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Unity plan pricing and packaging updates
- kmeisthax 3y agoOh boy. Anyone remember a decade ago when Adobe tried to charge a revshare for cross-compiled 3d engine code on Flash Player and it pushed everyone out of Flash development and to Unity? Also, this continues my pet peeve of disguising bad news with neutral headlines. If they had made anything cheaper they would have put it in the headline. "Updates" means "price increases".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cheeseomlit 3y agoI don't understand, is this as absolutely insane as it seems? Am I reading this wrong? They're charging the game developer 20 cents every time a user installs the game? I must be missing something here.
- JoeOfTexas 3y agoits bonkers, considering most games fail lol, no way some college student is going to pay that
- meheleventyone 3y agoYou need to meet minimums in terms of revenue and installs so for college students it’d be a success problem. It’s still going to put a load of people off because who needs the added worry and reporting involved!
- no_wizard 3y agoThey have thresholds based on revenue and install counts. You have to meet both before you pay anything. After reading the FAQ though I’m not sure it’s a good deal. It also seems like you 100% have to enable spyware
- cheeseomlit 3y agoYou're telling me. I've been working on a Unity project for several years and now I'm on the verge of scrapping the whole thing and starting over in Godot because of these fucking MBA parasites. I should've known better than to trust a publicly traded company with anything ever.
- cptcobalt 3y agoGodot is reasonably better than Unity, especially with Godot 4 and onward. A bit of a learning curve, but that's the same with any engine. You can certainly prototype and ship more quickly with Godot than Unreal.
- KronisLV 3y ago> Godot is reasonably better than Unity, especially with Godot 4 and onward. I actually made a post explaining how the only terrain plugin available at the time didn't really work well in neither Godot 3, nor Godot 4: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/terrains-in-godot-not-quite-ready-yet https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/terrains-in-godot-not-quite... Then, a while later, a new plugin came out that's made by the community, which seems to address some of my concerns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwJEXOglBrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwJEXOglBrQ (video by Gamefromscratch) To me, it feels like Godot has a pretty nice future ahead of it. I'll probably stick with Unity for the time being, since I don't actually expect any of my small game projects to ever get big, so the change in pricing doesn't really affect me at the time. But in the future? Maybe I'll go back to Godot, even their C# support is getting much nicer now!
- jsharpe 3y agoCollege students don't have to, since they don't meet this criteria to be charged the monthly fee: "Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs." That said, wow. Charging a monthly fee on game installs is absolutely wild. The personal fee (for first world countries) is $0.20 / month. If you charged $10 for the game, you'd be losing money after only 50 months (around 4 years).
- meheleventyone 3y agoYou’re reading it wrong the monthly bit refers to the reporting/billing period and volume discounts. So each month you pay for the installs past the thresholds that month.
- marcosdumay 3y agoThey managed to create a price that inviabilizes both ads-for-playing (and the more devious variants, like pay-for-win and lottery) and upfront paid games. That's just amazing, and will probably become a case study somewhere after the company fails.
- stuckinhell 3y agoa college student wouldn't pay anything until they are making money
- ceeam 3y ago20 cents MONTHLY
- berkle4455 3y agoSurely that’s not right… it’s gotta be first install is 20 cents. 20 cents per install is egregious but a recurring license is financially unsustainable.
- flutas 3y agoIt's only once per install. I agree that it's worded very badly though. > What is the Unity Runtime Fee? > (...) Creators only pay once per download. https://unity.com/pricing-updates https://unity.com/pricing-updates
- ceeam 3y agohttps://unity.com/sites/default/files/2023-09/NewFeeTable.png https://unity.com/sites/default/files/2023-09/NewFeeTable.pn... Why does it say "monthly rate" if it's not a monthly rate?
- semanticist 3y agoBecause the pro and enterprise plans give you a price break based on the number of installs per month.
- flutas 3y agoMaybe because it's paid monthly no matter what, as opposed to yearly plans? > You will be invoiced monthly based on the month’s install data. Invoicing will be the same method as for your Unity plan subscriptions, though it will be monthly regardless of your Unity plan payment cycle. I'm assuming that $0.20 is paid every time it's downloaded based on their wording, so that could introduce a new way to harm competitors. Buy their game and uninstall / reinstall on loop?
- r053bud 3y agoFrom the FAQ: “Creators only pay once per download.”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flutas 3y ago> They're charging the game developer 20 cents every time a user installs the game? Yup, but don't worry. You can get a discount if you use Unity's ad network![0] This whole thing seems...short sighted. [0]: https://unity.com/pricing-updates https://unity.com/pricing-updates "Can I get a discount on the Unity Runtime Fee?"
- TeaDude 3y agoI can't believe that they're encouraging MORE Unity games to be riddled with ads. Isn't that the (admittedly unfair but true for the mobile market) stereotype?
- pavlov 3y agoUnity merged with an ad network last year. The engine now exists as a vehicle to show more ads, since that’s the primary revenue source of the company.
- hightrix 3y agoAds are a technological cancer that seem to have no cure in sight. It is really frustrating how ads have ruined so many good products/platforms.
- mrguyorama 3y agoMobile users put up with even directly "pay to win" mechanics and blatant gacha bullshit. They seem unwilling or unable, for whatever reason, to even conceive of a different paradigm. "Mobile gaming", read mobile unregulated casinos where you can never withdraw, are the biggest and most profitable gaming sector. Don't worry, companies like EA are looking at that market, licking their chops, and continue to try and push such concepts as gacha into what used to be perfectly fine video games, and plenty of consumers eat up any excuse just so they don't have to go a year without the exact same videogame as last year but worse.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wpietri 3y agoYes, but the developer has to have made $200k over the last 12 months and had 200k installs. So if you hit both minimums and have made $1/install, they'd like 20% of that. Unless you're in an emerging market, in which case it's 2%. Is that insane? I'm not a game developer, but it seems like it's in the ballpark of what the app stores are charging, and with a structure that's actually enforceable at reasonable cost from Unity's perspective.
- jsharpe 3y agoThey want 20% of that, PER MONTH.
- wpietri 3y agoSorry, where does it say per month? I don't see that.
- jsharpe 3y ago"Standard monthly rate" above that section of the fee table.
- wpietri 3y agoAh, I see what you're saying, but in the linked FAQ it says, "Creators only pay once per download."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- semanticist 3y agoThat just references that the fee is charged monthly and for pro/entprise plans based on monthly install numbers. But you're at least the second person just in this discussion to make that mistake, so they probably need to reword that table!
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- stuckinhell 3y agoUnity wants to get into the premium space and shake off the shovelware engine stigma.
- berkle4455 3y agoEpic and Roblox are going to be very happy with this news.
- codingcodingboy 3y agoMoney is not free anymore.
- no_wizard 3y agoare they only counting unique installs or do developers pay with any install? Like if i reimagined my machine and reinstall games does that mean they have to pay the install fee again? EDIT: The more I read the FAQ, the more I think this is a bad deal
- wpietri 3y agoOoh, good question. Does Unity phone home when a game is launched? If I were in Unity's shoes and trying to enforce this cheaply, I'd either have it phone home so I could keep track of how many active users a game has, or I'd just scrape data from the app stores to see who's worth having a salesperson call up.
