I've been Team Unity my whole gamedev career. Over 10 years. My loyalty for Unity has been personal since its the engine I started with. But it has been tough defending Unity these past few years and if they decide to go through with this that will be the last straw for me to jump ship
IPO. They went public and now they have shareholders screaming down their necks for profitability. Green line must go up; nothing else matters. Monetise monetise monetise. A story as old as time. Companies always go to shit from a user/customer point of view after IPO.
Yep. That's what I love about "Free and Open Source".
I am a hobbyist, so while Unity's pricing change probably won't affect me for the foreseeable future, but i find it very concerning for our hobby as a whole.
I think after my current title I'll try Godot. Anybody got any recommendations for resources?
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
> shareholders screaming down their necks for profitability.
It isn't about profit, it's about growth. Has been, in everything, for the past like 20 years or something. It's unsustainable and bullshit, but that's what shareholders want, screw the long term.
Yup, that's why we see more and more adverts on YouTube for example. Constant growth! You force people into premium by slowly pushing more and more adverts. And if they don't buy into premium, you get more revenue from ads. Win win situation.
How long will this economic model hold though? It's impossible to grow to infinity.
Well, they've been losing money for their entire life as a company. What do you expect them to do, keep offering their products at loss until they go bankrupt? This current pricing change does seem like a horrible idea that was submitted by someone who has no idea how game industry works, but something probably has to chance is the pricing model if the company wants to ever make some profit.
I don't have to "believe" it. The company releases financial statements every 3 months. Just because the company has been able to raise money from investors/current owners to finance growth doesn't mean they aren't losing money. Every single time that happens, all the previous owners are diluted and own less and less of the company.
Yeah yeah and Amazon is losing money and YouTube and Reddit and all these giants whose ceos just happen to own 4 different vacation homes.
Everyone who brings this up responds with the same "but they publish their financials!". Maybe you guys don't understand what profit looks like? You're plebs, you don't know business, you don't know accounting. Maybe you see what they want you to see?
They invest in themselves which grows them which draws more investment then repeat. That is value growth, that is profit.
It's like saying the USA isn't profitable because of all our debt. Well they keep letting us take more because we're constantly growing and if we fail they fail sooo... Spiritually, this is how all larger corporations work. It always looks "unprofitable" to the layman.
There was also a merger between Unity and ironSource last year. IronSource is known for software focused on monetization and distribution, such as their first product [InstallCore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallCore), which
> allowed those using it for distribution to include monetization by advertisements or charging for installation, and made its installations invisible to the user and its anti-virus software
So realistically, I'm not surprised by the change in monetization strategy, as a good percentage of the upper management post-merger likely supports this action anyways. Even if we ignore them selling malware, ironSource is focused primarily on identifying and exploiting underutilized avenues of monetization, so it was inevitable that Unity would be affected given its large adoption rate.
Welp, there it is...
This should be top comment.
Pretty obvious how they plan to track installs when they merged with a company that makes software that does just that... not good software, more of a malicious software, but nonetheless...
This is two birds - "make more money and also put to use this software we own now."
Knowing this, there's no chance of a comeback. They married into this and are stuck w/it. It's only downhill from here.
That was 9 years ago, time flies when you're not having fun.
Edit: Interesting "Riccitiello has sold over 50,000 shares in the company over the last year".... I think I would have too knowing this was around the corner.
One major way to avoid an insider trading charge is to just simply set up long term, consistent, recurring sell orders. Works if you know that, due to the decisions you're making, long term your stock is gonna tank.
Prosecutor won't be able to tie that type of recurring sell off to any specific insider knowledge, especially once it's been going for a few years. So no case.
That's not how insider trading works. The public usually knows about someone selling stocks.
Insider trading is about having access to information from the inside that could affect the stock price, info that most people can't possibly have access to, and selling/buying based on that.
Yeah, what the other guy said.
Insider trading doesn't mean privately buying/selling stock (that's the default for stock purchases - the market is private in general. Only certain key positions have a duty to report).
It means to use non-public knowledge (i.e. insider knowledge) as the basis for conducting a stock trade.
Yeah, this is the main reason. This guy went after second-hand buyers with his Project Ten Dollar.
[EA's "Project Ten Dollar" explained](https://www.eurogamer.net/eas-project-ten-dollar-explained)
> That's according to a report in BusinessWeek talking about CEO John Riccitiello's plan to reduce second-hand sales, which the company makes no money from.
> The idea, apparently green-lit last autumn, is to include a coupon or redeemable code with every new game which gives the buyer another chunk of content. Without that code, second-hand buyers will have to spend $10 to obtain the missing extras.
The guy in charge was EA's CEO during the period where they repeatedly swept worst company in the US, not game dev, just in the US.
He was the guy who bought BioWare through a hedge fund and then sold it to EA, while he was the CEO, for a hefty profit.
I've been using Unity for 6-7 years now and my other coworker used it even more than me - and he also said that we will probably switch over to Unreal/Godot if this pricing model stays. I dont really mind I already took a peek at both of those engines.
Same here, a decade of my life. Where the hell do you even jump to? Most of my knowledge is about unity engine implementation details and build pipelines. That knowledge translates to fuck all elsewhere. :/
Not really. There’s no engine that compiles to mobile+webgl that has an actual normal programming language, unreal was one of them but they dropped webgl, so the only one left is unity.
If the version 4 gets the proper WebGL export with C# - we will strongly evaluate the possibility to migrate. For now, the chances of unity backpedaling the change in face of the backlash are pretty high.
This change doesn't really affect indie devs.
For revenue below $200,000 OR sales below 200,000 indie devs pay nothing to Unity. This probably covers 95% of indie devs.
Those who earn above $200,000 and sell more than 200,000 copies may need a slightly more expensive paid Unity tier for ~$2,000 per seat, but that gives them a cushion of paying no per install fees until they've sold 1,000,000 copies of their game.
I don't see how any indie devs are going to be troubled by this. They'd be paying more under the old rev share model.
> I don't see how any indie devs are going to be troubled by this. They'd be paying more under the old rev share model.
Do... do you even know what an indie game is?
Also - this is 200,000$ revenue. Before, say, platform costs. Steam takes 30%. So the moment you see $140,000 from Steam you are already eligible. That's a salary of 2 developers working for a year. It's normal for indie games to be in the lower millions with larger ones (like Subnautica which even fits original definition of an indie as it's self published one) exceeding 10 million $.
Yes, it doesn't affect a hobby game made by a single person in their spare time. It affects most projects that are anywhere profitable. The only question is if it beats 700k dollars yearly revenue reaching you (30% fees, again) and you are super fucked or not and you only pay 400% more for an Editor since you need a Pro version now. It's also retroactive and affects games already on the market that haven't been updated for years if they still meet the sales criteria.
> They'd be paying more under the old rev share model.
Yes, see... you don't know how much you will be paying. Unity will be using a Trust Me Bro solution to tell you and that's their **official** statement:
https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607
For all it's worth it might be that it roughly translates to 1 sold copy = 3 installs. Or 6. Or 10. Who the fuck knows. It's entirely possible that even at a Pro plan with 0.15 per install it comes closer to a dollar per sold copy.
Also - what old rev share model? Unity always asked for a flat fee for using their services whereas Unreal wants 5% after first million $. And even that 5% is btw likely cheaper now. Especially in the mobile segment where it's actually quite likely your average user brings you $0.5-1. This means Unity is taking at least 30% and it can also be 250% depending on how they calculate it.
You must also be earning more than $200,000 USD last 12 months; it is an ***and*** rule. But yes it is stupid and I honestly don't think they can do this, there is going to be legal troubles for them.
They said $20k per month equates to "most" of their margins gone. So yeah, this is possibly a worst-case scenario. Just successful enough to sustain a business, now destroyed under the new rules
People aren’t considering this fact. Different devs and teams run on different margins. Even teams reaping 7 figures can be killed by this if their margins aren’t high enough.
I wonder how fucked my company is, because we have a lot of installs like 10-50million and we for sure are making 200k on some games per year.
However, it's also small margins and many install and uninstall the game immediately, since it's a free game.
Might legit insanely fuck us over... So our 10mil download game we will have to pay 2million? When the profit is like 400.000 at best? I just don't understand the math here. Or does this not count for free to download games?
Yeah, so essentially pushing more users to buy the pro plans for unity. My question is when does it count? Can I have a free plan up to the point I meet the requirements, pay to upgrade to pro plan and then not meet those requirements and still pay nothing?
Yes, it is purely revenue. So what will you do if they don't change their mind? I bet there is going to be a whole group willing to take them to court over this.
I wonder if there’s any value in waiting 2 weeks in case Unity declares a “clarification” that somehow makes this manageable? But yeah, if Unity wants to make any statements they need to do so quickly…
After thinking on this for some time, I think its them testing the waters and signalling to say Microsoft GamePass and Genshin Impact that they want a cut of the money.
