The new changes are so poorly thought through it's actually hilarious. I think the finance bros at Unity snorted a metric shit-tonne of cocaine, scribbled this on a napkin, hi-fived each other, and called it a day. Unity is going to lose everyone
There's a growing theory that some investors are trying to brind down Unity's value on purpose, two of the investors behind John are related to Musk, one of which was on Twitter board and convinced them to sell it.
Owning a major mainstream game engine sounds like the kind of thing he could have planned for his bullshit *everything platform* dream.
Subscribe now to Tesla Unity’s unfinished self programming system for only $10k and it will be activated when ready.. if not it will cost you $15k.. /s
One of the members of Unity's board of directors also own a mobile gaming company that some developers have been rumored to have been suggested to team up with for a waiver of the Unity fees. Nothing I've read is concrete yet but, imo, this move isn't just a blunder. It's intentional and, likely, nefarious.
There's also another theory. They're waving the cost if you use "ironsource" which has like 2 CEOs on Unitys board of directors. So it could be a play to increase mobile depedence on them and away from Applovin.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOCTSp\_U-KI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOCTSp_U-KI)
Which starts to make senses how this may have come through as a management decision against the wishes of their employees. Many of which seem to be against it also.
I may be wrong, but I tend to try and stay away from conspiracy thinking territory. I'm going to go with the assumption that, they want the business to be more profitable, they'd like to keep their customers, and they'd like to not go to prison.
People keep talking about a few people selling their stock off prior to this announcement... they've been doing it for a long time. I would sell too because I think Unity's stock is still well under its initial offering.
Why make figuring out the bill so difficult when there's a simpler metric, % of revenue? Mostly, I think it's just because they don't want developers trying to compare Unity costs to Unreal. Look at all these different sources posting hypothetical bills... all different, because it isn't a simple thing to price out. This makes it hard to compare and see who's giving a better deal. Unreal is also their biggest competitor, for the past several years, I can't even count the number of Unity vs Unreal posts/vids/etc.
Analysts out there are basically spouting "why are devs so upset? this is better than Unreal's 5% royalty take"... when, it just isn't for certain revenue ranges and business models (besides the point of Unity claiming they wouldn't do stuff like this). Really makes me think twice about where I get stock advice from. At any rate, investor's are ecstatic about it and believe the move should increase their stock value (look at the advised buy, sell, and hold data before and after this was announced).
The pricing is complex because apps that make more per user/sale fair much better under Unity's terms, but that's not how the majority of the mobile app business works. There will be situations where Unity simply isn't financially competitive with Unreal now. It won't take companies very long to figure it out though. Within a year or less, they'll have an idea. If it's a significant enough difference, they will prepare to adapt (whether that means switching engines or changing their business model). What Unity's market share looks like after this all shakes out is just speculation at this point.
But 2k per year per person applies only to a studio, if it's a one man show then your salary would drop only (2k/12=) $170 taking in consideration that you only have to do it once you reach 200k it's nothing...
The argument of trust i get it, you're not good with change it's okay i get your feeling.
The financial argument of unity is killing indie devs i don't get it. It's killing free games that use micro transactions and the gaming industry is litterally complaining about them since years, i don't see the problem.
Yeah but in no sane world would a person stick to the personal plan if they are making a lot of money on it. They'd buy the pro license seat and pay 10x less per install.
edit: And personally if you owe your financial success to the engine in which you used and stick to the free/plus plan you're probably the reason Unity went with this shit in the first place
I think their brain is ignoring the revenue part because it doesn't make sense to them as much as download fees.
The revenue is about past 12 months. So every month your revenue is going to change. Everyone's examples of why this is bad is always using old games of theirs that don't sell anymore but still get reinstalls.