- wpietri 3y agoI was looking at that table, which otherwise made great sense, but struggling to understand why Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise had cheaper per-install prices than Unity Personal. Part of the answer is that they charge up-front monthly fees to use it: https://unity.com/products/unity-pro https://unity.com/products/unity-pro So I see $2040 per year per seat for Unity Pro. That doesn't quite explain why the per-install costs decline with volume for Pro/Enterprise licensees, but I suspect that's just that the Pro/Enterprise are more sophisticated and have better negotiating power.
- meheleventyone 3y agoPresumably the Pro/Enterprise subscribers are more likely to reach the thresholds as well so get charged for installs and it’s a carrot to get people to upgrade if you expect volume.
- starburst 3y agoThis cannot be right, how can this makes sense with mobile gaming? Unity has a HUGE market share there, so they know the number. How can free games ensure a 0.20$ per install? Why not go with X% of the revenue?
- grogenaut 3y agoBecause they can more easily track the former than the latter? The latter would be show me your books.
- starburst 3y agoThat's how Unreal does it, 5% over 1M or something. Installs tracking has it own problem in itself, like pirated copies or offline, etc.
- grogenaut 3y agoUnreal isn't being used to crank out low end mobile games that are purely ad sponsored... betting that there are more shenanagians going on in unity's space that would means it hard to actually check the books versus someone with 1M in revenue
- gambiting 3y agoHow do free games pay for unity licencing right now?
- starburst 3y agoFree with splash screen, or Plus / Pro subscription to remove splash screen. I don't disagree that Unity need to make money, but they should go the Unreal route with % of profit or something. Tons of games don't even make back 0.20$ per user (mobile or f2p), what's going to happens to those? Force to close because they cannot pay the rent?
- fidotron 3y agoUnity is a tragedy. They have managed to fumble the technical aspects so much it drove people away, to the point they become more valuable as part of an ad business than an engine one. Their efforts outside the games industry don't appear to have as much traction as they deserve either. The question has already been "Why aren't you using Unreal?" and that's just going to get harder. Given the current VC taste for eliminating all things which count against gross margins now might be a good time to be an engine developer again.
- ceeam 3y ago> Why aren't you using Unreal? C++. Sure, we can talk about Verse or even Skookum, but C# is much easier. Still, if any big game engine would have something like JS it would be even better for indie or small studios.
- somenameforme 3y agoUnreal C++ is so heavily modded that it often doesn't really feel like C++. Like I feel kind of odd the rare times I use std:: anything. And Unreal C++ tends to be garbage controlled, support reflection, and so on. The only real big downsides are you have C++ compile times and generally poor intellisense - though IDEs that specialize in Unreal, like Rider, have seen exponential improvements on that front. And for teams that are genuinely averse to C++, going 100% Blueprint is also a completely viable option.
- V1ndaar 3y agoFor people scared off by C++ and who want faster recompile times, check out the Nim bindings [0]. Check out his Twitter/X account [1] for plenty of cool things it brings to the table. [0]: https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE https://github.com/jmgomez/NimForUE [1]: https://twitter.com/_jmgomez_ https://twitter.com/_jmgomez_
- jimmaswell 3y agoUnity used to support JS but nobody used it. Why would I ever pick such a weakly typed mess over C# for this use case?
- eljimmy 3y agoThe claw of capitalism will always tighten its grip. Any software company that goes public has this problem it seems.
- KMnO4 3y agoThe pricing is a bit weird. Their criteria is based on gross revenue of >=$200k. But instead of charging a percentage of that, they charge per install at a rate of $0.20/install. So if you made $200k off of 1M installs, you’ll now pay $200k and your total profit will be zero. I guess the assumption is that each install will earn you >>$0.20, but that’s a very generous assumption. What about a F2P game that has millions of installs but only a fraction support the game with microtransactions? There’s definitely going to be some cases where studios will owe more money to Unity than their game makes.
- meheleventyone 3y agoI think you need to read the table again. If you have that volume you shouldn’t be on the most expensive per install plan. And if you’re on a higher plan you wouldn’t qualify for the per install pricing at all.
- KMnO4 3y agoBefore this change, there would be no reason to spend $2100/seat on Unity Pro. The Personal/Plus plans would be more than sufficient for indie devs. You’re right, some studios are going to be forced to switch to the Pro plan to save on per install pricing. That just seems like a really frustrating forced upgrade.
- ddxv 3y ago"Once a game passes the revenue and install thresholds, the studio would pay a small flat fee for each install (see the table below)." This was not clear to me at first based on their table which currently shows 1-1000 installs as falling into the $0.20, but it's in fact actually the installs AFTER passing the threshold I believe. So assuming it was installs, it would be install 200,001 - 201,000 that would be charged $0.20?
- madsbuch 3y agoThis might be good for for Godot..
- ceeam 3y agoThe big deal breaker with Godot was that any console (XBox/PS) release was out of question.
- 6581 3y agohttps://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html#third-party-support https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
- amitmathew 3y agoW4 Games, which was founded by some of the Godot devs, also recently announced console support: https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-a-practical-console-porting-solution-for-game-developers/ https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-....
- ncr100 3y agoYeah, there's like a small size studio, or studios where they plan to not have like a very strong monetization curve, where this makes sense. This pricing change pressurizes modestly successful long tail profits. And so I think yes competitor game engines that are more progressive will be more popular for those segments.
- Kapura 3y agoIt's a shame Unity seems so intent on making itself unattractive to developers. I prefer writing c# to c++, and I think Unity's onboarding experience is much better than Unreal. But when it comes to a non-solo-development effort, when you need to start thinking about businesses and numbers and all the things that aren't making the game, Epic has made Unreal attractive, and partnerships with the Epic Games Store can boost that value even further. Unity's recent moves to me speak to a fear that they've more-or-less hit their market saturation point, and now they're looking to extract more from the developers who live in their slice of the pie. I fear this will make that slice shrink, which will create more fear, and then the problem spirals.
- ActionHank 3y agoI've been eyeing out UnrealCLR, it looks really promising!
- WillPostForFood 3y agoUnfortunately it looks dead - last release was over a year ago, commits tapering off.
- Auracle 3y agoIf Unreal (natively) adopted C# that would absolutely be a killing blow to Unity, to the point where I'm amazed they haven't done it.
- kevingadd 3y agoThere was C# support for Unreal (contributed by the Mono maintainers) at one point but Epic actively blocked it. They want everyone on C++ and nothing else
- msk-lywenn 3y agoThey gave UnrealCLR an epic megagrant. How can you say they "actively blocked it" ?
- jsharpe 3y agoCharging a monthly fee on game installs is absolutely wild, considering that most games on Steam are one-time purchases. The personal fee (for first world countries) is $0.20 / month. If you charged $10 for the game, you'd be losing money after only 50 months (around 4 years).
- NoahKAndrews 3y agoIt looks to be per-install, not per-month-installed.