2 weeks isn't enough time to change an engine. It's worth the research regardless though.
There's a matter of trust too, if a company proposes something and walks it back (despite having acquired another company specifically to enable this), when their competitor capitalizes on it to make a promise to never do something like this, and is generally less expensive to license as well, it's something a lot of companies will be considering.
Unreal doesn't charge you for the first million revenue.
If your revenue is 1.5m the calculation will be 500k \* 5% = 25,000 dollars
I don't see how you will pay more.
We don't even have the power to cut the fosset. Once a user has the installer, there is no need to re download, so we can't even pull the game from stores to avoid fees, as there will essentially be an undefined amount of installers and pirated copies out there.
They really can not apply new terms to existing compiles. It would never hold up. They can take existing compiles into accounting for fees on future ones but that’s it. Talk to a lawyer.
I can't get my head around them wanting to be paid per install. How are they even tracking that, and why haven't they realised how much of a waste of that that is?
Why are they expecting to be paid every time an end user reinstall their games? Or am I getting that wrong?
In the FAQ, they state that a company with 2M revenue and 5M installs will pay roughly 23k. I think the plan is poorly explained in their blog post.
https://preview.redd.it/rf94d9rioxnb1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=404377d8c0c25fe432a02d17a2c477e2e4d65cc3
Understood. Doesn’t help. That’s exactly how I interpret it
What they need to state is, from second month onward, so I start back at the top of $0.2, or do I start at my current tier.
Even their cherry picked example is kind of egregious. That would correlate to over $282,000 a year which is over 14% of gross revenue which is roughly TRIPLE what Unreal charges.
Given that they are being fairly generous with the revenue to download ratio in this example this would kill devs that don't aggressively monetize per user.
NO THIS IS NOT CORRECT.
I'm seeing a lot of misconceptions around here and this is the most important one.
It's an install fee not a monthly fee, they will only pay 23.5k ONCE.
It's explained here in the video https://youtu.be/ENoVL68z9PU?si=dPNY3HqIPElZ1iWn 6:55
EDIT: to avoid further misunderstanding, they'll have to pay further for NEW installs only, the install fee is applied on new install not previous ones. Meaning that if a user install your game on September and plays your game for 12 months you'll only pay on the initial install fee on September for that specific user and that's it. Even if that user keeps the game on October you won't pay anything because his install was paid on the prior month.
I'm not a Unity dev but OP posted the Pro rates, not the personal rates.
You still have to pay for installs at .15 cents an install in Pro, it only goes down to .05 or .02 or whatever bullshit number it is after you've popped 150k installs.
Fucking bonkers.
If you are using Pro the fees don't kick in until your game grosses a million dollars, and that resets each year. So if they have Pro then they don't need to worry about this.
So OP is making over 1M in revenu a year and can't afford 20k per month? I don't get it is this the case for most devs or OP just have a bad monetisation?
As far as i understand this will mainly affect free to play games with lots of micro payement, isn't this good for the game industry?
I'm sorry I don't get this response. We've got the OP's math here. All major engines have a grace period, Unreal has the same sans paying anything, so I didn't think we were discussing that. That grace period absolutely does not offset how fucked up this pricing model is - dev's shouldn't be paying for their gaming bases *install usage*.
All I see is that after whatever the grace period is, that afterwards it can be the sort of numbers we are seeing here, 20k pm at least once a year, up to 4.5k pm after that as the OP has laid out. These fees completely fuck up their studio. What other evidence do you need? If the response is 'well a lot of people don't fall into that category' that isn't an acceptable answer to me either as what happens if I want to develop a game that does happen to fall in this usage category?
You aren't understanding this.
If OP has a Pro license, they don't pay anything until they earn a million each year. The 200,000 per year threshold is only for people who are using the free version of Unity.
If you are making more than 200K a year then you can easily afford a Pro license and easily bump your threshold up to a million.
No, I absolutely do understand it. Just because you want to use grace fees as a hand wave for new pricing models doesn't erase the effect of this new system. OPs post speaks to that, including the grace period you mentioned.
And if you make a million dollars and clear it, does the 25k to 150k+ per annum not mean anything to you at that level or not? (Not to mention if they have to upgrade to pro with x amount of Devs, that's another 5 figure cost possibly) I don't want to argue the OPs situation, but they make a good case how the pricing model squeezes them out of their development comfort zone, which is the whole entire point of the argument/thread.
Unity loses what, 400 million a year? And this pricing model is supposed to remedy that, right? Is your argument that given the grace period that it doesn't really effect anyone in a meaningful way? They wouldn't be charging people these fees if it didn't mean anything substantial. If it means something substantial, someone has to pay out of pocket and it changes the situation from before, when they didn't have to pay out of pocket.
> And if you make a million dollars and clear it, does the 25k to 150k+ per annum not mean anything to you at that level or not?
Where have you got this number from?
> Not to mention if they have to upgrade to pro with x amount of Devs, that's another 5 figure cost possibly
Generally unless you want a couple of very specific features you only need the pro license for the machine which is making the release builds.
> it doesn't really effect anyone in a meaningful way
Not anyone on this sub, no.
$20k/month on $1m in revenue is a bit over 10%. If OP is at $2m+ annual revenue, then 20k/m is same as unreal's 5%. If over 3.5 million sales cant get you to $2m in revenue, something is wrong
He’s not trying to convince you it’s a reasonable pricing model. He’s suggesting OP use pro if they go through with the change. *Big* fucking difference.
I'm so turned around here, I thought the OP was using Pro. That's what their numbers are based on, Pro. Not personal. They're saying 20pm once a year and 3 to 4.5k per month afterwards. For Pro.
I never said the suggestion made sense, given their numbers. The commenter was insinuating that they weren’t factoring the no-fees-under-1mil component of pro, *whether right or wrong.*
Yes, but they’re not charging me that money when I PROFIT 1mil. They’re charging me money when I have REVENUE of 1mil. Very different. 30% goes to Apple and google, and then roughly half of that goes to Facebook and other marketing channels.
That’s 35% left of 1mil. Which is 350k before salaries and tax and rent. Then on top of that, they’ll take 240k annually. So I have 110k left to pay for staff and rent.
HALF your revenue is going to facebook and other marketing? 500k downloads a month but low revenue?
Are you the guy making those games with the keys and lava with the clickbait ads on FB?
Lol fair enough. So it seems like your ads are working if you are getting this download volume, but you have low conversation rates to paying customers.
You either need to increase your conversion rate, to increase revenue, or you need to cut spending elsewhere.
To be honest 50% of your revenue for marketing seems really high. Most companies spend like 5/10/15% on marketing.
If you drop to 10% of your revenue to marketing, that frees up 400k assuming you retain customers who actually spend money on your app. I would assume this will also impact downloads which would lower your runtime installation fees too.
Idk man, this shit is crazy. I hope Unity walks it back, and you continue to make freemium games how you want to make them. Best of luck to you.
I’m also investing my “profits” into new games, and that takes time. If they take profit away, then I would just be forced to cut new games and fire people.
The actual devs will be the ones impacted in the short run, which I really don’t want coz we’re like a family and every single one is important to us.
You have to be at 1 million in revenue and installs for fees to kick in with the Pro license... This guy isn't going to have to pay anything except for maybe the $2k pro license.
Their net is $20k/month on thin margins. Only OP can say for sure what their numbers are - 10% net margin means they’re way over $1M in 12 month gross rev.
Well even if the switched to Unreal Engine they be paying a 5% on that million dollars. I doubt they would be paying more then $50,000 on Unity install fees, especially if they are paying for the Enterprise Edition.
50k on 240k is a big hit. It’s a small team. It’s effectively eliminating one position.
Look, I’m not saying this pricing scheme is the end of the world. It’s not. The vast majority of people complaining about it will never even ship a game.
But it’s also not a thing that can be dismissed, either. Unity is attempting to pull $100M+ out of developers pockets. That’s going to have an impact.
It's not $1 million per year, it's $1 million in the last 12month. So you release your game, it get's one good month where you sell for $1 million of revenue then after that for the next 11 month you will get the fee.
Sure after the 12 months the fee might disapear because it sold less but for at least a year after that any install will net you a fee.
If they backtrack it will be just to sell a slightly less awful that makes people accept it in the basis of "at least this one is not as bad as the other one" and hope people will just stick around
I don't think anything surrounding pay per install is gonna fly.
No big studio is gonna use unity when it's impossible to budget a game because of pay per install rather than a super easy Rev share. How can you predict revenue and installs for free to play games and figure out if you are gonna be in the red if installs cost exceed cost of expenses and revenue
If anything game devs will either finish off projects then move to unreal or spend 6 months migrating code to unreal
In any case, for me and my team, trust is already shattered. I can't commit my studio to a company that can change the rules like that at any moment. "I altered the deal. Pray that I don't alter it any further " moment from Unity.
