New Unity pricing

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1_rick

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https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/

"Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November."

People seem to be really upset.

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DukenukemX said:
Aren't there alternatives to Unity?
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Sure, but if you follow the link, one of the first replies is a guy who says he's spent a dozen (?) years using Unity and he feels almost locked in to it now. It's easy to say "well, bite the bullet and go to Unreal Engine" (or there's apparently an MIT License OSS game engine I can't remember the name of, but it's not trivial, especially you've got a lot of time and knowledge tied up with a given platform.
 
Look for existing games to be pulled from distribution before Unity starts charging the dev for installs.


"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."

"Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones.
A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024."
 
jfreund said:
. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
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Ok, that probably means the Tweet I linked above about owing $5.6M is probably wrong, but it would be nice if Unity's lawyers (and people in general) would be a bit more specific and said, in so many words, "you won't be charged for the installs that happened prior to 2024."
 
Well this looks like a death knell

Why would anyone trust them at this point to not rugpull you in some ridiculous way? I don't know what the fuck they expected.

Imagine being 2 years into development - you already pay the developer seats for the engine. Haha JK enjoy even more costs than what you signed on and even worse is it's affected by people reinstalling, installing on multiple devices, bundles, giveaways, etc...
 
Wow.
Why would they do this?
Aren't they losing ground left and right to UE5 already?
Its like they are speedrunning their way to get everyone to leave Unity and have no income at all
 
"Why would anyone trust them at this point to not rugpull you in some ridiculous way? "

It gets even worse. I didn't mention this but apparently they used to say you could avoid future TOS changes by staying on an older version of the development environment, and they quietly changed that so it's no longer true, sometime last year.
 
DukenukemX said:
Aren't there alternatives to Unity?
Click to expand...

I imagine this is going to violently drive their users to Godot and Unreal. Godot is quite wonderful from what I've read.

Unreal has quite friendly terms as well.

Also it looks like they got rid of one of the Unity pricing tiers as well. Now once you want to move beyond the free version, you're looking at like $2000/yr starting.
 
DouglasteR said:
I want to see they enforcing this.
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What makes you think they won't (say) disable a developer's ability to use the development environment?

They could certainly sue a dev who doesn't pay up. They may not get their $$$, and even if they did, it might not cover their lawyers' fees, but the mere threat will certainly cause a lot of small devs to simply walk away from their games.
 
1_rick said:
Sure, but if you follow the link, one of the first replies is a guy who says he's spent a dozen (?) years using Unity and he feels almost locked in to it now. It's easy to say "well, bite the bullet and go to Unreal Engine" (or there's apparently an MIT License OSS game engine I can't remember the name of, but it's not trivial, especially you've got a lot of time and knowledge tied up with a given platform.
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Now we know why Unity is doing this now. I know a number of games are built on the Unity engine, and of course developers are now comfortable with it. So either pay up, or take the time to learn to use another engine. They know what they're doing.
 
Some are wondering how unique system install count is even possible to track without telemetry, which could impact DRM-free and offline installs (though DRM-free ≠ lack of telemetry but have read that various games strip it out for their installers). Since Unity is concerned not merely with reported purchases but actual installs per system.
 
Westwood said:
I have no idea what any of you guys are talking about.
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Unity's a development environment for making games. It does a LOT of stuff for you, and keeps you from writing your own 3D engine. Now, if you put out a game and it gets more than some number of installs--including betas, early access, people downloading the game 6 times for some reason, etc., you owe 20 cents for every install. Go back and look at that Tweet I screenshotted. I'd never heard of her before, but Muck and Crab Game are free games on Steam, and now she owes Unity $5.6M on a game she didn't charge for. (Actually, it's apparently not that bad because they're only gonna charge for games installed after 1/1/2024.)
 