- monsieurbanana 3y agoI still refuse to believe that's the right interpretation. That can't be real. Are you really going to owe more to Unity every time a user uninstall/reinstalls your game? If they want to play in their main PC and their Steamdeck? Completely abolishes the incentive of pushing free updates too. You don't want to make new great features that would push people to re-download your game.
- NoahKAndrews 3y agoTheir FAQ page makes it crystal-clear
- Nullabillity 3y agoFrom the FAQ: > We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download. > An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device. The FAQ clarifies absolutely nothing.
- NoahKAndrews 3y agoI wonder if it actually applies to updates. I doubt that.
- Borealid 3y agoPerhaps missed in the discussion so far is that the Unity Personal license (the one that's free up to a certain sales volume) will now require an always-on Internet connection to use. That's a change from the past, and the FAQ doesn't provide a reason why. My guess would be analytics over licensing, but who knows really.
- grogenaut 3y agoThey got bought by an ad company, and have mainly been investing in ads and the 17th render pipeline internally so you can see where this is going: always on internet to deliver UHDQSRP ads
- hightrix 3y agoSounds like I need to start a betting pool as to when ads will come to the editor. Ugh, this whole thing is so frustrating. I’d love to cancel our unity projects and port to godot or unreal, but that’s just not possible in the near term. Unity is doing everything they can to push devs away.
- daveoc64 3y ago> Perhaps missed in the discussion so far is that the Unity Personal license (the one that's free up to a certain sales volume) will now require an always-on Internet connection to use. Is that really such a problem? It looks like it'll work offline for up to 3 days. Will there many people doing game dev that can't go online once every 3 days in 2024?
- Borealid 3y agoI think you're looking at it the wrong way around. The question isn't whether you have access to the Internet; the question is whether the server on the other end is up. Products that require an Internet connection to function are effectively time bombs that stop working at some future date, due to an incident or a change in someone else's business. I didn't say that was a "problem", but since it's harder to write a tool like this that fails when a server is down than to write one that keeps working... the question is why?
- Ekaros 3y agoI wonder if installs could be faked? So find a project that has revenue of the 200k and then appear to install it couple million times... Is this sort of scenario considered at all?
- hightrix 3y agoI’m wondering the opposite. Could a developer block the phone home call signifying a new install. I’m sure someone will try it.
- gs17 3y agoI'm sure it'll be against their ToS and they'll ban your account (which you now need to log in to at least once every three days to use the editor).
- YurgenJurgensen 3y agoThe developer doing so would certainly result in bans and/or lawsuits, but it's not inconceivable that if it is something that relies on the installer being able to phone home that people start building it into ad-blockers or popularising some script to set the appropriate firewall rules. And if this does go through, there's bound to be thousands of people with the talent and influence to do so and a desire to spite Unity.
- hightrix 3y ago> there's bound to be thousands of people with the talent and influence to do so and a desire to spite Unity. There are at least a few of us here already. I imagine the "hacks" will be released shortly after this is available to the public.
- matt3210 3y agoMust have spyware in the runtime. Watch your games get auto removed after the developer goes out of business or doesn’t pay RENT
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- damsta 3y agoHow does the install tracking work exactly? Do they fingerprint the device once you start a game?
- matt3210 3y agoThis being a monthly rate is insane. Does the game stop working if the developer doesn’t pay?
- tomnipotent 3y agoMonthly is in regards to how Unity invoices, the fee is per-install.
- matt3210 3y agoNo, the table header says “monthly rate” of .20 per install. Eg 10 installs is 2$ a month
- gambiting 3y agoThat's not correct. It's poorly worded, but fee is per install per lifetime not per month.
- matt3210 3y agoExplain why my interpretation is incorrect, otherwise I’ll continue with it. There’s no other way to interpret “standard monthly rate = 0.2”
- tomnipotent 3y agoRead the FAQ, which would have taken less time then you spent expressing your faux outrage on HN. What is the Unity Runtime Fee? We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download.
- matt3210 3y agoMakes sense, thanks for pointing it out. Also Faux: made to look like something else that is usually more valuable Common mistake, no worries
- Aeglen 3y agoTime to switch to Godot for my design-stage mobile game. The fact that they even came up with this, and worded it so poorly, reeks of incompetence.
- gambiting 3y agoSo I guess you can't make fully online games with unity anymore - the runtime will have to connect with unity servers at least once to report new installation.
- gambiting 3y ago*offline
- nullifidian 3y ago"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed." This reads as something insane. If a player replays a game on steam, redownloads it, the developer still pays for the installation? I know people who redownload games all the time, like tens of times over the span of several years. I hope it's imprecise language and only the initial install/download is counted. I hope these changes (whatever they actually are) won't push game developers towards developing games that milk users more, with loot boxes, in-game currency, cosmetics etc, and away from stand alone you-pay-once games, single player or multiplayer, only to be able to pay for the ongoing engine fees.
- larsiusprime 3y agoReading this on the face of it... - What about pirated copies? - What about maliciously installed copies? (4chan: "alright frens, time to install-bomb <gamewehate.exe>! Remember to click the IP address rotation button each time!"
- teraflop 3y agoAnd even if you assume they only charge for legitimate, authorized installations -- what about free demos? This seems to create a massive disincentive to make those available.
- gs17 3y agoI think demos would be fine, if you create a separate project for the demo. It's effectively a separate game with no revenue. Development builds, on the other hand, would be the same game.
- Karliss 3y agoInformation provided by Unity says that they can merge numbers for multiple games if they decided that they are sufficiently similar. So clever tricks of making separate game will not work. It depends on how greedy they are whether Unity will apply this rule to demos.
- tiptup300 3y agoAnyone else miss XNA? There's MonoGame, but man, it's really a mess, they're still using Microsoft.XNA.Game; And I always have a hell of a time getting it hooked into Visual Studio. Recently started a C# project that renders using DirectX onto Windows SDK window. Hopefully I can continue along with that.
- matt3210 3y agoDoes this apply to existing games? I can see a lot of companies running on margins going it of business here. I wonder if this entire fee will be passed directly to the customer
- bnewton149 3y agoI’ve enjoyed using Unity for the last 6 years but this is a deal breaker. It’s just wrong and makes one wonder what other policies they’re considering. After taking some time to mourn I plan on looking into Godot. I expect to take a big productivity hit but at least I won’t be continuing to invest my time into working on a platform that is so anti-dev.
- ncr100 3y agoWhat's super crappy about this is all the plugins, I've invested mega money in c# Unity specific asset store assets and now switching platforms is extra painful, vendor lock-in and all that. Foolish me.
- stuckinhell 3y agoI'm looking into chatgpt to convert my libraries to godot.
- norwalkbear 3y agoIs that working? I'd pay for an automated tool to help convert my unity stuff into Godot right now.
- stuckinhell 3y agoIt's not automated, but I'm able to make surprisingly progress while not knowing much about godot. You'll need to do some prompt engineering and must have chatgpt4 to get good results.
- raincole 3y agoIt's impossible to have such a tool. Not even close. If there is that would be the biggest innovation in the history of computer science (yeah, seriously).