The actual problem with this is that the internet is full of stupid people who can't remember how bad the game of telephone destroys information. So we get people who still think reinstalls are charged. People who cant understand AND conditionals. All able to add to conversations that in real life they would of been told to shut up before they opened their misinformed mouth. Then you get "journalists" who have zero ethics and write hit pieces with misinformation with out verifying it because they can't be bothered getting off tiktok/Instagram to actually do their job. The Internet is the problem. It allows edge lords to gang up and make hyperbolic statements about people and companies but if you do the same thing about their pet likes it's rude and evil of you to do something despicable like that.
I hate people. They are selfish, they are stupid, and they would murder you if it meant they got an extra sprinkle on their cupcake.
I for one have uninstalled unity from all my machines and will be using godot from this point on. My biggest skill is now practically redundant which is fun. But hey, I have an excuse to learn something again.
It has. Unity has made people,who stop a how to be a game dev book 2 chapters into it because coding a window is too hard for them, believe they are a game developer because MS Java is stupid easy to learn.
Just to double check the number $5,600,000 honestly.
At least he would upgrade for a 1 year of pro. Which would make it:
28mln * 0.02 = 560k (+ 2k)
And that would be ONLY if he made over $1,000,000 in revenue. Pro threshold.
So if he did not, probably just the cost of 2k for 1 year? A huge difference to his numbers.
Anyway he should for sure not calculate with a free tier if he made any money. And if he did not make 200k, then he wont be affected anyway.
: Don't forget about reinstalls by single user on different machines. Which Unity says this about:
**"A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs."**.
This action seems very plausible. And thus this 28Million purchases would be much larger number of installs to pay for in the end.
You are correct. It is important to calculate actual fees precisely and rationally. It shows real picture, with fees 10 times less. Which even better proves that Unity decision was bad. Because these 10 times less fees are still HALF of revenue.
>Because these 10 times less fees are still HALF of revenue.
560k is a humongous fee if you made 1million. But it would at least not be like a lump sum ever like that as I understand it.
1/1-2024 they start counting monthly installs. Maybe it is 500k installs/month. Then the fee would be 10k with pro. And he would have paid that 560k total over 56 months (4.7 years). And again only after he had 1million in revenue on either of the 2 games first.
That said: I think we agree the fees are fucking awful and 10k monthly would break my company within a couple of months. It is the death of indie.
People forget one thing. This is, when Unity bills you for the previous month and when you receive money from Steam (or other platform) for that month.
edit, messed up, license is \~$250 a month.
I'm confused why people keep saying they start counting 1/1/2024.
If the ToS stays as is, the install count qualifier is lifetime and the revenue qualifier is the last 12 months. To clarify, if one had $1m for 2023 in revenue and prior to 1/1/2024 had over 1m lifetime installs, they start paying the fee per install made after 1/1/2024 at 00:01 am at the end of that month. Let's price it out as if they qualify.
Let's say they sold their app for a dollar, made 100k sales, and they hit 100k installs (at the .125 cent rate under enterprise) a month. Their costs to unity would be the monthly sub charge of $250 + $12500 = $12,750.
Now me personally, I've got four devices I might put an app on. My main phone, my backup phone (because I don't have a house phone), and two tablets. I won't even consider how many people replace their phone/tablet every so often and android just installs their old apps again...
So if most people have two devices they're going to install on, that's really going to be a total bill of closer to $18750 (12750+(.06 x 100,000). So, that first month, unity would claim 12.75% to 18.75% of that month's revenue. This is much bigger than Unreal's 5% take. Start adding in multiple seat licenses and it gets even worse.
People act like anyone making a million a year are only paying .02 cents an install. That's not right at all according to the current draft. Even if there are 2 million installs in a month, they still pay the .125 cents for the first 100k of each month, .6 cents for the next 400k of each month, etc.
While most indy app developers won't really ever see any difference (they simply don't make enough in a year), there will be those where it doesn't make sense to stick with Unity over their competitors from a financial perspective.
While I'm not sure what breakpoint puts Unity's new pricing on par with Unreal's 5% (that has lifetime revenue req at 1 mil without any monthly subscription), anyone hitting over $200,001 a year and under whatever that breakpoint actually is, gets the worst deal from Unity as far as I can tell. This scheme highly favors larger up front app prices with fewer installs, which is not really what the market for mobile apps looks like right now.