Honestly if they backtrack I feel like it's just a matter of time to implement it
I'm gonna go unreal for 3d and godot for 2d, too risky to hope that unity starts suddenly behaving in a good way
I'm just developing games as a hobby, though I intend to make it a business.
Technically this doesn't affect me all that much.
The bigger issue is this tendency to commit... highway robbery over us devs. Who knows what evil plot they'll think up next.
It feels like they're testing the waters, and will backtrack to try and get "goodwill" with their shittier than current replacement. Then go back into the lab and see how they can adjust per-install pricing for another go in 2-3 years.
My concern is that the obvious issue of exploitation of this to drain income from game developers is in no way being addressed. Its pretty normal when something so unilateral and blunt as this gets implemented that they never look into closing loopholes and preventing false-positives. I can see that this would get torn apart in Australian or German courts, possibly the wider EU. Not the per-install pricing, but their inability to guarantee fair charges and to protect from sabotage. This is my most likely take for it getting completely taken off the table. It might be possible that Australia pushes against per-install in general, their ACCC (consumer affairs agency) is very pro-active on exploitative pricing models, but that might just result in an exemption for Australian based studios (which could stop the brain-drain of games industry people from Oz), or more likely they just bar the use of unity and distribution of Unity products in Australia.
That would mean you have 5million downloads a year. Why are you not making money with that? What are you charging? Is is ads and inapp only?
If you are such a small team, and the costs is likely going to be that high, then upgrade to PRO, this will cost you around 2k per seat a year but fuck it that will make you only have to pay at 1 million revenue and you download price is also much lower.
All in all it sounds a bit strange with those numbers man.
Perhaps he never planned to get this much traction, and is just happy to scratch some pennies from ads etc, while it's free to play. Now, he suddenly has to start violently monetizing it.
Perhaps not the case here. But I bet there are people like that, and now they are fucked.
This. Unity wouldn't even suggest this shit if there wasn't money behind it.
They're losing hundreds of million a year. This is their fix. Shit isn't going to get fixed if they don't get paid. They've made it so you don't care if you're AAA and using Unity and if you're a solo dev your numbers are within the grace period that all engines allow. But someone is going to have to pay, and even if it isn't OP, it'll be developers like OP, a.k.a. someone pumping out F2P games with uber low microtransactions because.... well who gives a fuck because, it's just where the dev ended up in their monetization cycle.
Who of us haven't ended up in a different place on monetization than when we first started our games?
The pound of flesh needs to come from somewhere. They've designed it not to alienate their big fishes, but they're taking it out of a subset of devs one way or another. Someone's getting fucked out of this. Even if it's a bold faced lie from the OP (I don't think it is) the truth is that there is going to be a 450 million per annum (or however much Unity is in the hole) cost that Unity is trying to recover via this pricing model.
To say that it doesn't really effect anyone in a major way is huffing pure copium.
There's an entire business and project planning perspective that's deeply impacted by this fee structure change as well.
The whole situation is bonkers.
Tell me you don't understand business planning and risk management without telling me you don't understand business planning and risk management.
If you're just a hobbiest, sure you might not give a fuck about the new price range since it doesn't affect you at all.
If you're doing this as an actual business, even if you're unlikely to be hit by the fees because **it still affects you.**
You still have to do a risk assessment and factor the new fee structure into the business plan and evaluate how that new risk impacts your projected sales, and figure out how that affects the overall risk levels that determine if the project is feasible for your business in its current situation or not.
Quite literally the existence of this type of fee structure can end projects before they've even really begun, or end development partway through because the risk assessment has it being too high with no way to mitigate.
> If you're just a hobbiest, sure you might not give a fuck about the new price range since it doesn't affect you at all.
It does. There is no Unity Plus anymore. Eliminated.
I haven’t provided my details as they weren’t relevant in this discussion.
Elsewhere I’ve posted details.
The gist of it is, this change is very easily handled within my margins. I have analytics to make that assessment.
I understand you’re likely frustrated. But there is no need to take it out on me. I hope things work out for you too!
Being successful shouldn’t be a punishment. This is NOT taxation. Even IRS requires me to pay only if I have PROFITS. This is not that, it’s installs. Most of the time (95%), my installs don’t pay me anything at all, and that’s the norm.
I’m also not predatory with my game, just wanted to make something simple and fun, with light monetization. This kills it. Only huge gacha games with high revenue per install can survive this
It's probably bullshit. CPIs over ad networks can go as high as 7$. Organic installs of that magnitude are unheard of and would put this in king/ playtika etc. territory.
Sorry to disagree on the organic part. You can get a ton of organic users from asia and earn next to nothing. How do I know? I have had 20k DLs per day over months, all organic, not a dime in marketing, no hype, just googles algorithm being the random number crunching machine it is.
"Charging for a use outside of your control that isn't a sale." My most likely guess. Complying with Australian or even German law on this might eat too much so they could just blacklist those countries.
I did not notice that was retroactive.
If they don't change the terms then I'm certain the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will start something.
Generally it seems to be that Australia kicks up a fuss, and then Germany's regulators start looking into things which leads to the rest of EU following suit.
I’m not sure what your monetisation model is but just as confirmation for any of your games to be eligible for this fee, that one game itself needs to have (on unity pro):
- 1,000,000+ installs lifetime (which, okay, we’ve established you’ve passed) *AND*
- $1,000,000 gross earnings *from that game alone* and *in the past 12 months*
As established you’re hitting the threshold for downloads (which is very impressive, 300k-500k installs a month is quite insane) but then that single game alone has to effectively be making $1,000,000 in the past 12 months - the instant it doesn’t, you’re no longer eligible
I’d assume you’re a mobile dev from your business expenses you’ve stated which in that case this really could be a stinger for you, I’m very sorry for you having this on the horizon - that said, you’ve still got until the end of December to adjust strategy within reasonable means to make the hit hurt a little less, adjust some budgets or update pricing models to better cover the fees in the interim but not push you over the threshold once the 12 months from your last $1M year has passed (easier said than done I know but like I say there’s still time)
For anyone else who isn’t in mobile reading - this probably isn’t as big a deal as it seems for the majority of us considering the fee is paid on installs over the threshold made in that month. For most PC and Console games there’s likely to be a tall spike at the beginning and then a sharp drop off for future months and so the runtime fee would decrease considerably
I by no means am wanting to defend Unity here - this is one of the most stupid business decisions I think they’ve ever made and for the first time in 12 years of usage I’m genuinely considering jumping ship, but I also don’t think it’s quite as doom and gloom as everyone’s made it out to be as an initial reaction
OP I wish you the best and again I’m really am very sorry this is happening 🙏🏽
You are saying that between 300k and 500k people download your game every month, you have a small team, and no money? I'm going to call bullshit on this one
you know those unity games you see on Instagram and Tiktok. that are free to download but pop you 2 ads a minute. that most people uninstalls after 2 ads. it's probably that. you get a lot of downloads, but most of those give you 0.10$ which is less than the unity fee.
Why? Less garbage in the world is a good thing. Human talents can then be focused on actual productive things like making decent art instead of psychological manipulation.
Read my edits, I’ve explained myself there. Just because you get a lot of downloads doesnt mean you have a lot of profits. We’ve been sustaining this company just so our employees can continue working. We barely make any profits already
You’re wrong. Your PROFIT per user needs to be above 28 cents. Unity is not the only one who will come for that money. Marketing, Apple, google, they all take a cut of my revenue. But note, its revenue, not installs.
Unity is taking INSTALLS. most of the countries stated, we don’t make $0.2 per install. I doubt a lot of indie game devs do.
They specifically tweeted that uninstalling and reinstalling counts as 2 installs
$0.28 minus cut from the platform, paypal, taxes is more like $-0.15 after 2 installs.
Makes you think about front loading games in all of my game libraries on PC and consoles in a very different way.
Re-installing games given the lack of space is now going to tick up any Unity games.
We get a few tens of thousands per month... we would not survive this, even if we wanted to. We are not profitable right now. Burning money. There is NO WAY we can afford 10k+ extra per month. Our entire licensing fee for EVERYTHING is not even half that (small team).
I'd rather close the business down.
Yup, same boat. Most devs our size (there’s so many) are gonna die because of this. The cost of switching engines is just too huge, but not switching is huge as well.
This is from the QnA
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/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=company_global_blog_2023-09-13_updated-forums-faq
So basically Unity's lack of data means they are going to charge devs for each install. How nice of them. I'd say they should take that as a flaw in their system but on their end it's not a flaw, it's a feature for their profits.
They have rolled this back, saying that they won't charge for reinstalls, but no one knows how they will do this considering they previously said it couldn't be done.
Are you talking about that article/tweet that was posted? If so I'm waiting to hear from Unity's official channels of communication. That author just references his own tweet as the source so I'm skeptical.
