Business model for unity 4 - PROPOSAL

News & General Discussion
1

Here’s an alternative proposal - what do you think?

The Problem and the Danger

The problem with the existing business model of unity is you are rapidly going to lose ground against your competitors because you have a barrier to entry, which prevents global media exposure. This barrier to entry is that you cannot leverage your existing users to promote your new products.

You can’t call on your 1 million existing users because for the most part the demos they show the public and distribute are compiled in unity free. Cryengine and UE don’t have that barrier: demos, videos, screens, hype, media are all done with the full power of the platform exposed to them. Full DX11 goodness available to the world with post effects.

Their engines are letting their users spread their engines, and you are not.

A solution

You could move the licensing from engine features while developing, to engine output instead. In detail:

  1. all copies of unity are unlocked, with full pro license available in the trial.

  2. however the license is restricted on all OUTPUT formats with a transparent unity watermark in the corner. This forces all business-minded customers and hobbyists to purchase if they are serious about it. (These guys likely bought it anyway).

What does this do?

  • Overnight, asset store is cleaned up. There’s no longer a split between pro or free assets. Everyone can buy anything - it just works!

  • All productions online from all users heavily promote back to unity because instead of an ugly DirectX 7 looking unity free thing on a webplayer, they are all DOF, lensflares, compute shaders and other mind-bendingly cool demos with a soft transparent unity logo in the corner at all times.

  • Collaboration for business is extremely encouraged. All businesses currently working with UE and Cryengine cannot ignore the feasibility of the engine under extreme demonstration.

Demonstrate unity pro, not unity free.

There are no downsides to this - it is the existing business model but with a slight shift of WHERE the licensing takes affect. Instead of a barrier to entry, you make it a barrier to exit. This a fundamentally important business model that frankly, I’ve concluded is the only way to evolve your existing outdated business model.

Anyone in business knows the more barriers to entry there are the harder it hurts your conversion ratio.

I hope that it is at least given merit and thought before you conclude an opinion. Thank you for your time.

2

Interesting proposal.

I suspect their current business model is working well for them. But I like hypothetical discussions about things like this.

You said, "Instead of a barrier to entry, you make it a barrier to exit. "
That’s a really interesting concept. Do you know of any other fields / markets that do this already?

3

I like your way of thinking, Hippo. It’s very well nicer to advertise the official product rather than the one that’s provided for free with drawbacks. More people would like what they see rather than games that don’t look like current-gen games(as in Unity Free some more games look not the best). It tells people, “Hey! This is what I can do in Unity Pro! Wow, this game’s effects and performance are amazing! I should try Unity!”

I’m also thinking about buying Pro actually sometime in the near future.

4

I agree with you a lot on that this will help promote unity as a good looking engine. BUT unity free games can be used for commercial purposes without any cost. So if there is no free, then what? Everyone has to pay 1500$ to release something.
The free version does look like something from 2000, not a good thing for PR. It’s especially discouraging for artists who just want to do some pretty pictures in a realtime engine. You can in cry or udk but in unity not really.

5

That is a thoughtful post there Hippo,

If I could just add to that, I say the one thing that would give Unity the cutting edge is if it helped Indie game developers successfully monetize their games while taking a percentage of their profit.

In short replicate the kongregate experiment on a much larger scale while requiring that the games be made in Unity.

There is a lot of creative genius out there among Indie developers. What they are absolutely helpless in is successfully marketing and monetizing their games. THE game engine company that helps them do this will be the game engine of choice for Indies in the future

6

I’ve long felt something needs to change with Unity’s model. Including possibly a batch purchase or subscription for teams.

Overall though good post and idea. What gets me is I have unity free at the moment and the trial’s run out on pro so I can’t realistically use (or learn) how to use pro features until I purchase the license. This creates a barrier and a ‘lag time’ in production because anyone going from free to pro will have to learn the features that it grants you, and not only that they’ll also have to adjust their current project to better make use of the pro features. And yes, the barrier also exists in the publishing and use of asset store products.