- dagmx 3y agoIMHO this is yet another failure of leadership at Unity. This will absolutely kill any incentive for the remaining indie devs to use Unity with such a low floor and flat cost. Whereas your game going temporarily viral would have been huge , now it’ll be a huge burden. Meanwhile Unreal is 5% after 1M. A progressive fee would have at least made some sense. As it is, Unity lags severely behind Unreal for both features and sentiment. The big markets for Unity were indie and enterprise. They’d ceded everything in the middle to Unreal. Epic provide megagrant funding to Godot, in what I imagine is a play to eat Unity from the bottom up. Unity will just accelerate that. And enterprise is fickle. They’ll switch to something else as soon as any project lead feels like it. Imho this is one more step down the road to the death of Unity. They have brilliant engineers led by very incompetent leadership.
- qwytw 3y ago> Meanwhile Unreal is 5% after 1M. Which is still more than Unity as long as you game costs more than $5-20? Of course this pretty much makes making any actually free (not filled with ads free) games impossible. Edit: If I understand correctly the install fee only kicks in after $200k revenue? If so these pricing changes actually seem pretty reasonable..
- bcrosby95 3y agoMost Unity games are mobile apps. Some suits probably saw the numbers on installs and saw dollar signs, but never thought about if it was a viable pricing model for most of their actual customers.
- qwytw 3y ago> pricing model for most of their actual customers I guess they don't really value customers who can only generate $0.01-1.0 or less per install. Not saying it's right but it's not like this group of developers is really paying them that much anyway (and noncommercial games/apps don't seem to be affected at al).
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- NotGMan 3y agoOh boy...the mobile game studio who are already making little money per install are gonna go crazy. Unity right now is only massively used by 1) Indies 2) Mobile game studios They just made sure that all of those will switch tech. Unreal Engine has a much better license because it says that "it's not retroactively changable": so if you eg stay at Unreal 5.2 forever no new epic changes to the license will apply to you since the 5.2 license applies to you forever. RIP unity. Even if unity reverts this (which IMO they will due to backlash) all new mobile studio game devs will move to some other engine.
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- pavlov 3y agoLast year Unity merged with IronSource, a mobile app ad network. The writing was on the wall then. These “pricing upgrades” today are designed to drive more adoption of Unity’s ad network. Popular free games will have to start showing ads via Unity to pay for the new runtime distribution fee.
- nugget 3y agoMost of the talent from IronSource has left or checked out, and they started to slip in competitiveness and lose clients as a result. This pricing model seems designed to slow those losses, but if it increases developer adoption of Godot or another rival platform (other than Unreal), it seems like Unity is playing with fire here.
- Kerbonut 3y agoThey are literally disincentivizing installation of games made by their engine, hilarious.
- BonitaPersona 3y agoWell, this is in line with their wonderful incentive for devs to pay to REMOVE the mandatory Unity logo. This has made +10 years of high-quality, unforgettable, GOTY games made in Unity to not have the logo, while all the humble, low-quality, full of free-asset-store assets, practice projects of newbies, show the Unity logo first and foremost. Literally attaching your brand recognition to the projects exactly opposite of the ones you want your brand to be recognized with.
- matt3210 3y agoPeople keep saying this is not a monthly charge per install. The header clearly says “standard monthly rate” with various per install charges. An I not interpreting this correctly?
- dcow 3y agoBilled monthly for net gain in installs.
- starburst 3y agoIt is bad phrasing, I think they meant each month you need to pay X for the installs of the month. You pay only once per install. Also what is an install? Why not go with "user", someone installing the game 5 times is gonna cost 1$? Terrible communication all around form Unity.
- gs17 3y agoNot just "what is an install?" but "how do they detect installs?" Does every Unity game have always-online DRM included now? Will pirates count, so Unity demands a share of money you didn't make? If you give out an open beta to the public, do those development versions count as installs? Unsurprisingly, the FAQ does not answer much.
- starburst 3y agoOr what about games made on previous version of the engine? They certainly didn't include a phone home to Unity but still according to the pricing on January 1st any new installs of old games is going to have a cost at that point... Web Games? So every single person that open the web page is going to cost me 0.20$?
- gs17 3y ago>So every single person that open the web page is going to cost me 0.20$? That's what they're saying, "each time a qualifying game or app is downloaded by an end user". And they have an incentive to count multiple downloads as multiple "installs".
- matt3210 3y agoUsing small sandboxes with randomized hardware IDs, a malicious actor could really mess things up
- Explore3003 3y agoBetween this and the 30% commission charged by Game Stores, is there any profit left in gamedev anymore?
- BonitaPersona 3y agoIf you want income, either you - cross your fingers for a deal with a major (Xbox game pass, Epic exclusivity) - cross your fingers for a deal with one of the smaller ones that will do proper guidance and marketing (devolver, deck13, new blood, Annapurna, team17, etc) - cross your fingers for big streamers to dedicate at least a few hours to your game - make an extremely niche, moated game that will for sure attract a specific fanbase that buys everything on that niche. And cross your fingers that a competitor doesn't launch around the same date. - make an addictive gachapon filled casual mobile game, and burn money in ads Only one of these doesn't have you crossing your fingers. (I'm half joking please don't take this too seriously)
- raytopia 3y agoSimilar to when GameMaker: Studio switched to a subscription model Unity is about to shed a lot of users but will probably make mire money then it ever has. Also this seems to be targeting the mobile market more than other markets because of how large install bases are on that platform. 100M+ users for each popular mobile game * 0.01-0.02 = a lot of money for Unity.
- matt3210 3y agoThis is effectively a 20% charge on a 1$ game. I’m sure the studios will pass this charge on to the customers so it won’t matter much to them.
- dns_snek 3y agoIf their sales margin is the same, but fewer users buy and install their game because it's now 20% more expensive, that reduces their overall profit which definitely matters to them.
- matt3210 3y agoIf we save 0.2 per install by having Unity ads, does this mean the other ad sources drive less income? This effectively means the saved amount by using Unity ads is offset by the lost income from the no longer used original ad source.
- tomnipotent 3y agoThe amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal. Let's look at fictional scenario for Vampire Survivors, and model 5M units sold in the first 12 months at $4.99 per sale. We'll also assume a Unity Enterprise plan. Units Sold: 5,000,000 Gross Sales: $24,950,000 Steam Fees: $0-10M (30%): $3,000,000 $10M+ (25%): $3,737,500 Total: $6,737,500 Unity Fees: 0-100,000: $12,500 100-500k: $24,000 500k-1MM: $10,000 1MM-4MM: $30,000 Total: $76,500 Net Sales: $18,136,000 I can't be certain exactly how Unity is planning to accrue installs when determining installs over threshold, so treating it like brackets. So in this fictional scenario, the Unity fee is 0.3% of gross or 0.47% after Steam takes its cut. Even if we assume the average consumer downloads the game 1.2 times, that's still only $20k more. The bigger issue is how thresholds accrue, since that could push more installs into costlier lower threshold brackets. I'm not sure I see the outrage.