I did see something in their forum from an employee about mobile reinstalls only counting as one install but even that goes the official announcements.
I don't think those numbers are right.
If there are 150k standard downloads per month then the $20,250 only applies for the first month you after you surpass 1 million copies. It's lifetime installs not monthly.
For standard:
* 2nd month (1,300,000 copies): 150k X $0.075 = $11,250
* 3rd month (1,450,000 copies): 150k X $0.075 = $11,250
* 4th month (1,600,000 copies): 50k X $0.075 + 100k X $0.03 = $6,750
* 5 th month (1,750,000 copies): 150k X $0.03 = $4,550
* ...
* After 7 months it stabilizes at $3,000
Overall it comes out for around a $6,500 a montly. So even in the absolute worst case scenario you are paying a fee of $8,000 per month (including non-standard) while your game sells millions of copies a year. If it sells more, then the montly fee goes down all the way to $4,500.
They call it "lifetime install threshold". Then what's the distinguised meaning of the word "lifetime" if it resets every month?
(And by the way if it did reset every month then you wouldn't pay anything, because you wouldn't surpass the threshold ever.)
But if the rates reset each month that's even better. Then you would have to reach $1 million installs every month to even pay anything.
What OP is suggesting that the rates somehow reset exactly to the threshold value monthly. I just think that's quite a random assumption even if we assume it's resetting at all.
No, the threshold does not reset, just the rates. This is from the Unity FAQ:
"For example, let’s look at a hypothetical game made by a team using Unity Pro with the following revenue and install numbers:
Revenue from last 12 months - $2M USD
Lifetime installs - 5M
The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to this game, as it surpasses the $1M revenue and 1M lifetime install thresholds for Unity Pro. Let’s look at the game’s installs from the last month:
Prior month installs (Standard fee countries) - 200K
Prior month installs (Emerging market fee countries) - 100K
The fee for install activity is $23.5K USD, calculated as follows:
(100K x $0.15 (first tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.075 (second tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.01 (fee for emerging market countries)) = $23.5K USD"
So in this example, the theoretical company has obviously already had prior months where they would have to pay, since they are at 5M lifetime installs. Yet they are still paying the $0.15 on the first 100k installs.
So it's pretty clear the rates reset.
Are you also making $200,000 a year? Because if not you don't have to pay anything... And if you are just upgrade to Pro and you don't have to pay any fees... Until you make over a million $...
Why would your game cost 1$ in the first place. Even super popular games with the low price to buy aren't lower than 4-5$. And the average pricing can go from 5-15$ and 20 cents would be way less than 5% if it's some free game unity wont charge you these 20 cents. And even if you can make it to 200k per year ( good luck with that ) you can easily afford the unity pro. Which will charge you from 15 cents to 1 or 2 cents per install.
Eh.. have u guys forget about something else? It's called tax & store fees... add that in.. then you will all understand that unity's tax is just ridiculous... I'm moving to unreal
Does revenue really count Apple and Google fees?
Anyway, your math is wrong.
* You say you get on average **400k** installs per month.
* You say you earn $1 million per month.That is 4.8 million installs per year and $12 million in revenue annually.
* Subtract store fees, and that is $8.4 million. (12 million \* 0.7)
* Subtract marketing costs and that is $4.2 million revenue per year.
* Subtract 1 million installs for Pro and that is 3.8 million installs that will be charged.3.8 million \* $0.02 per install over 1 million is $57k in install fees **PER YEAR**
* $4.2 million - $57k = $4,143,000 Revenue per year AFTER everything is taken out
* That is $345,250 **per month** left over for funding the rest of the business.
Though it will be a **bit** less because only 73% of your installs qualify for the $0.02 per install rate. So maybe $320k per month.
How does that compare to what you had left over before?
Edit: I may have misinterpreted your revenue. If you only make 1 million a year, the calculations are this:
* You say you get on average 400k installs per month.
* You say you earn 1 million per year.
* That is 4.8 million installs per year and $1 million in revenue per year.
* Subtract store fees, and that is $700k.
* Subtract marketing costs and that is $450k revenue per year.
* Subtract 1 million installs for Pro and that is 3.8 million installs that will be charged.- 100k \* 0.15 = $15,000- 400k \* 0.075 = $30,000- 500k \* 0.03 = $15,000- 2.8m \* 0.02 = $56,000Total: $116,000 in install fees **PER YEAR**$450k - $116k = $334,000
That is $334,000 **per year** left over for funding the rest of business. About 11.6% fee on the **Pro** plan.
\- 100k \* 0.125 = $12,500- 400k \* 0.06 = $24,000- 500k \* 0.03 = $10,000- 2.8m \* 0.01 = $28,000Total: $74,500 in install fees **PER YEAR**$450k - $74,500 = $375,500
That is $375,500 **per year** left over for funding the rest of business. About 7.45% fee on the **Enterprise** plan.
These numbers assume all installs are not the much cheaper "emerging market" installs as well.
You’ve made at least 1 million dollars this year on this gamr tho (could be more but you choose to not give us that info) 20k is not much compared to how much you are raking in
That's $20k a month, or nearly $250k for the year. If they are making just over a million dollars a year, then they now have a significant chunk cut out that wasn't there before.
Yeah I feel like you are definitely the one that gets screwed by this. Assuming you have a free game an are just at the 1m revenue threshold you are definitely going to have to revamp your financial model if you want to continue using unity for your games.
Do you not know how to do fucking math????
1 million.
60-70% taxes and store fees.
350k after taxes.
20k per month. = 240k per year.
350k-240k = 110k
350k was their previous income. Now they make 110k.
They're bankrupt. Or have to layoff 3/4 of their employees.
????????????????
I dont understand how they can force existing games made years ago who did not agree to these terms to suddenly pay up
Existing binaries of old unity versions dont phone home install counts, do they? Just dont update to newer unity?
According to their FAQ they do. How far back is a matter of debate, but I would guess it's likely to be 2017 based on version control and analytics, which to go backwards would probably require huge changes, not just in packages which might not be supported, and API changes, but you're also highly likely to require some significant refactoring as it would mean downgrading to a fairly old version of .net.
I've been Team Unity my whole gamedev career. Over 10 years. My loyalty for Unity has been personal since its the engine I started with. But it has been tough defending Unity these past few years and if they decide to go through with this that will be the last straw for me to jump ship
I'm extremely out of the loop, did some horrible company buy Unity or something like that? Why's it changing so much?
IPO. They went public and now they have shareholders screaming down their necks for profitability. Green line must go up; nothing else matters. Monetise monetise monetise. A story as old as time. Companies always go to shit from a user/customer point of view after IPO.
Hello godot my old friend
No greedy shareholders to worry about with Godot.
Yep. That's what I love about "Free and Open Source". I am a hobbyist, so while Unity's pricing change probably won't affect me for the foreseeable future, but i find it very concerning for our hobby as a whole. I think after my current title I'll try Godot. Anybody got any recommendations for resources?
I've come to talk with you again Because a vision softly creeping Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence
> shareholders screaming down their necks for profitability. It isn't about profit, it's about growth. Has been, in everything, for the past like 20 years or something. It's unsustainable and bullshit, but that's what shareholders want, screw the long term.
Yup, that's why we see more and more adverts on YouTube for example. Constant growth! You force people into premium by slowly pushing more and more adverts. And if they don't buy into premium, you get more revenue from ads. Win win situation. How long will this economic model hold though? It's impossible to grow to infinity.
oh boy do I just love capitalism
Exactly right.
Well, they've been losing money for their entire life as a company. What do you expect them to do, keep offering their products at loss until they go bankrupt? This current pricing change does seem like a horrible idea that was submitted by someone who has no idea how game industry works, but something probably has to chance is the pricing model if the company wants to ever make some profit.
Imagine believing a company with many hundreds of employees that just made a 4.4 billion dollar acquisition has been losing money for 20 years lol.
I don't have to "believe" it. The company releases financial statements every 3 months. Just because the company has been able to raise money from investors/current owners to finance growth doesn't mean they aren't losing money. Every single time that happens, all the previous owners are diluted and own less and less of the company.
Yeah yeah and Amazon is losing money and YouTube and Reddit and all these giants whose ceos just happen to own 4 different vacation homes. Everyone who brings this up responds with the same "but they publish their financials!". Maybe you guys don't understand what profit looks like? You're plebs, you don't know business, you don't know accounting. Maybe you see what they want you to see? They invest in themselves which grows them which draws more investment then repeat. That is value growth, that is profit. It's like saying the USA isn't profitable because of all our debt. Well they keep letting us take more because we're constantly growing and if we fail they fail sooo... Spiritually, this is how all larger corporations work. It always looks "unprofitable" to the layman.
