Pyrian on 12/9/2023 at 21:08
Sooo, Unity posted this: (
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates) Unity plan pricing and packaging updates
In a nutshell, if you make over $200,000/yr and have 200,000+ installs, you're more-or-less forced into Unity Pro, and once there, if you make over $1m and have 1m+ installs, you're charged a fee for each install over 1m (lifetime), the fee ranging from 1c to 20c each depending on plan and total installs (and goes even lower in some countries).
In practice, I expect most users are unaffected, not make $1m (or even $200k) in the first place.
But for those who are, I anticipate some issues. Game Pass, Epic freebies, and especially piracy are all things that can massively spike installs without giving much (or any) concomitant revenue.
How
exactly are they counting installs? With the age-old (
https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607) Dude, Trust Us approach! Yes, they're seriously planning on
billing companies based on the results of their secret proprietary algorithm and expect everyone to just accept that on faith.
Quote:
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.
I expect this story to develop in the coming days. 'Cause I don't think that what they got now is going to fly with precisely the people they need it to fly with.
EDIT:
To put a little perspective on Unity's motivation, here, consider their recent financial situation:
Revenue: 1.81b
Profit: -0.96b
...That is, um, *very* not good.
(
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U/financials?p=U)
Yakoob on 13/9/2023 at 03:26
Latest clarification (
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten) from Axios
Quote:
But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.
Ah so install-bombing is still possible by spoofing device ID or running a VM
Quote:
As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.
I'm sure Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will be absolutely thrilled by this news
Pyrian on 13/9/2023 at 04:54
From that Axios article:
Quote:
As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.
Good luck with that, Unity, lol.
henke on 13/9/2023 at 05:49
Good summary of the situation so far, Pyrian!
Yeah, uh, this sucks. I'm locked into Unity for my current main projects, but I gotta start looking at Godot or UE for future games.
WingedKagouti on 13/9/2023 at 06:33
Quote Posted by Pyrian
How
exactly are they counting installs? With the age-old (
https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607) Dude, Trust Us approach! Yes, they're seriously planning on
billing companies based on the results of their secret proprietary algorithm and expect everyone to just accept that on faith.
It's going to be a phone-home component embedded into the engine.
For a company like Activision (Hearthstone is made with Unity) and Niantic (Pokemon Go) the price is basically non-existant at something like $46.5k for the first 2 million copies downloaded and $10k for each million after that. But that's based on the Enterprise license. A small indie would need to set aside work hours to verify the numbers Unity presents them as well as proving whether they made enough money to break the threshold.
Shadowcat on 13/9/2023 at 07:32
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Revenue: 1.81b
Profit: -0.96b
Well I clearly don't understand this business. How do they have operating expenses over over 2 billion dollars in a year? (or anything even
remotely on that scale...)
Yakoob on 13/9/2023 at 09:35
Quote Posted by WingedKagouti
It's going to be a phone-home component embedded into the engine.
For a company like Activision (Hearthstone is made with Unity) and Niantic (Pokemon Go) the price is basically non-existant at something like $46.5k for the first 2 million copies downloaded and $10k for each million after that. But that's based on the Enterprise license. A small indie would need to set aside work hours to verify the numbers Unity presents them as well as proving whether they made enough money to break the threshold.
It's literally impossible to track tho. Between deals like gamepass, reinstalls, multiple devices, charity bundles, demos, review and streamers keys, cloud Services, Physical releases and, worst of all, piracy - its impossible to know how many installs you actually have.
They claim that charity bundles will be exempt, but how can you tell when the build is literally the same and downloaded from literally the same store front? Which means it's also likely the same as the pirated build, especially if you released a drm free build on itch or gog.
Regardless of how bad the fees are, this whole model is entirely unpredictable and impossible to account for in your business plan. Unity can just hit you with a fee based on vibes, and you don't have any data to even dispute.
Not to mention this incentives devs to create worse experience for players: higher prices, fewer releases, more micro transactions, no free updates, no demos, no contests/giveaways, more aggressive drm, more aggressive anti-piracy, etc.
I'm really banking on them walking this back, because in the current state, it's just completely bonkers.
WingedKagouti on 13/9/2023 at 12:14
Quote Posted by Yakoob
It's literally impossible to track tho. Between deals like gamepass, reinstalls, multiple devices, charity bundles, demos, review and streamers keys, cloud Services, Physical releases and, worst of all, piracy - its impossible to know how many installs you actually have.
They have claimed it would be based on a system identifier that would be sent to their servers (as if Unity itself had DRM), so someone reinstalling on the same machine would not trigger it, but installing the same game on multiple machines would count as multiple installations.
This situation reminds me of the OGL 1.2 fiasco Hasbro/WotC went through earlier this year. And the more I think about the two situations, the more they resemble each other. If it goes the same way, Unity will walk back all of the changes in a couple of weeks.
theabyss on 13/9/2023 at 13:08
If I wanted all of our customers/developers to switch to the Unreal engine, this is how I would do it.
demagogue on 13/9/2023 at 14:45
Oh yeah being charged for pirated installs would be really perverse, making the developer pay for other people's crimes. I think that might even be something one could take to court and vitiate as an unconscionable stipulation, in a common law jurisdiction anyway. There's something fishy there.
I think only some of the bigger studios would be able to challenge it though, and it's not certain. You'd need a big bankroll for a risky outcome.