What to do about the fact that unity free users can sell their product I feel is already settled to some degree. Free users can only gross $100k from what I recall, over the lifetime of the license before being required to purchase pro. So the serious developers will certainly buy pro one way or another. The catch here however is we don’t have data available to see how many hobbyists have actually bought in versus the ones that are actually developing commercially.

7

i like the idea of just 1 edition so everybody has the same thing with the same capabilities, but it also worries me, because im a ios basic user which hooks into unity free, if it gets 1 edition, the price would get more close to the current pro price, which i simply could not afford, specially when you add for example ios pro…

for example i mainly develop 2d ios/mac games with unity, because its a cool tool even if its for 3d , with some extensions it can get a pretty efficient tool for 2d development.

so it seems that would segregate a lot of people like me that only need what the free/basic needs and would be forced to go somewhere else, which i dont really want.

one option would have some kind of subscription like corona sdk or adobe, that you get all the features for a relatively small monthly/yearly fee, allowing more frequent updates, and thus reducing version fragmentation.

current licenses are permanent, but really nothing in technology is permanent, some technical detail changes under the hood and the product ceases to work in (insert here platform) and you are forced to pay for the version upgrade anyway if you intend to keep working on your project.

8

I am glad Hippo made the thread. I remember some time ago someone else made such a request but was pretty much ignored. Hopefully this won’t.

9

I agree, it will be intresting to see what happens to this. Although I disagree with making people have to buy a pro licence just to publish a game, if your using unity free. It should just force a Unity logo/Intro on start up of the game.

10

Interesting concept although your proposed model would be more restrictive for current free users. I like many others am happy plodding away making my game in Unity free version. The game I am making doesn’t require any of the Pro features, there are plenty of workarounds for some of the missing stuff which can be used to make an attractive product. Infact the only thing Pro does have that I would want at the moment is the removed Unity banner though I don’t think this should exist anyway - a free version should just have less features not added annoyances :stuck_out_tongue:

11

I’m not persuaded that this would make Unity any substantial extra amount of money. Do you really think that the market Unity stands to profit the most from - selling licenses to large studios with good-sized technology budgets - is going to have its purchasing behavior significantly influenced by how many little D3D11 tech demos are in the gallery? If you’re EA and you’re looking to invest in 30+ seats for an engine, you’re going to be doing due diligence, in-house evaluations, and talking to Unity staff and present customers (the larger the better).

Allowing more people to play with pro features may lead to an improvement in the health of the ecosystem around these things - you get more people in the community who know how the features work and can offer help on it - but that ecosystem isn’t hugely relevant to these guys either, because most of the help they need they get from their $12k/yr support contract. It may mean more people who could be hired as consultants, but it’s not like Unity requires a particularly rare set of skills - most industry vets have worked with multiple engines over the course of their careers, so adapting to one more is no big deal.

12

SideFx has something similar going with Houdini. The apprentice and apprentice HD version limit the resolution of rendered images and disallow exporting to other 3D packages. But if you pay for the full license they’ll allow you to convert your assets to be usable in the full version, which has no such restrictions. Aside from that, the two versions are identical in capabilities.

13

I wish Unity’s licensing would work this way, but unfortunately it would probably lose multi-seat business for Unity Tech… It would make it easier for small teams to use a single Pro license for exporting, and have everybody work with Free licenses… I doubt this would be a major problem, but it can’t be ignored.

Then again, this potential loss might be offset by the abundance of creative tech coming out of the 1,000,000+ users with newly found Pro capabilities (which is good for public perception, the Asset Store, etc. as hippocoder suggests)…

14

+1
To be honest, I always thought that unity was shooting itself in the foot by reducing the graphical quality of the free version.
When the real power of the pro version is the profiling tools.

Unity after all are selling a graphics engine, and visual quality is the eye candy, but performance is the enabler for interactive media. Who knows they could even kick off that Machinima toolset drive their Unite demo hinted at.

Get the CGI Artist onboard for free, and see the quality of demos explode. ;0)

15

Its a good idea. Can we vote/poll and pass results onto Unity for consideration?

16

Yes, it’s a nice idea, but Unity will need to make up for that lost revenue somehow, and it will likely be through raised prices and/or royalties.