Okatis said:
Some are wondering how unique system install count is even possible to track without telemetry, which could impact DRM-free and offline installs. Since Unity is concerned not merely with reported purchases but actual installs per system.
Click to expand...
They apparently have telemetry in the engine, and other methods.

Q: How are you going to collect installs?
A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.

Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses?
A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes.

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.

Q: If a game that's made enough money to be over the threshold has a demo of the same game, do installs of the demo also induce a charge?
A: If it's early access, Beta, or a demo of the full game then yes. If you can get from the demo to a full game then yes. If it's not, like a single level that can't upgrade then no.

Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games?
A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

Q: When in the lifecycle of a game does tracking of lifetime installs begin? Do beta versions count towards the threshold?
A: Each initialization of an install counts towards the lifetime install.
Click to expand...
 
1_rick said:
Unity's a development environment for making games. It does a LOT of stuff for you, and keeps you from writing your own 3D engine. Now, if you put out a game and it gets more than some number of installs--including betas, early access, people downloading the game 6 times for some reason, etc., you owe 20 cents for every install. Go back and look at that Tweet I screenshotted. I'd never heard of her before, but Muck and Crab Game are free games on Steam, and now she owes Unity $5.6M on a game she didn't charge for. (Actually, it's apparently not that bad because they're only gonna charge for games installed after 1/1/2024.)
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so that dude installed and uninstalled a game(s) that many times?
 
I am conflicted by this as we do run a few Unity Dev spaces here.

This pushes to do away with the “free” games, 0.99 up front with some sort of Add stream for sure.

With the state of Unreal vs Unity right now, pricing aside there is no reason to use Unity unless you absolutely have to.
The specific howTo’s between their dev environments are different but the skills are largely transferable.

Unreal is causing large drops in other engine usage and they are doing what they feel they have to in order to shore up their revenue while they frantically work on catching up.
 
1_rick said:
Sure, but if you follow the link, one of the first replies is a guy who says he's spent a dozen (?) years using Unity and he feels almost locked in to it now. It's easy to say "well, bite the bullet and go to Unreal Engine" (or there's apparently an MIT License OSS game engine I can't remember the name of, but it's not trivial, especially you've got a lot of time and knowledge tied up with a given platform.
Click to expand...

Lock-in is usually self-chosen.

There used to be many programming language implementations that, in addition to developer cost, charged a runtime fee for every program compiled with that environment. They got wiped out when OSes and programming languages went open source.

Open Source is about avoiding lock-ins, it doesn't have much to do with money on a commercial scale. Sooner or later open source game engines will cut into the commercial offerings.
 
This is the beginning of the end for them if they enforce this.

Because any set of smart devs will basically tell anyone new to not learn Unity engine and instead use engines that don’t have stupid policies like this (especially since Unreal is free to develop on). Large studios will definitely stay away. They don’t want to have to support games that are 10 years old, let alone continue to pay for them. So even at great pains of doing retooling, they will move to other engines and have their people learn other engines rather than have these kinds of problems.

It might take another 5-10 years for Unity to die. But unless they reverse course here, they most assuredly will.
 
DukenukemX said:
Aren't there alternatives to Unity?
Click to expand...
It seem that the close for new TOS not affecting the unity released the year of the change or prior have been removed from their website too. Also the window between the announcement and when it turn on (january 1 2024) is so short relative to the time a game take to make, that we can imagine people debugging-testing their game to be released Q1 2024 using unity for it the last 3-4 year exist. It also apply to already released game: Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. And because of the download-install nature, it could exist a scenario of someone installing a game the first time on a device in 2024 that was available to be downloaded and downloaded before the change (if the telemetry has been there for it for a while....).

UnknownSouljer said:
This is the beginning of the end for them if they enforce this.
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It would have so they rapidly changed, the fee is only on the first install by device and we can soon imagine it will be changed again, for example how compatible it is with the Xbox Game Pass and other of the world, were an install is close to meaningless, will probably have an other change in that regard.

