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Am I missing something in Unity's new pricing model? They want a cut, ranging anywhere from 0.02 to 0.2 USD per install of the game, if you sell more than somwt

Am I missing something in Unity's new pricing model? They want a cut, ranging anywhere from 0.02 to 0.2 USD per install of the game, if you sell more than somwthing like 100k or 1 million copies. Sounds reasonable? Who feels they've been shafted by this? Raise your game price by that much and you're good, no?

RamblingCTO 3y ago
You also pay for installs of unused Games. The issue is also about ToS changes, intransparency and a felt shift in values with Unity.
ranguna 3y ago
People online have talked about things like "install bombing", where you install and reinstall a game repeatedly, which causes the 0.02-0.20 price to stack. But tbh I haven't read the new model and ToS fully, so this might be BS. Also, retroactively applying the new model to already exiting games was also a bit of a bad move. You make a game and decide the business model based on what you know at the time and what you can predict will happen in the future, predicting that unity would change their pricing model like this is near impossible, so the business model you picked for your old games is now unfit.
- lemoncookiechip 3y ago
  Installs by Unity's own admission, only count each new machine, which I guess can be faked by malicious entities who want to hurt certain developers. This also counts pirate installs, but Unity claims to have a way to discern what is and isn't a pirate install. Honestly, this is mostly going to hurt indie devs who make it, but aren't quite in the same successes bracket as a game like Cities: Skylines, Hearthstone, Rimworld. And also F2P games, especially mobile ones, where Whales can easily spend $200k or $1mil, but you have millions of installs of people just trying the free game and deleting it, or installing it on multiple devices. The Runtime fee can easily exceed Unreal Engine's own 5% flat Royalty Fee by a fair margin (easily 10%) depending on the money you ask for and method of distribution, for example, you won't want to give out copies or discount the game as much after meeting the requirements.
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    The rule for the fee, for Unity Pro is: "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." Just the number of install plays 0 role, if the game didnt generate more than 1 million year, last year.
StopHammoTime 3y ago
The problem is not that they wanted a cut. The problem is that they want to retroactively apply to all games that have ever been published and even those that aren’t using the most recent engine. Also, there are cases where a developer might squeeze $100k out of sales and then get a game pass deal where they get another $100k that would result in them getting 5 million downloads. That would result in the fee being $1 million because they’re on the lower tier subscription. They are doing this for two reasons from what I can tell: a) they want a cut of game pass volume b) they want to worse high volume micro transaction games onto their own ad network (if you sign up to their ad network you don’t pay the fee) The biggest problem is them attempting to bill people who have already released games and might still get the odd download. It’s crazy cause these developers never agreed to the new license AND it’s highly doubtful this would be legal anyway because contracts need consideration. “We just want more money” probably won’t cut the mustard.
- lionkor 3y ago
  Ah shit okay, thats bad. Thanks for getting me up to speed, their original announcement didnt make that clear enough for me to get it!
- pelasaco 3y ago
  That's not 100% true. Fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. That's because otherwise is really hard to pin a TOS version. I'm not lawyer, but for all services that we use, i.e paypal, we receive monthly emails about TOS changes, and you have to accept them, to keep using their services...
  - livefox 3y ago
    Unlike PayPal though, you can't just close your account and hop to stripe instead. Once you develop a game you're stuck with that engine until you redevelop the game. Moving engines is not easy simple or fast. It's like if I owned an old version of Photoshop and Adobe contacted me to say that because the jpg I produced blew up on Twitter I owe them $1000. I can't retroactively take the picture down and recreate it in gimp and I shouldn't have to. Most alternative products to unity simply do a hand wave to old products. "If your game was made in engine 2.0 you have this pricing structure, but engine 3.0 users have a different one"
xmodem 3y ago
Take a game like vampire survivors - not a unity game, but one that I have installed 10+ times at this point. They have put the price up slightly since launch - I paid €2.39 for it. The most objectionable thing about Unity's new pricing is it hits hardest the smaller indies with the lowest budgets. The AAA studios will barely notice it and are probably negotiating better terms anyway.
- pelasaco 3y ago
  Not really. Look the pricing and the AND condition: "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." https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat... So if you sold in the last year more than 200k AND have more than 200k game installs and have the unity personal version, then you have to pay for install...
  - ragestorm 3y ago
    The asinine part is per install, instead of something like revenue share. Regardless of the bar they set (200k x2) for additional installs to charge is terrible simply due to the install metric.
    - pelasaco 3y ago
      From what I can tell, if you were to sell a $5 game made with Unity and made $200,000 per year, the total charge would be $8,000. But that charge would be $40k if your game was only $1 and $800 if your game sold for $50. For Unity Pro if you made $10 million selling 1 million copies you would be charged $60,000. That same studio making $10 million on a game written with Unreal Engine would be charged $500,000 in royalties. That is far more than $60k for Unity. It still appears that Unity is the budget option, it just isn't quite as cheap as it used to be... So I couldn't find a situation where is cheaper to go with unreal (5% revenue share) than with Unity...
distract8901 3y ago
Because you aren't paying unity for each copy you sell, you're paying for each time a user installs the game, which will basically always be much higher than the number of copies sold. I regularly install my games on 3-4 different machines. My activity would cost the developer 3—4 times as much in unity licensing. Unity has clearly stated that they will charge for reinstalling, installing on multiple machines, and implied that pirated copies also count. If you get unlucky and your game is popular with pirates, you're suddenly paying for a ton of licenses on copies of the game you never even sold. You can quite literally script a process to repeatedly reinstall a single copy of the game to rack up unity charges for a developer you don't like. That's not really very reasonable.
nickthegreek 3y ago
Unity can’t tell you if the installs were from a pirate copy or not.

