This would be WONDERFUL for small studios. Most companies i work with offer support on a per incident basis. It makes situations like mine where you go a month or two without major issues and per incident might be more cost effective.
I can’t speak for them, but that is probably not cost effective for the Unity team. Premium support is an ongoing service, you are paying for a human being to be readily available to you as soon as you need help. Even if that human doesn’t have anyone to help at the moment, they do still need income.
Problem is one question is likely to take a long time to resolve, or won’t be resolved to the satisfaction of the developer, so you probably need larger amounts of time to be bought than you’d expect. That’s why bigger price. I thought about subscriptions with ticket based queues as an alternative, and that might work, might not.
Yea, it could be very tricky to quantify what an “incident” is.
Microsoft does it, Apple does it with their enterprise support… It’s fairly standard…
No not really.
Apple offer per incident support for their products. (Macs, devices, etc.). For development support it is petty much the same as unity. Check forums > file ticket > submit repro project. Like apple, unity offers enterprise support.
Microsoft dev per indcident support is fairly expensive and does not guarantee result, requires you provide the root cause, and does not review your code. (The main suggestion is to hire a consultant).
As I understand it, we actually made a conscious decision to move away from this kind of thing when we dropped the shorter-term support contracts.
It’s partly because it’s not cost-effective for us, and it’s partly because it does not fit the kind of model we want to operate on: we want studios to be talking to us regularly throughout development, going through the problems they’re having month-by-month, and not coming to us a week before release with everything on fire and expecting us to wave a magic wand and fix it. (And this still happens a bit, but it’s way easier to deal with when we have support staff who are already familiar with the project and have been advising people how to avoid the more excessive hacks throughout development, etc).
It is also, to be honest, MUCH simpler to do things like hire people for the support department if we know that the support contracts we have are going to pay salaries for the next X months. Per-incident support means we would not be able to predict how much cover we need at any given time, which in turn means that we couldn’t guarantee turnaround times on requests. And at that point - talking to us about things that aren’t working in Unity and we’ll try and get back to you eventually but no promises as to when - you’re basically getting the same experience as the bug reporter.
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You make getting support SOOOOOOOOOO hard…
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This is nice a pipe-dream… and I agree it would be cool (sorry for the TL;DR). However, my experience has never been great with Microsoft support - or Unity support when we used to pay for it. I found that it was a subpar copy/paste answer from somewhere that is more or less unrelated to the problem.
At the end of the day, you really contact support for one of two reasons… Something you are doing wrong (you could get a support contract from just about any Unity lead developer with some spare time). Or, much more common in my experience - Unity is doing something just wrong / crashed / broken and a support ticket can’t fix it anyway. And no one is going to fix it unless you go out of your way to really do a lot of QA work for them / submit a lot of files and data and repos and step-by-step stuff and then you need to also be able to make enough noise.
The reality too is that the majority of the “available” Unity staff is far newer to Unity than a lot of us. So, unfortunately paying for support actually doesn’t translate to resolving the issue…
Understanding all the sides of their monetization strategies helps though - SDK’s like SteamVR are paid for at great cost externally (from HTC/Steam for example) and they pay Unity yearly. They typically also have to provide their own support people that pretend to be Unity people. On the other side of the fence, you have Plus and Pro users funding the customer side of costs - and they now can only paying monthly as well (and remember, costs have almost doubled for the average indie dev trying to pay for pro now) - letting Unity cash in on both sides.
So the question becomes, what about tech support? Anyone qualified to provide support in case #2 - Unity level issues - is better off doing new feature development instead to maximize the amount of cash they can bring in externally (from Steam etc). Finally, there is an entire forum of people giving out free tech support and 1-on-1 support on here. There is just no real incentive for Unity to support their own products and small support fees won’t fix that for them - especially as it holds them accountable for stability (which not only doesn’t factor into their value plan, but actually detracts away from how much they can drag in from companies like Steam).
At least, this is my customer biased understanding so far of the issue …
I don’t know what you guys are talking about… when I report bugs and use Unity’s premium support, we get help almost right away. We’ve even had Unity devs make special emergency Unity patch builds that fix a few bugs that were big blockers for my teams projects (side note, patch builds are available to the public here).
Aaaanyway, if you really really hate Unity support because there’s still that one bug that you can’t take responsibility for and therefore must blame someone else, there’s always Unity Connect, which is a a section of the Unity forums in which you can contract other forum users to fix your problems.
Which of the specific support packages do you have?
Watching w/notifications (strange you need to post to get the option to receive emails)
Sorry, I’m not entirely sure… it’s through work, and I believe it’s the premium support that comes with the Unity enterprise edition. We have the email address of a Unity field engineer who usually gets back to us within 1 day of us contacting him.