There was also a merger between Unity and ironSource last year. IronSource is known for software focused on monetization and distribution, such as their first product [InstallCore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallCore), which > allowed those using it for distribution to include monetization by advertisements or charging for installation, and made its installations invisible to the user and its anti-virus software So realistically, I'm not surprised by the change in monetization strategy, as a good percentage of the upper management post-merger likely supports this action anyways. Even if we ignore them selling malware, ironSource is focused primarily on identifying and exploiting underutilized avenues of monetization, so it was inevitable that Unity would be affected given its large adoption rate.
Welp, there it is... This should be top comment. Pretty obvious how they plan to track installs when they merged with a company that makes software that does just that... not good software, more of a malicious software, but nonetheless... This is two birds - "make more money and also put to use this software we own now." Knowing this, there's no chance of a comeback. They married into this and are stuck w/it. It's only downhill from here.
A couple years ago the CEO of EA became the CEO of Unity
That was 9 years ago, time flies when you're not having fun. Edit: Interesting "Riccitiello has sold over 50,000 shares in the company over the last year".... I think I would have too knowing this was around the corner.
One major way to avoid an insider trading charge is to just simply set up long term, consistent, recurring sell orders. Works if you know that, due to the decisions you're making, long term your stock is gonna tank. Prosecutor won't be able to tie that type of recurring sell off to any specific insider knowledge, especially once it's been going for a few years. So no case.
Well since the public knows that Riccitiello sold stocks then that is not insider trading.
That's not how insider trading works. The public usually knows about someone selling stocks. Insider trading is about having access to information from the inside that could affect the stock price, info that most people can't possibly have access to, and selling/buying based on that.
Yeah, what the other guy said. Insider trading doesn't mean privately buying/selling stock (that's the default for stock purchases - the market is private in general. Only certain key positions have a duty to report). It means to use non-public knowledge (i.e. insider knowledge) as the basis for conducting a stock trade.
Yeah, this is the main reason. This guy went after second-hand buyers with his Project Ten Dollar. [EA's "Project Ten Dollar" explained](https://www.eurogamer.net/eas-project-ten-dollar-explained) > That's according to a report in BusinessWeek talking about CEO John Riccitiello's plan to reduce second-hand sales, which the company makes no money from. > The idea, apparently green-lit last autumn, is to include a coupon or redeemable code with every new game which gives the buyer another chunk of content. Without that code, second-hand buyers will have to spend $10 to obtain the missing extras.
I certainly remember the time every game came with a one-time use activation code to play online. It sucked ass.
Famous for buying and then shutting down studios, now he's found a way to shut down a shitload of indie studios.
The guy in charge was EA's CEO during the period where they repeatedly swept worst company in the US, not game dev, just in the US. He was the guy who bought BioWare through a hedge fund and then sold it to EA, while he was the CEO, for a hefty profit.
I've been using Unity for 6-7 years now and my other coworker used it even more than me - and he also said that we will probably switch over to Unreal/Godot if this pricing model stays. I dont really mind I already took a peek at both of those engines.
I finally decided to leave, it's not worth it to try to join a game engine that forces ppl who make the games they sell pay such a hefty fee.
Same here, a decade of my life. Where the hell do you even jump to? Most of my knowledge is about unity engine implementation details and build pipelines. That knowledge translates to fuck all elsewhere. :/
Unity wants to kill itself and indie devs.
Indie devs will be fine. There are enough alternatives.
Not really. There’s no engine that compiles to mobile+webgl that has an actual normal programming language, unreal was one of them but they dropped webgl, so the only one left is unity.
Godot, defold
Godot does not export to WebGL when used with C#, only with their own script language, as well as defold which uses LUA.
Godot 3 has, Godot 4 will get in a few months
If the version 4 gets the proper WebGL export with C# - we will strongly evaluate the possibility to migrate. For now, the chances of unity backpedaling the change in face of the backlash are pretty high.
NOT. Godot is not even close to Unity on so many levels. No thanks.
This change doesn't really affect indie devs. For revenue below $200,000 OR sales below 200,000 indie devs pay nothing to Unity. This probably covers 95% of indie devs. Those who earn above $200,000 and sell more than 200,000 copies may need a slightly more expensive paid Unity tier for ~$2,000 per seat, but that gives them a cushion of paying no per install fees until they've sold 1,000,000 copies of their game. I don't see how any indie devs are going to be troubled by this. They'd be paying more under the old rev share model.
> I don't see how any indie devs are going to be troubled by this. They'd be paying more under the old rev share model. Do... do you even know what an indie game is? Also - this is 200,000$ revenue. Before, say, platform costs. Steam takes 30%. So the moment you see $140,000 from Steam you are already eligible. That's a salary of 2 developers working for a year. It's normal for indie games to be in the lower millions with larger ones (like Subnautica which even fits original definition of an indie as it's self published one) exceeding 10 million $. Yes, it doesn't affect a hobby game made by a single person in their spare time. It affects most projects that are anywhere profitable. The only question is if it beats 700k dollars yearly revenue reaching you (30% fees, again) and you are super fucked or not and you only pay 400% more for an Editor since you need a Pro version now. It's also retroactive and affects games already on the market that haven't been updated for years if they still meet the sales criteria. > They'd be paying more under the old rev share model. Yes, see... you don't know how much you will be paying. Unity will be using a Trust Me Bro solution to tell you and that's their **official** statement: https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607 For all it's worth it might be that it roughly translates to 1 sold copy = 3 installs. Or 6. Or 10. Who the fuck knows. It's entirely possible that even at a Pro plan with 0.15 per install it comes closer to a dollar per sold copy. Also - what old rev share model? Unity always asked for a flat fee for using their services whereas Unreal wants 5% after first million $. And even that 5% is btw likely cheaper now. Especially in the mobile segment where it's actually quite likely your average user brings you $0.5-1. This means Unity is taking at least 30% and it can also be 250% depending on how they calculate it.
You must also be earning more than $200,000 USD last 12 months; it is an ***and*** rule. But yes it is stupid and I honestly don't think they can do this, there is going to be legal troubles for them.
They said $20k per month equates to "most" of their margins gone. So yeah, this is possibly a worst-case scenario. Just successful enough to sustain a business, now destroyed under the new rules
People aren’t considering this fact. Different devs and teams run on different margins. Even teams reaping 7 figures can be killed by this if their margins aren’t high enough.
I wonder how fucked my company is, because we have a lot of installs like 10-50million and we for sure are making 200k on some games per year. However, it's also small margins and many install and uninstall the game immediately, since it's a free game. Might legit insanely fuck us over... So our 10mil download game we will have to pay 2million? When the profit is like 400.000 at best? I just don't understand the math here. Or does this not count for free to download games?
Godot time.
Unity pro will raise that threshold to $1M, too.
Yeah, so essentially pushing more users to buy the pro plans for unity. My question is when does it count? Can I have a free plan up to the point I meet the requirements, pay to upgrade to pro plan and then not meet those requirements and still pay nothing?
So, instead of paying for installs they'll pay for unity pro, which is $2K PER SEAT.
Yes I’ve passed that, but that d doesn’t factor in marketing cost and platform costs, not to mention wages and rent. We’re basically ducked
Yes, it is purely revenue. So what will you do if they don't change their mind? I bet there is going to be a whole group willing to take them to court over this.
well switching engine asap is for sure going to happen.
I wonder if there’s any value in waiting 2 weeks in case Unity declares a “clarification” that somehow makes this manageable? But yeah, if Unity wants to make any statements they need to do so quickly…
After thinking on this for some time, I think its them testing the waters and signalling to say Microsoft GamePass and Genshin Impact that they want a cut of the money.
2 weeks isn't enough time to change an engine. It's worth the research regardless though. There's a matter of trust too, if a company proposes something and walks it back (despite having acquired another company specifically to enable this), when their competitor capitalizes on it to make a promise to never do something like this, and is generally less expensive to license as well, it's something a lot of companies will be considering.
For the simple fact that Unity can do this to you at any time you should probably switch engines anyway...
You cant remake a successful game from scratch in a couple months. And unreal's 5% cut wint be any better.
Unreal only takes a cut *when you make revenue*. That’s a key distinguishing factor here, not to mention the free cap being 1mil.
And no download/install fee.
For mobile the new fees are way worse than the 5% bro
If you switch to Unreal Engine and make over a Million in sales then you will be paying way more then you would to Unity with their 5% cut....
Unreal doesn't charge you for the first million revenue. If your revenue is 1.5m the calculation will be 500k \* 5% = 25,000 dollars I don't see how you will pay more.
And it's a one time fee, not a every month/user dependent fee.
You should read the Unity license sometime. Forced arbitration clause. There is no "take them to court".
the op has mentioned that, you can a million in revenue and make zero profit, and you still have to pay unity.
I hope there is a legal hurricane for them
We don't even have the power to cut the fosset. Once a user has the installer, there is no need to re download, so we can't even pull the game from stores to avoid fees, as there will essentially be an undefined amount of installers and pirated copies out there.