UnknownSouljer said:
Large studios will definitely stay away.
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The fee for unity enterprise licenses game seem to be free for the first millions and 1 cent per install after the 2 millions, half a cent in emerging market, it is significantly lower than the 20 cent over the first 200,000 of Unity plus.

And the game need to have made over $200k in the last 12 months ($1 million for unity pro-entreprise), so there will not have pop-up fee of death title, you are only charged on not only successful game, but game that have done well in the trailing 12 months. If it is an old moribond title sold for very little it should go under the 1 millions in sales a year.
 
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UnknownSouljer said:
This is the beginning of the end for them if they enforce this.

Because any set of smart devs will basically tell anyone new to not learn Unity engine and instead use engines that don’t have stupid policies like this (especially since Unreal is free to develop on). Large studios will definitely stay away. They don’t want to have to support games that are 10 years old, let alone continue to pay for them. So even at great pains of doing retooling, they will move to other engines and have their people learn other engines rather than have these kinds of problems.

It might take another 5-10 years for Unity to die. But unless they reverse course here, they most assuredly will.
Click to expand...
What a lot of people are missing here is the "Installs over the standard threshold" label on that graph, which is noted in the licenses as being 200,000 installs or $200,000 USD within a 12-month timeframe whichever comes first.
So do 200,001 installs in 12 months and you own them $0.20, make $200,000.01 in 12 months and you owe them $0.20 of that.
But if you are getting into those sorts of numbers you should at that stage be transitioning over from the personal license into a pro or enterprise license anyway.
But the developer there keeps having his free games featured in popular "Better with Friends" streams, no clue if the in-game asset sales cover that spread but for a while, his titles Muck and Crab Game were seeing upwards of 40,000 concurrent players.
 
Lakados said:
which is noted in the licenses as being 200,000 installs or $200,000 USD within a 12-month timeframe whichever comes first.
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That could be a big issue, from my understanding it is much better than that,

200,000 lifetime install (not last 12 months) but and $200k usd in revenues the last 12 months.

https://unity.com/pricing-updates
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 per-game lifetime installs.
Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 per-game lifetime installs.
Please note: It is important to remember that games that do not reach the revenue threshold, including games that are not monetized in any way, are not required to pay the per-install fee.
 
The problem is the boiling frog syndrome.

In the beginning the engine is free till a big threshold. The small only pay above X copies sold, this incentivizes micro and small devs to pursue their dreams.

Then, the costing methods change and now every install counts....

What about the future ?
 
I know I'm not alone in having different systems depending where in the house I am, so we're going to be costing developers, in my case, three times for every install? That doesn't seem good at all.
 
LukeTbk said:
That could be a big issue, from my understanding it is much better than that,

200,000 lifetime install (not last 12 months) but and $200k usd in revenues the last 12 months.

https://unity.com/pricing-updates
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 per-game lifetime installs.
Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 per-game lifetime installs.
Please note: It is important to remember that games that do not reach the revenue threshold, including games that are not monetized in any way, are not required to pay the per-install fee.
Click to expand...
I misread that part about the lifetime installs that's on me, comprehension fail.

But while this developer's games are free they do charge for in-game items, so it is monetized, but no clue if it actually makes the thresholds, Do they count streaming as monetization? The developer Danny has something close to 3.5M YouTube subscribers where he and others play the games they develop, does that count as monetization?
 
This is a complete disaster and Unity is basically shooting themselves in the foot if they don't about-face ASAP. I've already seen developers talking about how they will not be able to offer games as part of (non-charity exclusive; apparently something like Humble where charity is a portion of a bundle is not exempt, only those that go solely to charity) bundles , GamePass / other subscription services on this, among many other circumstances as it will end up sticking them with a massive bill that negates the licensing fees paid to allow their their games on the bundle or subscription service. This isn't even getting into the possibility for "protest/intentional harmful" install processes where someone manually or writes a script in order to repeatedly reinstall a Unity based game in hopes of doing financial harm to a developer or game they find objectionable for one reason or another. I should mention however that in the case of piracy, this should NOT be an issue if there is any sort of "crack", be it those that disable DRM, modified excutables, or something like simply disabling online capability and platform calls (ie SteamAPI etc) community functionality through proper .ini settings.