- matt3210 3y agoEspecially since the extra cost will certainly be passed onto the customer anyway. That’s a small bump for a 4.99 game, but a 20% bump for a 1$ mobile game
- adocomplete 3y agoYup. Unity I believe is very fairly priced and even with these changes the fees are very reasonable for what you get. And at the end of the day, if you think it's too expensive, you're free to build your own cross platform game engine from scratch.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- starburst 3y agoDon't forget Mobile or f2p gaming, Unity has a huge market share there and the margin are really low, adding ~0.20$ per user when most will makes you 0$ doesn't make sense at all. Going with % of profit does. Also it is quite unfair to cheaper games, indie 5$ games pay a much bigger share than a 40$ / 70$ game
- stephc_int13 3y agoI am not a fan of Unity, but this pricing style don't offend me. Per install fixed cost is a good way to avoid the race to the bottom and then the F2P nightmare that still plague the mobile gaming market. Before Apple invented the $.99 pricing tier, most mobile games were sold for $7-$20 and it was, IMO, a much better market.
- ncr100 3y agoSo you feel this applies healthy economic pressure, and his appropriate for applying across all markets? Like I kind of get where you're going... Increasing expectations so products must be high quality and guaranteed to be profitable. Although that's still a little wishful. And so it might not be realistic. I personally think this will actually suffocate certain segments of the software market. It's like the insurance donut hole here in the United States where if you're between certain ages you don't qualify for Medicare and you still are paying for it and so you risk going into extremely high insurance cost zone, just because your age happens to be like 58 years old.
- gs17 3y agoIf it only applied to games sold for profit (or with microtransactions) it would be okay, but basing it on installs leads to things like that a Unity developer should avoid including their game in a charity bundle unless they mostly want to donate to Unity. E.g. Fanatical's Stand With Ukraine Charity Bundle would have cost each developer ~$2000 if they were on a Personal/Plus plan. It's not a huge amount, but Unity does not deserve it.
- YurgenJurgensen 3y agoWas this true? I recall back when the first wave of App Store games were coming out, the general feeling among mobile players was "You buy your $40 game, and I'll buy 40 $1 games and we'll see who has more fun." So I think mobile games were always dirt cheap. Nowadays, of course, the $40 game is $70+Battle Pass+Digital Deluxe Upgrade+Day 1 DLC and the $1 game is free but contains a hypnotoad that will mind control you into spending $400 a month gambling for jpegs.
- 3y ago
- danShumway 3y agoThey're also introducing new DRM requirements for the editor (https://unity.com/pricing-updates https://unity.com/pricing-updates): > Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect. Notably, Adobe Creative Cloud requires you to check in every 30 days to validate licenses. I feel like it takes some work to come up with a DRM scheme for a development tool that is more onerous than Adobe's restrictions, but what do I know? I certainly have never left a demo laptop unplugged for a week and then set up a demo quickly without Internet access and needed to make a quick change in my engine. That never happens to indie developers, so locking down the editor until they reestablish an Internet connection totally won't be a problem for them. /s
- squeaky-clean 3y agoI've resisted moving to Godot because I already know Unity so well, but I guess they've finally forced me to switch.
- giyokun 3y agoWelcome to the party!
- danShumway 3y agoGodot just announced a new developer funding platform today for donations, which apparently takes a smaller cut per-donation than Patreon does. It's optional (Godot is free), but if any developers who are considering switching from Unity want to see Godot development accelerated, consider kicking the project a few dollars a month: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/ https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/
- j1mmie 3y agoI will move as soon as possible. Unfortunately I've got a two-year old project I'm about to launch. Can't rewrite it now. This is really not great
- faefox 3y agoThe ongoing enshittification of Unity is great news for Godot.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- droptablemain 3y agoDoes this mean the developer has to pay a license fee if someone acquires and plays their game in a "non-standard" way?
- ncr100 3y agoYes, so far there has been no clarification by unity about pirate installs or malicious competitors faking the unique installation API called to the Unity backend. Ripe for fraud. If unity is malicious they could actually set up farms artificially inflating installation counts and generating a little extra profit.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoI am 100% going to do this with an old laptop of mine. Is it even "fraud" if I just want to test my SSD longevity by constantly installing and uninstalling a game?
- ncr100 3y agoOnly if there's a contract between you and whatever other entity is doing this kind of per install behavior tracking.
- bcrosby95 3y agoThey also recently changed the pricing structure of their cloud build - they charge per minute used now. For whatever reason it takes their service 60 minutes to build our iOS game, which costs us around $4. It was kinda tolerable when we weren't getting charged per minute, but now it's just stupid to pay more money because their builds are slow as hell. We're kinda busy right now so we're paying the fee, but buying a mac mini for builds is definitely on our TODO list now, and once there's some slack in our schedule that will be done. We've also wasted weeks of time debugging bugs in their cloud system in the past, some of which were mysteriously fixed and they had no clue why. So I'm not even sure we've saved much time over just having our own in house build server.
- hightrix 3y agoIf you haven't looked into it yet, GitHub Actions is relatively easy to setup for Unity builds and, for us, it cut build times more than in half (60+ min to ~20min). GHA isn't cheaper per minute, but it is much faster and you can output things like Code Coverage.
- Fraterkes 3y agoI haven't written a lot in compiled languages, so maybe this is a dumb question, but are you actually saying that it takes an hour to compile your unity project? I thought that only happened with huge c++ codebases. How do you get any creative work done without quick iteration?
- bcrosby95 3y agoIf you want to test locally, you can just hit the "play" button in the Unity editor and it all happens pretty fast. We use this for building something you can install on an iOS/android device, or for putting up on the web for webgl.
- rahkiin 3y agoDistribution builds, especially to consoles, need full shader compilation of all variants in the build. This can take hours. For some pc games they also can prebuild some shaders for common hardware to speed up loading times.
- binarynate 3y agoCommenters here are overreacting due to misunderstandings: - the per-install fee doesn't kick in until you've passed BOTH the annual game revenue and install thresholds (i.e. >$200k annual revenue on the game and >200k lifetime unique downloads) - the fee isn't monthly, it's per unique download (poor wording in Unity's chart) - you only pay the fee on the number of downloads over the threshold This new pricing will actually decrease the price of using Unity for many developers. Before, if your company's total annual revenue was >$100k, you had to buy a paid Unity license no matter what. Now those company's can use Unity totally free until their game reaches $200k annual revenue and 200k lifetime downloads. This licensing scheme is actually very similar to licensing the AVC/H.264 video codec from Via LA (for example, if you want to ship a build of Chromium with MP4 enabled). In their case, licensees self report the number of units they've distributed per year and pay a small fee on the number of units over 100k. If you ship under 100k units, there is no fee.
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- procflora 3y agoI think a lot of people are just fundamentally rejecting the structure of a deal like that. The numbers will matter a lot to individual org's decisions but at least to me the emotional reaction here is unrelated to the specifics of the thresholds and rates. It's just "game engine company should not be doing that." Probably true since it doesn't appear like they're a game engine company any more. The enshittification machine is rumbling to life.