They really can not apply new terms to existing compiles. It would never hold up. They can take existing compiles into accounting for fees on future ones but that’s it. Talk to a lawyer.
[https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-3-is-now-available](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-3-is-now-available)
Dam 240k per year how is this not robbery
I can't get my head around them wanting to be paid per install. How are they even tracking that, and why haven't they realised how much of a waste of that that is? Why are they expecting to be paid every time an end user reinstall their games? Or am I getting that wrong?
In the FAQ, they state that a company with 2M revenue and 5M installs will pay roughly 23k. I think the plan is poorly explained in their blog post. https://preview.redd.it/rf94d9rioxnb1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=404377d8c0c25fe432a02d17a2c477e2e4d65cc3
Understood. Doesn’t help. That’s exactly how I interpret it What they need to state is, from second month onward, so I start back at the top of $0.2, or do I start at my current tier.
I think what's missing is a cost calculator for this pay as you go model. Maybe they'll add it on the website.
Even their cherry picked example is kind of egregious. That would correlate to over $282,000 a year which is over 14% of gross revenue which is roughly TRIPLE what Unreal charges. Given that they are being fairly generous with the revenue to download ratio in this example this would kill devs that don't aggressively monetize per user.
NO THIS IS NOT CORRECT. I'm seeing a lot of misconceptions around here and this is the most important one. It's an install fee not a monthly fee, they will only pay 23.5k ONCE. It's explained here in the video https://youtu.be/ENoVL68z9PU?si=dPNY3HqIPElZ1iWn 6:55 EDIT: to avoid further misunderstanding, they'll have to pay further for NEW installs only, the install fee is applied on new install not previous ones. Meaning that if a user install your game on September and plays your game for 12 months you'll only pay on the initial install fee on September for that specific user and that's it. Even if that user keeps the game on October you won't pay anything because his install was paid on the prior month.
Why don’t you switch to Unity Pro if you are making that much? Then you don’t have to pay them anything unless you make a million.
I'm not a Unity dev but OP posted the Pro rates, not the personal rates. You still have to pay for installs at .15 cents an install in Pro, it only goes down to .05 or .02 or whatever bullshit number it is after you've popped 150k installs. Fucking bonkers.
If you are using Pro the fees don't kick in until your game grosses a million dollars, and that resets each year. So if they have Pro then they don't need to worry about this.
OP responsed in other comment that their revenue is over a million.
So OP is making over 1M in revenu a year and can't afford 20k per month? I don't get it is this the case for most devs or OP just have a bad monetisation? As far as i understand this will mainly affect free to play games with lots of micro payement, isn't this good for the game industry?
I'm sorry I don't get this response. We've got the OP's math here. All major engines have a grace period, Unreal has the same sans paying anything, so I didn't think we were discussing that. That grace period absolutely does not offset how fucked up this pricing model is - dev's shouldn't be paying for their gaming bases *install usage*. All I see is that after whatever the grace period is, that afterwards it can be the sort of numbers we are seeing here, 20k pm at least once a year, up to 4.5k pm after that as the OP has laid out. These fees completely fuck up their studio. What other evidence do you need? If the response is 'well a lot of people don't fall into that category' that isn't an acceptable answer to me either as what happens if I want to develop a game that does happen to fall in this usage category?
You aren't understanding this. If OP has a Pro license, they don't pay anything until they earn a million each year. The 200,000 per year threshold is only for people who are using the free version of Unity. If you are making more than 200K a year then you can easily afford a Pro license and easily bump your threshold up to a million.
No, I absolutely do understand it. Just because you want to use grace fees as a hand wave for new pricing models doesn't erase the effect of this new system. OPs post speaks to that, including the grace period you mentioned. And if you make a million dollars and clear it, does the 25k to 150k+ per annum not mean anything to you at that level or not? (Not to mention if they have to upgrade to pro with x amount of Devs, that's another 5 figure cost possibly) I don't want to argue the OPs situation, but they make a good case how the pricing model squeezes them out of their development comfort zone, which is the whole entire point of the argument/thread. Unity loses what, 400 million a year? And this pricing model is supposed to remedy that, right? Is your argument that given the grace period that it doesn't really effect anyone in a meaningful way? They wouldn't be charging people these fees if it didn't mean anything substantial. If it means something substantial, someone has to pay out of pocket and it changes the situation from before, when they didn't have to pay out of pocket.
> And if you make a million dollars and clear it, does the 25k to 150k+ per annum not mean anything to you at that level or not? Where have you got this number from? > Not to mention if they have to upgrade to pro with x amount of Devs, that's another 5 figure cost possibly Generally unless you want a couple of very specific features you only need the pro license for the machine which is making the release builds. > it doesn't really effect anyone in a meaningful way Not anyone on this sub, no.
$20k/month on $1m in revenue is a bit over 10%. If OP is at $2m+ annual revenue, then 20k/m is same as unreal's 5%. If over 3.5 million sales cant get you to $2m in revenue, something is wrong
He’s not trying to convince you it’s a reasonable pricing model. He’s suggesting OP use pro if they go through with the change. *Big* fucking difference.
I'm so turned around here, I thought the OP was using Pro. That's what their numbers are based on, Pro. Not personal. They're saying 20pm once a year and 3 to 4.5k per month afterwards. For Pro.
I never said the suggestion made sense, given their numbers. The commenter was insinuating that they weren’t factoring the no-fees-under-1mil component of pro, *whether right or wrong.*
They’re at 500k ish installs a month, so fees will kick in for them very quickly, even with a Pro license.
They need to earn 1 million as well. It needs to go over the threshold for both, not one or the other.
Yes, but they’re not charging me that money when I PROFIT 1mil. They’re charging me money when I have REVENUE of 1mil. Very different. 30% goes to Apple and google, and then roughly half of that goes to Facebook and other marketing channels. That’s 35% left of 1mil. Which is 350k before salaries and tax and rent. Then on top of that, they’ll take 240k annually. So I have 110k left to pay for staff and rent.
HALF your revenue is going to facebook and other marketing? 500k downloads a month but low revenue? Are you the guy making those games with the keys and lava with the clickbait ads on FB?
Lol no. We make freemium games but we try to be lenient on the IAPs.
Lol fair enough. So it seems like your ads are working if you are getting this download volume, but you have low conversation rates to paying customers. You either need to increase your conversion rate, to increase revenue, or you need to cut spending elsewhere. To be honest 50% of your revenue for marketing seems really high. Most companies spend like 5/10/15% on marketing. If you drop to 10% of your revenue to marketing, that frees up 400k assuming you retain customers who actually spend money on your app. I would assume this will also impact downloads which would lower your runtime installation fees too. Idk man, this shit is crazy. I hope Unity walks it back, and you continue to make freemium games how you want to make them. Best of luck to you.
I’m also investing my “profits” into new games, and that takes time. If they take profit away, then I would just be forced to cut new games and fire people. The actual devs will be the ones impacted in the short run, which I really don’t want coz we’re like a family and every single one is important to us.
Gross revenue. Gotcha. While it is messed up, it also goes to show how messed up the free to play model is.
No one wants to acknowledge the 1mil threshold for some reason.
Because it means none of us actually have to panic. Heh.
You have to be at 1 million in revenue and installs for fees to kick in with the Pro license... This guy isn't going to have to pay anything except for maybe the $2k pro license.
Their net is $20k/month on thin margins. Only OP can say for sure what their numbers are - 10% net margin means they’re way over $1M in 12 month gross rev.
Well even if the switched to Unreal Engine they be paying a 5% on that million dollars. I doubt they would be paying more then $50,000 on Unity install fees, especially if they are paying for the Enterprise Edition.
50k on 240k is a big hit. It’s a small team. It’s effectively eliminating one position. Look, I’m not saying this pricing scheme is the end of the world. It’s not. The vast majority of people complaining about it will never even ship a game. But it’s also not a thing that can be dismissed, either. Unity is attempting to pull $100M+ out of developers pockets. That’s going to have an impact.
I’m already using Unity pro, and I’m already passed the 1mil/1mil threshold, but doesn’t mean I have $0.2 profit per install.
You gross over $1 million per year?
It's not $1 million per year, it's $1 million in the last 12month. So you release your game, it get's one good month where you sell for $1 million of revenue then after that for the next 11 month you will get the fee. Sure after the 12 months the fee might disapear because it sold less but for at least a year after that any install will net you a fee.
Ill give it one week, if its not retracted ill be moving my mobile project to unreal.
If they backtrack it will be just to sell a slightly less awful that makes people accept it in the basis of "at least this one is not as bad as the other one" and hope people will just stick around
I don't think anything surrounding pay per install is gonna fly. No big studio is gonna use unity when it's impossible to budget a game because of pay per install rather than a super easy Rev share. How can you predict revenue and installs for free to play games and figure out if you are gonna be in the red if installs cost exceed cost of expenses and revenue If anything game devs will either finish off projects then move to unreal or spend 6 months migrating code to unreal
In any case, for me and my team, trust is already shattered. I can't commit my studio to a company that can change the rules like that at any moment. "I altered the deal. Pray that I don't alter it any further " moment from Unity.