Unity is far from perfect, but for a long time prior it was one of the more capable 3D/2D engines for a wide variety of indie titles, handling a lot of the lower level stuff for new developers and providing more powerful tools in a way that some more limited (ie RPGMaker, GameMakerStudio etc) engines could not. The main alternative is Unreal engine, but that has its own potential issues - Epic hasn't exactly been making great decisions since the Fortnite and Epic Store era and despite occasional attempts to cater to publishers there are still many issues an I have no faith that, if their attempts to get people locked into their platform bear fruit, the vice will begin to turn even for devs and publishers, to say nothing of the obvious contempt for players, past refusals to support Linux on their engine properly, Easy Anti Cheat debacles until the Steam Deck and Valve managed to get them to finally throw a crumb of support to Proton/WINE users and more. Its really quite a pity, in some alternate reality they could have avoided EGS and instead focused on making the Unreal engine so compatible, powerful , performant, and accessible that they'd get a ton of games utilizing it across all different platforms, OSes, and the like without the need for maintaining platforms, lock-in, exclusivity, or onerous licensing traps.

While despite the above I'm sure some projects will focus upon Unreal if they are more wary of Unity since this decision, I hope this will be an opportunity for Godot engine ( https://godotengine.org/ ) to make some strides forward. Godot is an up and coming FOSS engine that is looking like a good alternative especially for indies, but with development over the past few years they seem increasingly powerful and useful not just for 2D titles any longer, but for 3D as well taking aim at Unity and perhaps Unreal. Godot may not be as established as some others, but its FOSS development and licensing paradigm is beneficial for preventing exactly this sort of issue we're seeing with Unity, where the potential for the "friendly and open" company with SDKs and APIs serving to get developers locked into their platform and dependent can drop the hammer financially in this regard. Godot will not overtake the big names overnight, but I can see it definitely grow with increased interest especially when big names such as Unity or Unreal make questionable decisions such as the one discussed.

Edit: there are also a number of other FOSS/libre game engines out there besides Godot, such as Defold, MonoGame, and some others all of which are worth checking out and providing viable alternatives to other projects on more proprietary or restrictively licensed engines.
 
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RanceJustice said:
This is a complete disaster and Unity is basically shooting themselves in the foot if they don't about-face ASAP. I've already seen developers talking about how they will not be able to offer games as part of (non-charity exclusive; apparently something like Humble where charity is a portion of a bundle is not exempt, only those that go solely to charity) bundles , GamePass / other subscription services on this, among many other circumstances as it will end up sticking them with a massive bill that negates the licensing fees paid to allow their their games on the bundle or subscription service. This isn't even getting into the possibility for "protest/intentional harmful" install processes where someone manually or writes a script in order to repeatedly reinstall a Unity based game in hopes of doing financial harm to a developer or game they find objectionable for one reason or another. I should mention however that in the case of piracy, this should NOT be an issue if there is any sort of "crack", be it those that disable DRM, modified excutables, or something like simply disabling online capability and platform calls (ie SteamAPI etc) community functionality through proper .ini settings.