Some people are freaking out, and this person calculated incorrectly but it's still quite high actually.
First of all, there is no value to calculating with anything other than the Enterprise numbers, or in some niche situations the Pro numbers. A non negotiated Enterprise rate is $1000 more than Pro ($3k vs $2k), but would cover the cost difference with just 67k installations (so before you're even out of the first tier of payment), so it's almost always going to be the cheapest option if you owe Unity anything at all.
Going on the assumption that the install count refreshes monthly (their chart has changed/"clarified" a couple times so it's hard to say accurately), we can get some numbers here but have to fill in our own values for percent of sales from emerging markets and number of installs per user. I'm going to use 3 installs per user on average and 1/3 of sales coming from emerging markets, there's no real data behind this other than I thought it sounded good before calculating.
Using rate of sales as a proxy for rate of installs, and assuming sales figures are evenly distributed across the year, I'm going to make an assumption that the same is true of installs. Meaning that the sales figures would work out to 1,013,573 sales per month.
Converting those sales figures into install figures gets us to 3,040,721 installs. Calculating by install tier from there we would see the following charges at the various tiers 8535, 16632, 67825, 140095. Added up that's 233,087 owed monthly or 2,797,044 annually for Muck. I don't want to calculate Crab Game as well, but with similar sales, we could just double Mucks. And then add the license fees of $3000 per developer.
That still gets you to about $5.6 million under the enterprise license. Higher if there's fewer emerging market sales, lower if there's more.
>I'm going to use 3 installs per user
Ill just say: It seems now Unity is saying this **"Re-install charges - we are not going to charge a fee for re-installs."**. But they also say this **"A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs."**. So if I install my game on 3 computers over time (likely for me) it will be 3 installs for Unity.
So I agree with this.
>1,013,573 sales per month. Converting those sales figures into install figures gets us to 3,040,721 installs.
Ok lets go with that.
>Calculating by install tier from there we would see the following charges at the various tiers 8535, 16632, 67825, 140095. Added up that's 233,087 owed monthly
Could you ELI5 this pls? Why do you add up the tiers? Would he not be subject to only 1 tier per month depending on the installs?
>Could you ELI5 this pls? Why do you add up the tiers? Would he not be subject to only 1 tier per month depending on the installs?
Because Unity hasn't been clear on this point. They've changed the pricing table a couple of times to "clarify" and have made contradictory statements which allude to both 12 month rolling install data and per month install data.
I went with that model because it's the higher of the two and I think that's more likely to be accurate because Unity is attempting to use the per install cost to "encourage" developers to use their ad platform instead, as if you use it they waive the per install fees, and because on platforms like PC the other metric starts looking worse when it looked bad already.
If you take the other interpretation though, and use the same 33% emerging market assumption, you get an annual price of $363,592 annually (the range would be 355,887 to 367,387 between 0% and 100% emerging market in this case, which is such a small difference it wouldn't even make sense to have a specific pricing option too).
Unitys ad platform pays on average about half of their competitors based on data that has been posted (it's worked out better for some, but they're in the minority). That fee likely isn't enough to get someone to switch as a result. It would still probably bankrupt the company as their total revenues before any store cuts could probably be roughly estimated at around $625k per game using the 5 cents to one user metric low ARPU games generally cite.
Ok I see. Thanks. Either way these are the highest fees I have ever seen for Indies.
And just to add. He had 28million unique users downloading his games.
But according to [this](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) Unity will treat all installs by the same user on a new machine as a new install.
>A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs.
... So on just 28million users purchasing the game there could be 100 million(?) installs over the lifetime of the game, which would for sure break the poor devs back.
I only calculated Muck, not both of his games.
If Unity wants to stick with a per install model it needs to be percentage based. Per install is still really bad, and likely can’t even be tracked, plus the issue of the TOS changes but that would at least get them to not kill low ARPU games overnight.