17

If by lost revenue you mean gained revenue, then indeed. Free pro for development will introduce a lot of new developers which will be good for both asset store and license sales. I even know a few people myself who are using UDK over unity simply because the free version is graphically limited. Though only one of them is a programmer so I guess it makes my point null and void.

18

As someone who is trying to look at making the transition from shiva to unity, the biggest hurdle is the lack of standard features in the free edition, which shiva simply has. Particularly things like real-time shadows and post processing effects (even just the built-in ones), occlusion culling, navmesh/path finding. These features are all required to build a half respectful game, and yes, certain things can be down ourselves or use assets on asset store but that defeats the purpose I feel of what unity stands for, quote: “We do the hard work so you don’t have to, and take the pain so you don’t have to.” all this takes time, effort to integrate if it’s not already done and ready for us to use as quickly and easily as possible. This is a major negative of using unity. Indies, hobbyists who want to develop for android and ios, with some nicer features, simple cannot afford it.

I also feel the difference between free and pro should not be in the technical features, like rendering capabilities, but it should be production enhancing features, such as profiling tools, tools to aid groups of developers (maybe advanced merge tools, etc), features that slightly larger teams should be using, but the indie working by himself (or maybe 1/2 other people) does not.

In addition, looking at business models of other tools (UDK, CE), many people complain about their royalty model, but as hippocoder says, it completely removes all barriers of entry. With entry being sooo easy, cheap and risk free, people use that tool, they learn it and then what is very important is that they become dependent on that tool, it becomes too hard and costly for them to learn something else. Personally, I would rather see the free edition dropped, offer an additional option for annual subscription to pro with ios/andoird (for say $100) and a royalty system much like the above. Even if this was only available to indies with annual turnover <10k or something like that, and drop the production features like profiling, keep the splash screen, (basically everything that does not impact how the output looks and plays). It would allow those who simply do not make enough to cover their costs (which is more often than not) to build something that improves the community showcases, and really show what unity can do on a larger scale.

I read a post somewhere (it may actually have been on the shiva forums) about piracy of 3dsmax or maya, and this was a while ago, I think before the student edition could be registered so easily without proof of being a student. A poster apparently said he knew people who worked at autodesk, and while they do not condone piracy of their product they are not particularly worried (worried may not the right word, but close enough). Why? Well think about it. People who cannot afford the product are never going to buy it anyway, but if they end up using the product that user then becomes dependent on that tool, it’s what they learn and it ensures there is plenty of supply for people who know the product for those big studios who do spend up big time. This can be neither confirmed nor denied about autodesk policy on the matter, and nobody should be doing it these days anyway, use their student edition if you want to learn it. (please dont bash me on this part of post, its just an example of a company understanding the value of building a community who are tied to their products)

From what I see Unity has grown into a real power horse in the indie market and are now starting to pull some big players to their product also. As unity pushes towards building their editor for AAA+ markets, it’d be nice to consider all the above posts, look at now building a huge community (yes even bigger) and supply for these big studios to tap into (these are the studios that are going to pay out millions to unity, not the indies in a garage), a supply of people who are now tied into the unity platform, who are not tempted to go elsewhere because they can leave unity easily to another engine with all key features available at no extra cost.

Honestly I do not expect a change, as that would require massive changes to a company business model, and while Unity does appear to be a dynamic enough company to make the adjustment, I believe there is also stakeholders and investors they need to answer to. Unity staff might love to do this and care about the “greater good”, but investors do not and care more about getting a big fat return. This change might simply come across as too risky for them. But I cross my fingers regardless.

19

People can and do sell games with a Unity splash screen. That would be much harder to do with a watermark. As it stands, people can earn the money for Pro by using the free version or the basic platform add-ons.

Every business model has issues, moving to a royalties based system would be a nightmare as there would be the need to track the sales of more than a million users.

I personally like the idea of each Pro feature being an Asset Store product. Of course this would introduce fragmentation issues, although I think that line is crossed by using any Asset Store product.

20

+1

Where can I sign the petition?