Is this an out of season april fools joke?
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Unity, at least change the terms.
- All existing subscriptions will be honored and the stupid fee should not apply. Until the agreed date of the subscription end date. You cannot change the terms of the service like this.
- Change the amount of revenue to something more realistic. I think $1 mil per game is fair. Anything below is not really a success, you are just milking. Our profit margins are already slim.
- Retroactive fee to already released games is just mental. Please wake the f up.
- The application date (Jan 2024) is crazy. You are making this huge change and only telling us 3 months before…game projects span over years…do you know how many devs’ life will change with this? Please give it a good year at least. So that we can move away from your engine. We need time to change engines.
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I thought $600 a year was excessive to get rid of the splash screen, but $2000!!!
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yea but see it from perspective of a company that have one hit wonder, they pass both instal and revenue threshold,
they release a demo of new game to get some attention and they get 2 mln ppl to downlad a demo, they suddenly need to pay $20 000 just for releasing a free demo (if you are enterpise)! You constantly lose money each time developer/QA reinstall the game xD.
This move is sadly in line with Unity’s incredibly poor decision making the past few years. The exodus of engineering talent was very indicative.
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Not sure if that helps, but you need to reach install and revenu thresholds for plans to apply.
At least there is a big AND in the text, not in the table.
Or I’m just hoping things… still it would make no sense at all.
So basically small devs need to make sure the revenue is less than $200k OR downloads are under 200k limits on Personal? I don’t think anyone wants a surprise tax based on something completely out of their control. I’m sort of glad this doesn’t concern me at the moment.
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We’ve been a Unity dev house for over 10 years now, and despite all the problems Unity has had over the past few years we haven’t had too much reason to consider other options. However this has us deeply concerned. This seems really messy and cuts into a lot of different issues I cannot currently see a good solution for. For the first time I am wondering if I need to lead our company away from Unity for our future projects.
The key questions I had after having read all available information Unity has posted:
- Exactly how are installs tracked? Over the life-time of our product, if a user “reinstalls” the game 20 times due to replaying the game, changing hardware, multiple devices, etc are we going to end up paying multiple dollars to that user? Although we make premium PC games, when our game is on sale we may end up losing money due to that users behavior!
- On PC our game could be pirated by tens or hundreds of thousands of users, each “installing” the game multiple times. So we’re going to be taxed potentially tens of thousands of dollars on entirely non-paying users?
- For PC studios, Steam has in recent years made publishing demos an ever more important part of releasing a game. Our game could easily be “installed” by hundreds of thousands of users. So having a demo could incur tens of thousands of dollars in fees?
- How are you going to combat an angry fan or bad actor rapidly “reinstalling” the game and spoofing unique hardware and seriously tanking our profit? There are no way we can enter a contract with Unity if this very real and likely problem is in place.
- In the past we’ve given free or extremely cheap copies of our game to charitable causes to help raise charity. We will no longer be able to participate in charitable causes as it’ll cost us too much to do.
- There is zero guidance on how this interacts with Game Pass and streaming services. How does any of this work there?
I honestly cannot see an easy answer to these questions and this style of profiteering directly impacts our decision making and ability to publish our games in the way we see fit.
With the current information we have and the way this looks to be going, we will have no choice but to cease doing business with Unity.
70 Likes
Same here. It’s insane that they want to force us into the Pro plan. I don’t need all of that crap.
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Hello Unity.
Nice try. And as you see the forum is burning. Time to step back and rethink your next move.
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I am very disappointed, how does this pricing even make sense? Do gambling games just get a free pass now as their revenue is off the charts even without installing 200k instances? They’ll just unlist the game as soon as they reach the threshold, they already made their fortune.
The whole pricing model just became atrocious. Why not just do this (replacing existing payment models):
After $100k 4% revenue is cut (undercutting Unreal Engine’s 5% at $1M, but still making up for it because of the lower level of entry), and on top of that offer an enterprise license for companies that wish to customize how they pay and want extra support, services per developer?
How can you make such illogical decisions ALL THE TIME?
There is a stress limit we can bear with your mismanagement, and this has reached that limit. Unity is a great engine, but that does not make up for this pricing model. People are already switcing to Unreal and Godot, why make your own situation even worse? If indie dev companies start leaving I’m leaving aswell. I started freelancing just a few months ago, if I can’t find a job posting I’m off…
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I’m a solo indie dev and this feels like borderline abuse. I’ve spent about 3 years making my project and now considering on moving to Unreal or even Godot. I really dont want to rewrite all the scripts and remake all the scenes that I’ve made but it feels like I have no other choice. It doesnt look like a thought-through decision, and I’m already seeing posts on other sites planning to abuse this system to generate millions of fake installs to ruin some poor dev. Why not just raise the usual fee? Why do you want to implement this fee in this specific way, which is not only very hard to track but also is very succeptible to abuse? It really feels like a terrible decision at least and a betrayal at most.
P.S.: I understand that you want to increase your profits in this troubling time, but dont forget that things can turn out the way that instead of getting a bit more profit from a dev you might stop getting any at all.
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Is this a joke? This is absolutely unbelievable in every single way. You could literally bankrupt any small company using Unity due to this genuinely asinine concept.
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I don’t think they will count debug builds, would be… weird
1 Like
When I worked at Unity, there was a suggestion to just release these ideas into the employee chats, and see what people said. Employees, I guarantee, would say everything that’s been said here and more. The freakout would be proven before ruining the company’s image publicly and betraying trust with the community. And yet the leadership would release these massive changes with zero feedback from any actual developers in the company. And the leadership is surprised by the massive backlash every time, and often rolls back the changes entirely. But the result is that the lost trust and lost customers never rolls back completely with those decisions to reverse course.
Why does this company not learn from its mistakes? Why do they refuse to loop employees in on these things and prevent the disaster from ever even being publicly known?
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I bet the Unreal download servers are melting right now.
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Question to the team: How is Unity going to track install data if users are NOT consenting to any data tracking at all (a good example would be iOS and the ATT prompt).
This is a technical question. Thank you
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for established games, this feels like post hoc extortion. i’m not entirely sure this is legal – but it is definitely a massive breach of trust. not going to work with unity in the future
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Now I pay $35 every month for Unity Pus, just to remove the Unity logo in front of my apps… Now, I had to pay $170 for the Pro version JUST TO REMOVE THE UNITY LOGO???
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One in theory could make their own open-source unity runtime that’s 1:1 compatible with the editor. Just saying.
Since not a lot changes between unity versions anyways.
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