Runtime phone home by default?
> It does not, unless you have hardware stats enabled.
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I'm not a gamedev nor have ever used Unity to develop something, but those two sections seem conflicting. Can anyone kindly explain how they have their "own data from Unity services" while the runtime does not phone home by default? Thanks!
I’m sure they’d prefer to capture the data themselves, but they’re now allowing you to self report in order to placate the outrage from the recent announcements.
Seems like they win on the end.
Looks to me like the good old strategy of we'll start with a very high proposal then come back with a more watered down version thst people will accept as being more reasonnable than the initial terms. But they still get to charge more and seem reasonnable doing so.
Also, Godot has mysteriously acquired a large surge in their funding, and has a much less abusable license structure...
I think Unity has some bad financials right now and are pressing every part of the business to generate more revenue.
I don't think this was some grand scheme - I think they're panicking about money and acting without thinking through the long term consequences of their actions.
Fortunately the rest of their pricing changes don't affect us, but it's still a real pain in the ass
For now. Reminds me of "first they came" [0]
And sure, they should have gone with plain old revenue sharing from the get go ("we get X% of your sales, so if you sell nothing, we get nothing, and if you move 2 million units, we get an amount you can quite easily part with"), instead they came up with a batshit insane plan, and their CEO should have been fired already.
That doesn't mean they can backpaddle on the part where they need to put a sales-based revenue stream in place. Either they do, or they go out of business (which is an even worse deal for everyone. Folks seem to vastly underestimate how close to failing Unity was even before this debacle).
As much as people will want to go raise pitchforks despite these changes, reading through them these changes are actually massive. The part where it only applied to Unity 2023LTS and beyond is a HUGE change. It's aggressive, and and a grandfather clause for already in-progress games is clearly missing so fuck em, they have more work to do, but it's also nowhere near as insane as the previous arrangement. And it almost certainly won't be their last change as long as the dev/studio world goes "good start, but this is still unacceptable".
The engine is such a central part of a game company's stack. On one hand that makes it harder to just up and switch, so there is some lock-in there, but on the other hand, if developers don't regard Unity as a reliable partner, they are going to be taking a hard look around at alternatives.
I think the real problem with this pricing move is that it made a lot of Unity users think "hey, we can't trust Unity not to screw us over." That is something that is hard to take back.
I just don't see how anyone can trust them after that.
Given clean slate would you really pick these guys for your new game? Knowing they’re keen to pull a fast one on you for profit and may well have a 2nd go at it.
The question is whether or not they have damaged their user's trust to an irreparable degree.
From the perspective of understanding and reacting to this the OP is correct that streamers aren’t really driving this.
> Yes.
I guess that ends Pro or Enterprise users publishing web games or interactive content. It's also going to hurt GamePass publishers.
Goes to show how deeply Unity screwed up that they couldn't even corporate speak their way out of this.
Games take such a long time to develop and you have to be able to trust that your engine won't change the terms of service when you are like 3 year into development. They have shown that they either don't care about or understand that, neither of which is great.
Like what is to say they won't pull another one of these in like 3 years.
There's big financial risk inherent in game development for which studios naturally would "pay" some sum to hedge against, in the format of trading away some upside in the success case for a lower cost in the failure case. In fact, risk aversion, which at least in aggregate often models much real world behavior, dictates that studios would be willing to pay generously, entering into a deal that yields negative EV in exchange for flattening the risk curve. On the other hand, underwriting the risk on Unity's part is basically risk-free because of its horizontal reach across studios. Because of the asymmetrical risk, there's considerable economic surplus to be captured in a way that leaves both parties better off.
Of course all of this only works out if Unity only sufficiently benefits from the big successes. To that end, while generous, the choice to let developers pay the lower of rev share vs. per-install fee seems perplexing to me. When customers can pick after they already know whether their game is successful, Unity fails to set up an effective insurance business and ultimately will lose out on the surplus. The winners will no longer automatically subsidize the losers, Unity may have to raise the costs of both deals to cover its operations, and this all just becomes a more convoluted price increase.
Hired execs always do that because they are paid in stock. They couldn’t even afford to pay their taxes without doing that.
Also Sequoia lent Unity 1 billion (using convertible notes which will be exchanged for stock at maturity) to finance the IronSource deal. Why would they do that?