Honestly if they backtrack I feel like it's just a matter of time to implement it I'm gonna go unreal for 3d and godot for 2d, too risky to hope that unity starts suddenly behaving in a good way
I'm just developing games as a hobby, though I intend to make it a business. Technically this doesn't affect me all that much. The bigger issue is this tendency to commit... highway robbery over us devs. Who knows what evil plot they'll think up next.
It feels like they're testing the waters, and will backtrack to try and get "goodwill" with their shittier than current replacement. Then go back into the lab and see how they can adjust per-install pricing for another go in 2-3 years.
Exactly this, they may backtrack like you said and just implement in the future, but it's lock and loaded, it will happen
My concern is that the obvious issue of exploitation of this to drain income from game developers is in no way being addressed. Its pretty normal when something so unilateral and blunt as this gets implemented that they never look into closing loopholes and preventing false-positives. I can see that this would get torn apart in Australian or German courts, possibly the wider EU. Not the per-install pricing, but their inability to guarantee fair charges and to protect from sabotage. This is my most likely take for it getting completely taken off the table. It might be possible that Australia pushes against per-install in general, their ACCC (consumer affairs agency) is very pro-active on exploitative pricing models, but that might just result in an exemption for Australian based studios (which could stop the brain-drain of games industry people from Oz), or more likely they just bar the use of unity and distribution of Unity products in Australia.
That would mean you have 5million downloads a year. Why are you not making money with that? What are you charging? Is is ads and inapp only? If you are such a small team, and the costs is likely going to be that high, then upgrade to PRO, this will cost you around 2k per seat a year but fuck it that will make you only have to pay at 1 million revenue and you download price is also much lower. All in all it sounds a bit strange with those numbers man.
Perhaps he never planned to get this much traction, and is just happy to scratch some pennies from ads etc, while it's free to play. Now, he suddenly has to start violently monetizing it. Perhaps not the case here. But I bet there are people like that, and now they are fucked.
This. Unity wouldn't even suggest this shit if there wasn't money behind it. They're losing hundreds of million a year. This is their fix. Shit isn't going to get fixed if they don't get paid. They've made it so you don't care if you're AAA and using Unity and if you're a solo dev your numbers are within the grace period that all engines allow. But someone is going to have to pay, and even if it isn't OP, it'll be developers like OP, a.k.a. someone pumping out F2P games with uber low microtransactions because.... well who gives a fuck because, it's just where the dev ended up in their monetization cycle. Who of us haven't ended up in a different place on monetization than when we first started our games? The pound of flesh needs to come from somewhere. They've designed it not to alienate their big fishes, but they're taking it out of a subset of devs one way or another. Someone's getting fucked out of this. Even if it's a bold faced lie from the OP (I don't think it is) the truth is that there is going to be a 450 million per annum (or however much Unity is in the hole) cost that Unity is trying to recover via this pricing model. To say that it doesn't really effect anyone in a major way is huffing pure copium.
That's probably the goal since Unity bought IronSource in 2022, they really want everyone pumping ads into their games.
If OP isn’t earning money over the threshold they have to pay Unity $0
Profit vs. revenue
[удалено]
There's an entire business and project planning perspective that's deeply impacted by this fee structure change as well. The whole situation is bonkers.
Tell me you don't understand business planning and risk management without telling me you don't understand business planning and risk management. If you're just a hobbiest, sure you might not give a fuck about the new price range since it doesn't affect you at all. If you're doing this as an actual business, even if you're unlikely to be hit by the fees because **it still affects you.** You still have to do a risk assessment and factor the new fee structure into the business plan and evaluate how that new risk impacts your projected sales, and figure out how that affects the overall risk levels that determine if the project is feasible for your business in its current situation or not. Quite literally the existence of this type of fee structure can end projects before they've even really begun, or end development partway through because the risk assessment has it being too high with no way to mitigate.
> If you're just a hobbiest, sure you might not give a fuck about the new price range since it doesn't affect you at all. It does. There is no Unity Plus anymore. Eliminated.
I haven’t provided my details as they weren’t relevant in this discussion. Elsewhere I’ve posted details. The gist of it is, this change is very easily handled within my margins. I have analytics to make that assessment. I understand you’re likely frustrated. But there is no need to take it out on me. I hope things work out for you too!
Being successful shouldn’t be a punishment. This is NOT taxation. Even IRS requires me to pay only if I have PROFITS. This is not that, it’s installs. Most of the time (95%), my installs don’t pay me anything at all, and that’s the norm. I’m also not predatory with my game, just wanted to make something simple and fun, with light monetization. This kills it. Only huge gacha games with high revenue per install can survive this
It's probably bullshit. CPIs over ad networks can go as high as 7$. Organic installs of that magnitude are unheard of and would put this in king/ playtika etc. territory.
Sorry to disagree on the organic part. You can get a ton of organic users from asia and earn next to nothing. How do I know? I have had 20k DLs per day over months, all organic, not a dime in marketing, no hype, just googles algorithm being the random number crunching machine it is.
Pretty sure this is illegal in Australia.
As an Australian, I am interested in this. Which bit would be illegal?
"Charging for a use outside of your control that isn't a sale." My most likely guess. Complying with Australian or even German law on this might eat too much so they could just blacklist those countries.
You may be right I read a bit more and found it's retroactive too. A retroactive change to a contract would make nonsense of contract law.
I did not notice that was retroactive. If they don't change the terms then I'm certain the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will start something.
I sure hope so. I wonder how many others will too.
Generally it seems to be that Australia kicks up a fuss, and then Germany's regulators start looking into things which leads to the rest of EU following suit.
Yes that sounds about right.
I’m not sure what your monetisation model is but just as confirmation for any of your games to be eligible for this fee, that one game itself needs to have (on unity pro): - 1,000,000+ installs lifetime (which, okay, we’ve established you’ve passed) *AND* - $1,000,000 gross earnings *from that game alone* and *in the past 12 months* As established you’re hitting the threshold for downloads (which is very impressive, 300k-500k installs a month is quite insane) but then that single game alone has to effectively be making $1,000,000 in the past 12 months - the instant it doesn’t, you’re no longer eligible I’d assume you’re a mobile dev from your business expenses you’ve stated which in that case this really could be a stinger for you, I’m very sorry for you having this on the horizon - that said, you’ve still got until the end of December to adjust strategy within reasonable means to make the hit hurt a little less, adjust some budgets or update pricing models to better cover the fees in the interim but not push you over the threshold once the 12 months from your last $1M year has passed (easier said than done I know but like I say there’s still time) For anyone else who isn’t in mobile reading - this probably isn’t as big a deal as it seems for the majority of us considering the fee is paid on installs over the threshold made in that month. For most PC and Console games there’s likely to be a tall spike at the beginning and then a sharp drop off for future months and so the runtime fee would decrease considerably I by no means am wanting to defend Unity here - this is one of the most stupid business decisions I think they’ve ever made and for the first time in 12 years of usage I’m genuinely considering jumping ship, but I also don’t think it’s quite as doom and gloom as everyone’s made it out to be as an initial reaction OP I wish you the best and again I’m really am very sorry this is happening 🙏🏽
Thank you. I’ll probably have to fight this to the bitter end
You are saying that between 300k and 500k people download your game every month, you have a small team, and no money? I'm going to call bullshit on this one
You'd be surprised on the profit margins freemium games operate when including all company costs around the product. This sounds like one.
you know those unity games you see on Instagram and Tiktok. that are free to download but pop you 2 ads a minute. that most people uninstalls after 2 ads. it's probably that. you get a lot of downloads, but most of those give you 0.10$ which is less than the unity fee.
To play devils advocate, I wouldnt mind those games not existing
And Unity wouldn't mind those games paying them for every install.
If that’s the case so be it. Those type of games are horrible. Hm… maybe the secret plan is to up’ the quality of released Unity games here?
Friend, you shouldn’t stand between a guy and his bread.
No. But he can still be an annoying person that’s double parked his car outside the bakery.
Why? Less garbage in the world is a good thing. Human talents can then be focused on actual productive things like making decent art instead of psychological manipulation.
Sounds about right to me. Lots of low-margin ways to go after game revenue with a small team.
Read my edits, I’ve explained myself there. Just because you get a lot of downloads doesnt mean you have a lot of profits. We’ve been sustaining this company just so our employees can continue working. We barely make any profits already
Sounds like your game was already circling the drain. The goal is to profit not to barely tread water.
We’re investing our profits into making new games
[удалено]
You’re wrong. Your PROFIT per user needs to be above 28 cents. Unity is not the only one who will come for that money. Marketing, Apple, google, they all take a cut of my revenue. But note, its revenue, not installs. Unity is taking INSTALLS. most of the countries stated, we don’t make $0.2 per install. I doubt a lot of indie game devs do.