- gs17 3y agoI do appreciate that if you make something that's always free, no matter who you work for you don't need to worry about which license to use, and by making it revenue for the last 12 months we don't need to worry about every dev taking down all their old Unity games to avoid fees. But it's still not a great deal. Even if they somehow can exclude pirated copies and malicious reinstalls, there's still plenty of absurd scenarios with it. A developer decides to make their game that was a hit almost a year ago free? Now they might have to pay Unity more than the $200k they made on the game earlier! Or if they throw it in a charity bundle, they get punished for their attempt to help people in need!
- ponytech 3y agoI had been thinking about this for sometime but now it is time to switch to an alternative game engine. Thank you Unity for helping making my mind up.
- consoomer 3y agoUnity has built a very impressive engine and runtime. With that being said, I have never had the desire to use it (or any other engine). Perhaps I'm a minority here, but I dislike engines and I dislike the idea of "building my own engine." I think you should set out to make the game. You begin by creating a window. Then you draw some pixels or render a texture. You add events and controls. You make the game logic and states. Then you have a game. It can take as little as a hundred lines of code to have a basic game up and running. From there, you make the thing you want to create. No more, no less.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago> You begin by creating a window. Then you draw some pixels or render a texture. You add events and controls. Yes, but without an engine, how do you make this all cross-platform? Using something like Unity, you can theoretically write your program once and it runs on damn near anything. Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, PlayStation 4/5, Switch, and more.
- consoomer 3y agoThat sounds nice, but it looks a lot like a "what if" scenario. What if I need to support a dozen systems? What if I need to do fancy 3D graphics? What if I need to do some other thing that isn't my problem right now (and likely ever)? It's like when a web developer starts talking about how they will handle the c10K problem, or how their todo app is deployed on a fancy kubernetes cluster across the planet running on edge networks and fault tolerant, but they have zero users and no good ideas. Just make the game you want to make. If it's fun and people love it, build it out more. Rewrite it if you have to. Hell, Minecraft was wrote in Java, then C++. Just make a game.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoI think, at the very least, it makes sense to want to support Windows, Mac, and Linux. Trying to support consoles adds a massive layer of complexity regarding their stores. "Just make a game" is fine if your game is going to be simple and can be done in a month, but there are plenty of indie games that have had only one or two developers for a couple years before even entering Early Access. A game with that kind of complexity helps a LOT to use an engine.
- bilekas 3y ago> We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share. I'm sorry but maybe I'm missing something obvious.. Why are they making this seem preferable to developers? Also what does the runtime being installed have anything to do with the cost to Unity? This is mind blowing, i have to missing something.
- oddevan 3y agoIt's not a "cost to Unity" thing. It's a "you're using our code and we're entitled to our share" thing.
- bilekas 3y agoThis really is mind blowing, I used to play games like Subnautica and think how impressive it was that it was made on Unity. It was advertising of the engine/framework in itself!
- MaximilianEmel 3y agoIt seems to me that their primary consideration is games with microtransactions, gacha games, and mobile game ad-hell.
- LarsDu88 3y agoBoy, this is demoralizing. Unity needs to make money, but they just gave folks a great reason on the lower end a reason to switch to the completely free Godot which: - Will soon reach performance parity - Now supports C# - Is less bloated - Is FOSS Unity did have some great and useful libraries for doing things like animation rigging and editor customization. RIP
- ambyra 3y agoI wonder if the old versions of the editor will still run without the DRM additions in November.
- tezza 3y agoNo mention of WebGL installs * Do WebGL plays count? * This could bankrupt indies if too many people click the WebGL games * What Unity Version is this effective from? * Will games made on prior versions of the editor be affected?
- Karliss 3y ago> Do WebGL plays count? According to https://unity.com/runtime-fee https://unity.com/runtime-fee "distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an install." > Will games made on prior versions of the editor be affected? From the FAQ https://unity.com/pricing-updates https://unity.com/pricing-updates , "Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime". So while it doesn't apply to any past downloads, it will apply to any future downloads of previously released games.
- appstorelottery 3y agoI've been developing in Unity since it was a two man company. Deep down when EA ex CEO took it over I knew it was all downhill from there... I'd subscribed yearly to the Unity licence for 14 years! Certified Unity Expert. Flew to EU for conferences. I remember saying to the founders in the day they should raise money and grow the company (I was the random guy using Unity for window displays and other business applications, running the water shader for 24 hours and seeing it degrade etc.). I made a great living out of Unity, particularly in the Wind Energy industry. It speaks volumes to me about big-capitalism that it's gone this way... but to be fair - the product was so fragmented towards the end - multiple versions to choose from for a new project - LTS builds. It honestly became a nightmare to develop in for me. I lost the joy of making stuff work... Unity 2015 was probably the peak for me... These days I'm doing WebGL and ThreeJS is not fun either with upgrades, depreciated functions. The whole ecosystem is a mess these days. I need to shave my beard.
- ponytech 3y agoGodot is announcing a new funding program on the same day! https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/ https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/ Coincidence?
- CodeL 3y ago[flagged]
- gavanwilhite 3y agoKilling the Plus plan is the worst part about this. The cheapest paid tier is now $2000 / year, putting it out of range for side projects.
- pavon 3y agoWere the benefits of Plus over Personal worth the price? My impression was that most people bought because they went over the threshold which has now been eliminated for Personal.
- dindobre 3y agoRemoving the splash screen, guess I'm supposed to fork X thousand dollars yearly given it's about 2K per seat now, jesus christ
- gavanwilhite 3y agoSplash screen removal, access to support, etc. Generally all the benefits that come with paying for a thing, rather than being on a tier that the company is trying to get you off of.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- readyplayernull 3y ago> cloud-based asset storage Last time I checked their storage limit was around 40GB, that's too little unless you are making 2D casual games. I'm making a 3D shooter that takes 300GB+.
- dindobre 3y agoSo they basically tripled (4.5X actually) the cost of customizing the splash screen, to an amount that for non US based customers is a lot. I'm quite shocked, I was looking at godot with mild interest but now I'm actively hoping it picks up, this kind of changes are just insane and I'm guess things will get worse over time. And what about the install fees? Let's say my studio fails but people keep installing because of piracy or any arbitrary reason, am I going to get charged for the remaining of my life? It's just a shocking move
- ponytech 3y agoI feel the same. €1,877/year for removing the Unity logo on splash screen is way too much for a small studio like us.
- hanniabu 3y agoTIL you pay more the more your game is used. I thought these were just normal subscription pricing. I guess it's only a matter of time before this type of thing will be introduced into code editors like VSC and you need to pay based on how much your program is used. Middlemen rent seekers are a cancer.
- Zuiii 3y agoBallsy to pull this stunt when Godot is so close to hitting critical mass (see Bender). Is this them seeing the writing on the wall and cashing in?
- MassiveBonk51 3y agoHmm.. I guess this is what motivates me to try Godot.
- garganzol 3y agoMany companies start as bright locomotives of the tomorrow world, only to crumble into the valley of greed in the future. Unity is not an exception, it seems. For them, it's so much easier to raise prices and f%.k their customers than to truly innovate. Innovation requires talent, efforts and pain - and that's a scarcity, especially in the aging company which prefers an illusionary comfort to the true freedom.
