I just found the announcment of the whole new “Unity Industry” thing - and if I read that correctly, it leaves me shocked:
Are you seriously just casually announcing, that you are going to force your “non-entertainment”-customers - which are never fully specified and seemingly also include studios, that create serious games/VR applications for businesses and also do other stuff? So far it seems, that as soon as you work even partially with industry clients, you are forced into that new product.
I find that highly problematic, as it is basically 300% more expensive than current Unity Pro subscriptions.
Yes, you get access to more services and tools like PiXYZ - but what if you don’t need or want any of those things? Then you are just forced to accept a steep price hike for basically nothing.
Are you serious? Or am I gravely misunderstanding things here?
We are currently below the financial threshold - but who knows for how long. Unity is only a small part of our revenue chain and honestly? If these conditions actually apply to us, then we would cut Unity completely from our portfolio.
That’s my point exactly.
It gets even worse when you look at the FAQ part where it states, that basically your most expensive licensing factor cuts out the others. So if you are business like mine, that has a huge share of it’s revenue with other tools (like unreal) and only a small unity team…still industry license.
This is pretty disgusting - I guess they think there is some huge source for money in this area but Industry plan is “contact us” ffs and finances depend on “third party” company if working for someone.
If you do work for a big customer you will need to buy Industry not Pro (Plus is not mentioned, except indirectly in Industry faq where it says you must use Pro or Enterprise if “total finances” low enough)
Why do games and “Industry” need separate licensing - games are massive money makers, though maybe Unity is mostly used by small companies…
Even the current Pro license (with constant price increases) is getting too expensive for multiple people,
if your company only uses it for small’ish projects. (when rest of the large company is totally different)
Industry software is always more expensive.
At the automotive company I work for there are currently two licences running on my name alone with a total of 450€ cost per month. Almost everyone in the team has those or others.
Naturally that’s bound to support contracts. Response time of <12h are typical.
a year, not a month. But affects even individuals if working for a third party “If you are an individual using the Unity Software, then your Total Finances are: (a) if you are providing service(s) to a third party, your customer’s or client’s gross revenues” and/or funding (no matter what the source); or (b) if you are not providing service(s) to a third party, the amount generated in connection with your use of the Software."
They are a simple estimate after looking at the price of unity industrial collection, which this new unity industry offer succeeds.
There is no reason to believe, that the new offer will be less expensive…probably even more than that.
And yes - it’s 1 million USD per year - that is not that much. If you are a small company with around 15 employees, you can crack that number and still not float in cash.
The whole idea of forcing this whole package to somehow artificially increase your usage numbers for otherwise failed products like MARS is ridiculous. We don’t need MARS or PiXYZ - yet we will have to pay for them?!
I was given that number from an industry contact - but ok - let’s go with more reasonable numbers, that we can find in public:
The “Unity Industrial Collection” cost so far - around 3000 USD per year. Unity Pro was 1800 USD per Year - that alone is 1.6x the price.
Now we assume, that if they would have stuck to that “old” industrial collection price, they would have just put it as a number on the website instead of contacting sales - and they are heavily trying to emphasize, that it offers MORE than the industral collection.
This together with the inofficial numbers I was told about…
Your choice if you want to trust me on that or not. But expect to pay at least 1.6x more than right now for software you might not even need/use
The biggest game publishers, namely EA and Activision-Blizzard, both made about 7 billion USD in revenue in 2022.*
Compare that with Daimler, who made 51 billion. You’d think that is a big shot, right? Nope, Tesla made 81 billion. But wait … Toyota laughs at that with their 267 billion. Even the possibly biggest car manufacturer supplier (ZF) made 44 billion. All numbers from 2022.
Just to point out that yes, there is a significant revenue offset between industry and game companies. Likewise, these industry giants have been increasingly eager to embrace the new gaming tech and hardware since the new wave of AR and VR products came to market with the first Oculus headset, then the Quest, and the ubiquitous and increasingly powerful smartphones.
If you are a contractor working for an Industry giant and feel forced to upgrade to Unity Industry licenses, the obvious thing to do is to relay those additional costs to the customers. After all, these costs only occur because of the customer (and Unity changing their license terms of course).
* = Maybe Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Tencent, beat those numbers but for me taking a quick look it was just difficult to judge whether those revenues are company totals, or just the game software branch.
Unity Industry: 4554 EUR (so that would be around ~2.4x increase to current price)
There is one nice bonus for some users, *personally wouldn’t have time or budged to start fixing engine code:
“Source code access is included in that base price”
Other stuff that is included (but for our case, most of those are useless, and things like on demand training site content is pretty bad)
If you want to see, that my 300% increase was not that far off - ask your contact about the price for floating licenses
Better sit down for those.
To make my point here:
The package itself is ok - source access, bundle of tools - all ok - no problem there.
My problem is: It is forced upon us small businesses out of the blue. Why can’t I stick with Pro licenses for our team? Why am I forced to “upgrade” to the industry package? That does not make any sense.
@CodeSmile
No offense - but you seemingly have never worked as a contractor/service provider - I can’t just randomly up my costs because my clients are “big business” and my software vendor decided it’s time to earn some cash.
Prices have been established over the last years and sure, we increase them here and there, because inflation and cost adjustments are a thing everywhere…
But again - the unity team in our company is not the major breadwinner and with sudden license changes like this one now, it becomes increasingly hard to justify the cost of that team over the profit it can generate.
I have no problem, if you offer that package to actual Industry corporations like the ones you mentioned…sure, go ahead. For them, the content of the package actually makes sense. But why are they forgetting the small businesses?
Are you still “small” if your finances are 1 mil per year? Back of the napkin calculation implies that this sort of business could have up to 30 employees. And one of them would be paid more than what you’d need to spend on unity license.
Not in a country like germany or the U.S.
If you are an IT company with comparatively ok salaries, you reach 1 million in revenue with around 16-17 employees. I would consider that small.
And again - my biggest concern is this paragraph: "If you are an individual using the Unity Software, then your Total Finances are: (a)if you are providing service(s) to a third party, your customer’s or client’s gross revenues" and/or funding (no matter what the source); or (b) if you are not providing service(s) to a third party, the amount generated in connection with your use of the Software."
That basically means, that even if you work freelance for a corporation, you need to have Industry plan - no matter your personal revenue.
I included non-IT businesses into consideration. In IT, yes, it’ll be 15-16 employees, but even in this case I’m unsure if this can be called “small”.
Regarding this part:
That particular clause has always been a problem when you want to use unity for freelancing. One possible idea would be to ask your employer to provide a seat for you for the duration of your contract.
Sounds like it will work out for you if you decide to eliminate Unity, but if a company is focused entirely on Unity then that means training everyone for the new engine which will likely be more expensive than that 300%. Plus alternative engines almost always have the same requirement of custom licensing for serious applications.
If I’m not mistaken the only choice if you want to completely avoid custom licensing is Unreal Engine, and that will come with its own set of downsides like being more demanding on target hardware. Telling a client that they will need more expensive devices might be just as bad as telling them it costs you more to do business with them.
Just some random thoughts on my part. I don’t work on “industry” apps but I do work with a company with finances around the million dollar threshold and I do know what would be involved in transitioning them away from Unity.
Edit: Another thought just occurred to me. If a company at that threshold wants to continue supporting a client’s app they’re going to need to pick up the license regardless of whether they decide to move to a new engine for future projects so they’ll be paying for it in addition to training for the new one.
Maybe they’re not, and this is why you have to ask about pricing? They can offer whatever they want to whomever they want, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to make life harder for startups.
That aside, Unity’s licensing really didn’t need to get even more fiddly…