RamblingCTO 3y ago

You also pay for installs of unused Games. The issue is also about ToS changes, intransparency and a felt shift in values with Unity.

ranguna 3y ago

People online have talked about things like "install bombing", where you install and reinstall a game repeatedly, which causes the 0.02-0.20 price to stack. But tbh I haven't read the new model and ToS fully, so this might be BS. Also, retroactively applying the new model to already exiting games was also a bit of a bad move. You make a game and decide the business model based on what you know at the time and what you can predict will happen in the future, predicting that unity would change their pricing model like this is near impossible, so the business model you picked for your old games is now unfit.

lemoncookiechip 3y ago
Installs by Unity's own admission, only count each new machine, which I guess can be faked by malicious entities who want to hurt certain developers. This also counts pirate installs, but Unity claims to have a way to discern what is and isn't a pirate install. Honestly, this is mostly going to hurt indie devs who make it, but aren't quite in the same successes bracket as a game like Cities: Skylines, Hearthstone, Rimworld. And also F2P games, especially mobile ones, where Whales can easily spend $200k or $1mil, but you have millions of installs of people just trying the free game and deleting it, or installing it on multiple devices. The Runtime fee can easily exceed Unreal Engine's own 5% flat Royalty Fee by a fair margin (easily 10%) depending on the money you ask for and method of distribution, for example, you won't want to give out copies or discount the game as much after meeting the requirements.
- pelasaco 3y ago
  The rule for the fee, for Unity Pro is: "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." Just the number of install plays 0 role, if the game didnt generate more than 1 million year, last year.

StopHammoTime 3y ago

The problem is not that they wanted a cut. The problem is that they want to retroactively apply to all games that have ever been published and even those that aren’t using the most recent engine. Also, there are cases where a developer might squeeze $100k out of sales and then get a game pass deal where they get another $100k that would result in them getting 5 million downloads. That would result in the fee being $1 million because they’re on the lower tier subscription. They are doing this for two reasons from what I can tell: a) they want a cut of game pass volume b) they want to worse high volume micro transaction games onto their own ad network (if you sign up to their ad network you don’t pay the fee) The biggest problem is them attempting to bill people who have already released games and might still get the odd download. It’s crazy cause these developers never agreed to the new license AND it’s highly doubtful this would be legal anyway because contracts need consideration. “We just want more money” probably won’t cut the mustard.

lionkor 3y ago
Ah shit okay, thats bad. Thanks for getting me up to speed, their original announcement didnt make that clear enough for me to get it!
pelasaco 3y ago
That's not 100% true. Fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. That's because otherwise is really hard to pin a TOS version. I'm not lawyer, but for all services that we use, i.e paypal, we receive monthly emails about TOS changes, and you have to accept them, to keep using their services...
- livefox 3y ago
  Unlike PayPal though, you can't just close your account and hop to stripe instead. Once you develop a game you're stuck with that engine until you redevelop the game. Moving engines is not easy simple or fast. It's like if I owned an old version of Photoshop and Adobe contacted me to say that because the jpg I produced blew up on Twitter I owe them $1000. I can't retroactively take the picture down and recreate it in gimp and I shouldn't have to. Most alternative products to unity simply do a hand wave to old products. "If your game was made in engine 2.0 you have this pricing structure, but engine 3.0 users have a different one"

xmodem 3y ago

Take a game like vampire survivors - not a unity game, but one that I have installed 10+ times at this point. They have put the price up slightly since launch - I paid €2.39 for it. The most objectionable thing about Unity's new pricing is it hits hardest the smaller indies with the lowest budgets. The AAA studios will barely notice it and are probably negotiating better terms anyway.

pelasaco 3y ago
Not really. Look the pricing and the AND condition: "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." https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat... So if you sold in the last year more than 200k AND have more than 200k game installs and have the unity personal version, then you have to pay for install...
- ragestorm 3y ago
  The asinine part is per install, instead of something like revenue share. Regardless of the bar they set (200k x2) for additional installs to charge is terrible simply due to the install metric.
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    From what I can tell, if you were to sell a $5 game made with Unity and made $200,000 per year, the total charge would be $8,000. But that charge would be $40k if your game was only $1 and $800 if your game sold for $50. For Unity Pro if you made $10 million selling 1 million copies you would be charged $60,000. That same studio making $10 million on a game written with Unreal Engine would be charged $500,000 in royalties. That is far more than $60k for Unity. It still appears that Unity is the budget option, it just isn't quite as cheap as it used to be... So I couldn't find a situation where is cheaper to go with unreal (5% revenue share) than with Unity...

distract8901 3y ago

Because you aren't paying unity for each copy you sell, you're paying for each time a user installs the game, which will basically always be much higher than the number of copies sold. I regularly install my games on 3-4 different machines. My activity would cost the developer 3—4 times as much in unity licensing. Unity has clearly stated that they will charge for reinstalling, installing on multiple machines, and implied that pirated copies also count. If you get unlucky and your game is popular with pirates, you're suddenly paying for a ton of licenses on copies of the game you never even sold. You can quite literally script a process to repeatedly reinstall a single copy of the game to rack up unity charges for a developer you don't like. That's not really very reasonable.

nickthegreek 3y ago

Unity can’t tell you if the installs were from a pirate copy or not.