Unity is far from perfect, but for a long time prior it was one of the more capable 3D/2D engines for a wide variety of indie titles, handling a lot of the lower level stuff for new developers and providing more powerful tools in a way that some more limited (ie RPGMaker, GameMakerStudio etc) engines could not. The main alternative is Unreal engine, but that has its own potential issues - Epic hasn't exactly been making great decisions since the Fortnite and Epic Store era and despite occasional attempts to cater to publishers there are still many issues an I have no faith that, if their attempts to get people locked into their platform bear fruit, the vice will begin to turn even for devs and publishers, to say nothing of the obvious contempt for players, past refusals to support Linux on their engine properly, Easy Anti Cheat debacles until the Steam Deck and Valve managed to get them to finally throw a crumb of support to Proton/WINE users and more. Its really quite a pity, in some alternate reality they could have avoided EGS and instead focused on making the Unreal engine so compatible, powerful , performant, and accessible that they'd get a ton of games utilizing it across all different platforms, OSes, and the like without the need for maintaining platforms, lock-in, exclusivity, or onerous licensing traps.

While despite the above I'm sure some projects will focus upon Unreal if they are more wary of Unity since this decision, I hope this will be an opportunity for Godot engine ( https://godotengine.org/ ) to make some strides forward. Godot is an up and coming FOSS engine that is looking like a good alternative especially for indies, but with development over the past few years they seem increasingly powerful and useful not just for 2D titles any longer, but for 3D as well taking aim at Unity and perhaps Unreal. Godot may not be as established as some others, but its FOSS development and licensing paradigm is beneficial for preventing exactly this sort of issue we're seeing with Unity, where the potential for the "friendly and open" company with SDKs and APIs serving to get developers locked into their platform and dependent can drop the hammer financially in this regard. Godot will not overtake the big names overnight, but I can see it definitely grow with increased interest especially when big names such as Unity or Unreal make questionable decisions such as the one discussed.
Click to expand...

Epic's store may be ass, but their engine terms are pretty good.

And, like him or not, Sweeney still owns the majority share of the company and seems pretty content to reinvest the vast Fortnite riches into bettering their offerings when he's not literally buying swaths of Canadian forests to protect them.

It would certainly appear that they have quite a bit less incentive to fuck up their good thing.
 
This is insane and I can't think of any reason this could be a good thing... this will only encourage even worst monetization in games that still use Unity if this doesn't change to recoup these losses. Or we will go back to the 3 install limits we had a decade ago.
 
Lakados said:
What a lot of people are missing here is the "Installs over the standard threshold" label on that graph, which is noted in the licenses as being 200,000 installs or $200,000 USD within a 12-month timeframe whichever comes first.
So do 200,001 installs in 12 months and you own them $0.20, make $200,000.01 in 12 months and you owe them $0.20 of that.
But if you are getting into those sorts of numbers you should at that stage be transitioning over from the personal license into a pro or enterprise license anyway.
But the developer there keeps having his free games featured in popular "Better with Friends" streams, no clue if the in-game asset sales cover that spread but for a while, his titles Muck and Crab Game were seeing upwards of 40,000 concurrent players.
Click to expand...
"What a lot of people are missing here is the "Installs over the standard threshold" label on that graph, which is noted in the licenses as being 200,000 installs or $200,000 USD within a 12-month timeframe whichever comes first."

Dude had 28 million installs in approximately 2 years. He'll probably cross the threshold on January 5th, and while the "I owe $5.6M" is, then, wrong, we could make a SWAG assuming his games continue to be popular.
 
WarriorX said:
This is insane and I can't think of any reason this could be a good thing... this will only encourage even worst monetization in games that still use Unity if this doesn't change to recoup these losses. Or we will go back to the 3 install limits we had a decade ago.
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I think this is pushing publishers into things like game pass, as there they aren't charged for demos, and fees are billed back to the likes of Microsoft, or whoever is offering the bundle or the pass, it also changes so things that are still in "early access" get charged but when the game is finished and launched properly they aren't recharged for on that account.
It seems to financially incentivise the tieing of installs to accounts for things as it changes how installs are counted.

The changes aren't exactly good but I wouldn't go so far as to call them bad either. They are just different, and I wonder if this change is a precursor to something else.

Unity is the default dev environment for the Switch, and I wonder if for the Switch 2 Electric Bugaloo that is still the case, because if they aren't that could explain a few things.
 
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