- GenericDev 3y agoJesus christ. I'm so deep into my current game I'm hesitant to move away. But this is bad... I don't know what to do. I have a huge sunk-cost fallacy here. I guess I'm going to ship it and pray, and then never use Unity again. Jesus christ, what were they thinking? Fuck Unity.
- gs17 3y agoWhat is your monetization model for your game? It might not be a huge issue if you know you'll get way more than $0.20 per user. If you were selling a game for $10, this is minor. If you're making a f2p game where there's no guaranteed income and most of your players will not spend a dime, it's a lot riskier. I'd worry about the install counts getting spoofed by angry players, but that seems like a bigger liability for Unity than developers.
- bootloop 3y agoIt's per install not per user! If your user installs it 5 times over the course of 2 years it already eats 10% of the game gross revenue. And it just keeps going..
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoUnity spent $4.4BN to merge with an Ad Tech company. How is anyone surprised about this change?
- gsuuon 3y agoI wonder if this is an attempt to motivate Unity developers to produce higher quality (or at least, higher retention) games? This seems to heavily favor desktop experiences that are paid upfront and mobile games with high retention, while it would more or less kills hyper-casuals with low retention.
- tekronis 3y agoGamesFromScratch has commented on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlPOn0nAOeo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlPOn0nAOeo
- Takennickname 3y agoHonestly this is hilarious.
- ravivyas 3y ago20 cents per install is crazy. Mobile games are already a risky business with success hard to come by. Marketing costs for games has already gone up due to due to ATT. They are doing the classic chase current revenue while destroying future revenue thing
- yalok 3y agoThis is incredibly painful for indie devs. My app is totally free, done as a charity/side project for disadvantaged kids. I've been paying for their Plus plan - $35 a month. Now it will have to be $185 a month, or my app would have to have Unity splash screen... Very sad. Would have to figure out another engine to move to, preferably that has good native Web support as well. Any recommendations?
- nullifidian 3y ago>My app is totally free, done as a charity/side project for disadvantaged kids. I assume you haven't made "$200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months" from it, so you can relax.
- yalok 3y agobut the splash screen... - will make my app look like some demo...
- grogenaut 3y agoI worked on multiple AAA games they all had splash screens like "HAVOK"... is that really worth doing a totally new engine?
- MaximilianEmel 3y agoYeah, but Havok has that precedent set. Unity doesn't, and since the price was so low previously, the ones with the splashscreen were the ones not willing to spend even a bit of money. Whether it's warranted or not, it goes give that impression of demo/low-budget/low(er)-effort.
- pixelbyindex 3y agoEveryone on HN has been suggesting GoDot. I have also spent lots of time with Unity, but recently spent about 5-10 hours playing around with GoDot. Some thoughts: - I strongly dislike the name and logo - It feels very foreign at first, but easy to pick up - It appears to me that it is production ready - Migrating an existing unity project would be an absolute nightmare - Publishing to consoles looks tricky, but I haven't been far down that path yet I am going to be spending more time with it now, because I have been growing less and less happy with unity over the last 2+ years. The proverbial straw has now found it's seat upon the camel's back
- vnorilo 3y agoThey hint that the install fee can be discounted if other Unity services (read: their ad network) are used by the game in question. I think it's a play to force f2p games to use their ad mediator as the install fee will effectively raise the cost-per-install for anyone using competing ad networks. Vampire squids doing vampire squid things. I'd expect them to get sued, and at least in the EU it seems likely to be difficult to defend.
- sovietmudkipz 3y agoI wonder if this will impact game.ci
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y ago> We will also add cloud-based asset storage... So your game is dependent on their servers, and they can kill your game?
- gs17 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if the way they determine installs adds an extra layer of DRM that requires an internet connection too, killing all Unity games if the company ever goes under.
- teruakohatu 3y agoWill this end free game giveaways as free wil not cost the dev?
- CaliforniaKarl 3y agoThe blog post: https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat... You are likely already paying a recurring cost to Unity, as per https://unity.com/pricing https://unity.com/pricing: Excluding the free Student & Personal tiers, the starting list price is $2,040 per year per user (for Unity Pro), going up to $4,950 per year per user for the top tier (Unity Industry). So, this is a new charge, which becomes active when the following conditions are met for a particular game: • # of installs, over the life of the game, passes 200k (Personal) or 1MM (Pro/Enterprise). • Revenue, over the last 12 months, passes $200k (Personal) or 1MM (Pro/Enterprise). Once both of those thresholds have been met, then you get charged a flat fee per install over the threshold. So, if you meet the Revenue amount, and you've had 200k/1MM installs, your next install requires you to pay a fee to Unity. This is all covered in the table at https://unity.com/sites/default/files/2023-09/NewFeeTable.png https://unity.com/sites/default/files/2023-09/NewFeeTable.pn... For games that are not being distributed through a channel (Steam, GoG, console/app store, etc.), this is going to be really annoying to track and report on. This is also going to be annoying for games that are distributed through multiple channels. Unity's probably going to get into the auditing game at some point; à la Microsoft, Oracle, etc.
- crtasm 3y ago> this is going to be really annoying to track and report on. I imagine they could expand on their existing analytics platform, which I believe is already forced into any release from Unity Personal? https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/com.unity.services.analytics.html https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/com.unity.services.analytics...
- sammyoos 3y agoAs a Unity developer, first this year our account manager told us our yearly fees were about to double and now runtime fees. One of the reasons we picked Unity was because of the fact they advertised (loudly) about the lack of runtime fees.
- jakobson14 3y agoMaking me feel a lot more like using godot, or writing my own engine.
- bodge5000 3y agoA great move by Unity. Sometimes I find myself missing features from Unity after moving to Godot; a general purpose, strongly typed programming language and live editor changes whilst the game is running are my biggest examples, but thanks to these changes I'll never look back longingly at Unity again. Good work team! Funnily enough the changes have also made me look back into Unreal, I hear they have a proper Linux editor now and that their flavour of C++ is a bit nicer than I expected. I doubt I'll switch from Godot anytime soon, but worth a look. EDIT: I see the point being made a lot that this won't affect many smaller devs as they'll never make enough money to meet the threshold, however it seems to me that if your choice of engine makes you hope your project isn't successful, then it might be time to choose a different engine. Unreal engine devs hope their game will make enough to qualify for the revenue share, not because the revenue share is a good thing for them, but because it means if they're making that kind of money it won't be a problem.
- jay_kyburz 3y agoWe were paid a fixed price by Microsoft to be in Gamepass and at the time we had no idea how many installs there would be. We had over X million downloads of Void Bastards. I wonder how many people are scrambling to pull the game out of Gamepass right now :) Update: I updated my comment to hide the install numbers in case there was some rule that prevents developers sharing those numbers.
- peteforde 3y agoThis is brutal and devastating. They might as well have called the post "Party time is over, our MBAs need to make some money for our investors". In my case, this would be the final straw after years of baffling tech reorgs and broken promises, but I have such a massive sunk cost investment in Unity store assets that I am effectively locked in. All of that said, I would put serious money on this getting at least partially rolled back in the next few days. The blowback is going to be big enough that the investors might tell the MBAs to stop sacrificing their long-term profits for short-term gains.