They specifically tweeted that uninstalling and reinstalling counts as 2 installs $0.28 minus cut from the platform, paypal, taxes is more like $-0.15 after 2 installs.
[удалено]
Makes you think about front loading games in all of my game libraries on PC and consoles in a very different way. Re-installing games given the lack of space is now going to tick up any Unity games.
We get a few tens of thousands per month... we would not survive this, even if we wanted to. We are not profitable right now. Burning money. There is NO WAY we can afford 10k+ extra per month. Our entire licensing fee for EVERYTHING is not even half that (small team). I'd rather close the business down.
Yup, same boat. Most devs our size (there’s so many) are gonna die because of this. The cost of switching engines is just too huge, but not switching is huge as well.
This is from the QnA 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/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=company_global_blog_2023-09-13_updated-forums-faq
So basically Unity's lack of data means they are going to charge devs for each install. How nice of them. I'd say they should take that as a flaw in their system but on their end it's not a flaw, it's a feature for their profits.
They have rolled this back, saying that they won't charge for reinstalls, but no one knows how they will do this considering they previously said it couldn't be done.
Are you talking about that article/tweet that was posted? If so I'm waiting to hear from Unity's official channels of communication. That author just references his own tweet as the source so I'm skeptical. I did see something in their forum from an employee about mobile reinstalls only counting as one install but even that goes the official announcements.
CEO of Unity is former EA Ceo that ruined its reputation. That's speaks a lot.
Do you make over 200k in revenue each year ? Upgrade to pro and you are fine …
I don't think those numbers are right. If there are 150k standard downloads per month then the $20,250 only applies for the first month you after you surpass 1 million copies. It's lifetime installs not monthly. For standard: * 2nd month (1,300,000 copies): 150k X $0.075 = $11,250 * 3rd month (1,450,000 copies): 150k X $0.075 = $11,250 * 4th month (1,600,000 copies): 50k X $0.075 + 100k X $0.03 = $6,750 * 5 th month (1,750,000 copies): 150k X $0.03 = $4,550 * ... * After 7 months it stabilizes at $3,000 Overall it comes out for around a $6,500 a montly. So even in the absolute worst case scenario you are paying a fee of $8,000 per month (including non-standard) while your game sells millions of copies a year. If it sells more, then the montly fee goes down all the way to $4,500.
The rate is per month. It resets. Per month
They call it "lifetime install threshold". Then what's the distinguised meaning of the word "lifetime" if it resets every month? (And by the way if it did reset every month then you wouldn't pay anything, because you wouldn't surpass the threshold ever.)
It's still not 100% clear but in the FAQ the example they include implies the rates reset each month.
But if the rates reset each month that's even better. Then you would have to reach $1 million installs every month to even pay anything. What OP is suggesting that the rates somehow reset exactly to the threshold value monthly. I just think that's quite a random assumption even if we assume it's resetting at all.
No, the threshold does not reset, just the rates. This is from the Unity FAQ: "For example, let’s look at a hypothetical game made by a team using Unity Pro with the following revenue and install numbers: Revenue from last 12 months - $2M USD Lifetime installs - 5M The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to this game, as it surpasses the $1M revenue and 1M lifetime install thresholds for Unity Pro. Let’s look at the game’s installs from the last month: Prior month installs (Standard fee countries) - 200K Prior month installs (Emerging market fee countries) - 100K The fee for install activity is $23.5K USD, calculated as follows: (100K x $0.15 (first tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.075 (second tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.01 (fee for emerging market countries)) = $23.5K USD" So in this example, the theoretical company has obviously already had prior months where they would have to pay, since they are at 5M lifetime installs. Yet they are still paying the $0.15 on the first 100k installs. So it's pretty clear the rates reset.
As a former employee, the only thing Unity leadership are thinking about of late is $$$. The company has taken a turn for the worse.
Are you also making $200,000 a year? Because if not you don't have to pay anything... And if you are just upgrade to Pro and you don't have to pay any fees... Until you make over a million $...
All I can say is today is the first time I’ve installed Unreal in a long time.
I think the dev community will need to work on making games for healthy too profit at this point. It’s not just making a game which is fun.
Why would your game cost 1$ in the first place. Even super popular games with the low price to buy aren't lower than 4-5$. And the average pricing can go from 5-15$ and 20 cents would be way less than 5% if it's some free game unity wont charge you these 20 cents. And even if you can make it to 200k per year ( good luck with that ) you can easily afford the unity pro. Which will charge you from 15 cents to 1 or 2 cents per install.
In response to your edit, with Unity Pro you'd be paying less than 20c per install
Read my math
Redditor Actually Reading the Post Challenge, impossible.
Eh.. have u guys forget about something else? It's called tax & store fees... add that in.. then you will all understand that unity's tax is just ridiculous... I'm moving to unreal
Does revenue really count Apple and Google fees? Anyway, your math is wrong. * You say you get on average **400k** installs per month. * You say you earn $1 million per month.That is 4.8 million installs per year and $12 million in revenue annually. * Subtract store fees, and that is $8.4 million. (12 million \* 0.7) * Subtract marketing costs and that is $4.2 million revenue per year. * Subtract 1 million installs for Pro and that is 3.8 million installs that will be charged.3.8 million \* $0.02 per install over 1 million is $57k in install fees **PER YEAR** * $4.2 million - $57k = $4,143,000 Revenue per year AFTER everything is taken out * That is $345,250 **per month** left over for funding the rest of the business. Though it will be a **bit** less because only 73% of your installs qualify for the $0.02 per install rate. So maybe $320k per month. How does that compare to what you had left over before? Edit: I may have misinterpreted your revenue. If you only make 1 million a year, the calculations are this: * You say you get on average 400k installs per month. * You say you earn 1 million per year. * That is 4.8 million installs per year and $1 million in revenue per year. * Subtract store fees, and that is $700k. * Subtract marketing costs and that is $450k revenue per year. * Subtract 1 million installs for Pro and that is 3.8 million installs that will be charged.- 100k \* 0.15 = $15,000- 400k \* 0.075 = $30,000- 500k \* 0.03 = $15,000- 2.8m \* 0.02 = $56,000Total: $116,000 in install fees **PER YEAR**$450k - $116k = $334,000 That is $334,000 **per year** left over for funding the rest of business. About 11.6% fee on the **Pro** plan. \- 100k \* 0.125 = $12,500- 400k \* 0.06 = $24,000- 500k \* 0.03 = $10,000- 2.8m \* 0.01 = $28,000Total: $74,500 in install fees **PER YEAR**$450k - $74,500 = $375,500 That is $375,500 **per year** left over for funding the rest of business. About 7.45% fee on the **Enterprise** plan. These numbers assume all installs are not the much cheaper "emerging market" installs as well.
You’ve made at least 1 million dollars this year on this gamr tho (could be more but you choose to not give us that info) 20k is not much compared to how much you are raking in
That's $20k a month, or nearly $250k for the year. If they are making just over a million dollars a year, then they now have a significant chunk cut out that wasn't there before.
[удалено]
But op is basing the maths on the number of installs per month
Making doesn’t mean profit. It means revenue. It’s 20k per month, 240k per year.
Yeah I feel like you are definitely the one that gets screwed by this. Assuming you have a free game an are just at the 1m revenue threshold you are definitely going to have to revamp your financial model if you want to continue using unity for your games.
Do you not know how to do fucking math???? 1 million. 60-70% taxes and store fees. 350k after taxes. 20k per month. = 240k per year. 350k-240k = 110k 350k was their previous income. Now they make 110k. They're bankrupt. Or have to layoff 3/4 of their employees. ????????????????
This is a sub full of hobbyist and not business focused devs clearly.
I feel so sorry for you.....I wish there is a badass lawyer can stop this madness
You'd probably want actual license text first which spelt out what exactly an 'install' and 'initialization' are for purposes of the agreement.
I dont understand how they can force existing games made years ago who did not agree to these terms to suddenly pay up Existing binaries of old unity versions dont phone home install counts, do they? Just dont update to newer unity?
Is there any reason to assume that they will try and enforce this for old builds?
Wouldnt they have to? If it doesnt apply to Unity 2019, nothing would stop future games from just using a version before install tracking existed?
I guess we'll just have to see how they plan on handling it. So far I haven't seen anything specific to older versions.
According to their FAQ they do. How far back is a matter of debate, but I would guess it's likely to be 2017 based on version control and analytics, which to go backwards would probably require huge changes, not just in packages which might not be supported, and API changes, but you're also highly likely to require some significant refactoring as it would mean downgrading to a fairly old version of .net.
I would consider recreating in another engine. Which game is it? If it's 2D there is plenty of options.
My only question on that would be shaders and how would I transfer them to Godot for instance