- m-p-3 3y agohttps://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/1701691036832309260 https://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/170169103683230926... I suspect this will significantly impact the Xbox GamePass lineup soon once it takes effect. Also, imagine that pirated copies or even multiple installs by the same users counts into hitting that threshold. I could see a malicious competitor pushing a lot of installs to hit someone else bottom-line and sink them financially with a minimum of risk for them. That new policy need to go back to the drawing board ASAP.
- LarsDu88 3y agoWhat product-market-fit does Unity have left? If you're an indie studio making small 2d or basic 3d games, you will use Godot If you're a big studio looking for AAA graphics capability you will use Unreal. There is no other reason to use Unity other than legacy asset store purchases and existing project maintainence. In 2-3 years those legacy projects will wrap up and Unity will be dead in the water as a company, mark my words.
- everyone 3y agohow do they plan to even track revenue and also installs? Also what do they do if they say you are over the revenue or install threshold and just tell them to fuck off? Can they remotely kill your game???
- daft_pink 3y agoI mean their company loses money. Seems like a bad idea though.
- moogly 3y agohttps://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280 https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280 "I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds) - If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges - Same if they install on 2 devices - Charity games/bundles exempted from fees"
- tsunagatta 3y ago> If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges This is genuinely insane — I’m not familiar with any other software in the world that charges a customer for deleting and reinstalling it to the same user/same machine.
- feelandcoffee 3y agoIn an age where the typical user has to install and reinstall games because storage is limited and games are getting heavier and heavier... that's going to be a problem.
- dorfuss 3y agoVery good point, I do that all the time, because I can have about 2 games installed at any given moment.
- pixelbyindex 3y agoI haven't seen it mentioned here yet, but for anyone wondering: "How will Unity track installs?" > We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won't go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.[1] [1] https://x.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607?s=20 https://x.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607?s=20
- pixelbyindex 3y agoAlso, from the unity forums: > Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? > A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/page-26#post-9294098 https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...
- abracadaniel 3y agoSo a subreddit could band together and bankrupt a developer by buying their games and scripting an uninstall/reinstall process.
- armchairhacker 3y agoSomeone’s going to break the system, “install” random games 1,000-1,000,000 times, and Unity’s going to have to salvage some metrics and defend their accuracy in court and public.
- thrillgore 3y agoThis is like watching a friend make a dumb decision you feel powerless to stop.
- superchroma 3y agothey're not pissed off, they're afraid that the spectrum of release models will be affected by Unity's plan. They're afraid of sudden massive charges. They're afraid for their revenue. They're afraid that this feature will be implemented with as much care as the threatening emails they send to developers. They're afraid of the prospect of rewriting their games in another engine because there has never been time enough for that to be a good idea
- Jigsy 3y agoI thought people abandoned Unity after they partnered with that shady company?
- the_hoser 3y agoNope. Developer skill momentum is a hell of a drug.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoSkill momentum is one thing, lock in is another. Development times are measured in years, and one does not simply plug and play Unreal for Unity.
- hightrix 3y agoI took a wait and see approach to the IronSource merger. I hoped for the best while expecting something like this. That said, Unity blew my expectations out of the water. I’m fully expecting enshittification of the Unity Editor next.
- Geste 3y agoCurious as to why there seems to be so many replys on Unity News. Is there that many Game Devs on HN ?
- phendrenad2 3y agoSo what are we using? Godot? Did the Linux Foundation turn Cryengine into something usable yet?
- mixedCase 3y agoThis feels like a pretty obvious door-in-the-face tactic.
- stolen_biscuit 3y agoWow I wasn't expecting it to be as bad as it is. Charging per download and install and removing the cheaper tiers is ridiculous. Good news for any griefers out there who feel like making a particular game developer lose money, just download and install the game a handful of times. What a terrible decision by Unity, shame for all the developers who have spent years and years learning a powerful tool run by complete sociopaths
- Cloudef 3y ago>How is an install defined? >An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device. Lmao, so if someone pirates your game the developer has to pay for it?
- danudey 3y agoAnd if a user installs your game twice, that counts as two installs and you have to pay the fee twice. And if a user installs your demo you have to pay the fee anyway.
- Cloudef 3y agoIf this brings back engineless games and rises the quality of games as whole then maybe this is not that bad thing in the end
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- jschveibinz 3y agoRelated cautionary advice for AI developers: be careful to design a business and revenue model that can survive the underlying licensing fees as they change (increase) over time. Cheers.
- wly_cdgr 3y agoMy sympathy for indie Unity devs wrt this kind of thing is....limited. They made a deal with the devil, and now the devil has come to collect. Tough tits!
- 3seashells 3y agohttps://github.com/Milkman-Games/Unity-to-Unreal-Conversion https://github.com/Milkman-Games/Unity-to-Unreal-Conversion https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/getting_started/editor/unity_to_godot.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/getting_started/editor/u... (no auto converter)
- herbst 3y agoIt was about time. If splash screen gets expensive again it might be easier to catch unity games early and get my money back. To many low quality unity games out there.
- dschuetz 3y agoToday I've deleted my Unity-Account. They've got that EA stink after announcing those nonsensical pricing plans. Gee, I wonder why their CEO dumped Unity shares months prior.
- blincoln 3y agoThere are a lot of things to dislike here, but it's particularly unbelievable to me that Unity would try to retroactively apply this change to games that were in development or released before the change to the licensing model. I've never worked in the games industry, but in every field where I've worked, that would be a company-ending poor decision. Imagine Sony suddenly trying to impose a per-playback fee on all existing and future factory-produced Blu Ray discs. Imagine Lockheed spending 5-10 years developing a jet fighter, then a year before it's finished, TI tells them that there will be a monthly usage fee for every TI chip used in the aircraft. Imagine a retailer spending hundreds of millions of dollars to roll out a new Fujitsu point-of-sale platform, then a year later Fujitsu says they're updating the license terms to require a flat fee for every customer transaction. Or worse, imagine that the Fujitsu platform runs on Windows, and Microsoft tells the retailer that the Windows licensing terms have been updated to require a per-transaction fee for every Windows device that has point-of-sale software installed. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm completely failing to see why any business would continue to use a product that requires a long-term commitment when the vendor has acted this way. Is it a last-ditch cash grab to appease Unity investors? i.e. do they know that it will kill their platform, but they're hoping the tail end of Unity-based games[1] will generate enough licensing fees to recoup some of the investment money? [1] i.e. games already released, but still for sale, as well as games still in development but too far along to switch to another engine.
- manicennui 3y agoI don't quite get the outrage. I feel like most of the people commenting here haven't actually read the post. "We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user." "Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs."
- gsuuon 3y agoThis is pretty late, but - does this completely kill Unity web? I mean, if every visit to a web game is an "install" there's no way games are making enough to cover that scenario. I guess caches could mitigate this somewhat.. but a viral spike in traffic would become a huge financial liability.
- RobKohr 3y agoFor those who are more code centric and like rust, https://bevyengine.org/ https://bevyengine.org/ is a good alternative to godot as far as open source goes.