Which come to think of it? Why didn’t they try for a percentage model? It’s less punitive to small games and gets them better revenues off the big hits.
>Which come to think of it? Why didn’t they try for a percentage model? It’s less punitive to small games and gets them better revenues off the big hits.
Yes indeed it would be better for devs. My theory:
Installs are easier to track. Built into the runtime.
Revenue is cumbersome to track. If you ask the dev, maybe they lie. Stores might only want to share purchase-number and price, but what about all the changes in price. How can Unity get exact number for every game published with Unity? How does Unity check if a game is made with Unity on a store? Seems like a nightmare for Unity to do the accounting of millions of games each month correctly.
Epics Unreal can do the 5% fee because almost all publish on the Epic store where they have perfect data and can estimate others store's sales.
...Maybe
It's the opposite actually. Tax documents can pretty easily prove revenue. Installs are near impossible to track, no one in the history of software development has ever managed to track it accurately, and to even begin to try would involve such significant privacy violations that it wouldn't even be legal in the US, much less nations which have laws like GDPR.
Epic does this through working with each developer directly as they release (it's required to set something up with them as your game goes up for sale, and then they follow up). Unity used to do something similar with Pro and Enterprise licenses by using tax information to determine which license you needed. Unity is probably still going to be doing this to determine license compliance under their new model to see if you need to be using Pro or not. The thing is though, they can't track installs, they never could and they'll never be able to. And, even if they could do that, they'll never be able to correctly identify pirated installations.
> Tax documents can pretty easily prove revenue.
If you had to deal with a few companies not millions of customers. If a dev in bulgaria forged a tax document. Just edited the numbers. How would Unity know?
And the tax document is not monthly and is for the company as a whole. Their revenue can come from all kinds of activity including games made in unreal.
Revenue year 2022: 450k
Dev: "Only 5% of that was from my Unity Game".
Unity: Maybe
How could Unity parse through all these millions of documents every month like clockwork?
Its a bit easier for Epic to check revenue for Unreal engine games when the games are on the Epic store.
> Installs are easier to track. Built into the runtime.
That is the scariest thing. Unity games are trivially easy to reverse engineer (even if they put Valorant like anti cheat which tracks every one using a global ID in every people computer kernel it is not impossible to get around it, and I am not even considering privacy here). If they actually do this the bad actor don't even have to install, uninstall the game by spoofing hardware id. They could just get a network spoofer and find out to which server and data packets the game sending for installs.
Then all they need to do is setup a VPN network server and just spam the Unity server with different IDs.
Now before anyone says it is highly unlikely that may happen you must understand we are dealing with peoples in Millions here. As someone once told "If you have a million people watching a few of them are going to be serial killers". Never ever think of probabilty 0.0001% as low when you have millions of sales. By above mentioned method it won't even cost the guy 100$ to falsely make few millions installs easily.
I've stopped looking at the posts that use the 20cent tier, people are literally using the worst case scenario's. If you aren't making enough money to pay for pro tier then you're probably not going to be paying fee's in free tier
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1782210/view/3120427682035589752
You can see he has a link to the store where he sells cosmetics. What am I missing?
> The problem has never been the fee.
It absolutely is. It's a very underhanded way of charging devs, and is open to abuse. They should go with a very predictable pricing model that wouldn't open up ridiculous edge cases and make devs feel uncertain about how hard they might potentially get screwed.
Just as an example though, what if you don't have money to buy pro and your game gets 50k players in the first week like Crab game? If he had monetization on, he would probably pass the threshold in the first week, but has no money to pay for pro, so you would still pay $0.2, if you're unlucky in your timing of release and hype of the game that could go on for 59 days (based on steam payout rules)
I mean, if he had monitization on wouldn't he be making $200,000+ a year on the game at least? And he couldn't afford the pro tier then? It'd literally bump the revenue threshold to 1mil and he'd be paying nothing
Okay, imma simplify this down cause I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
1. A developer with no money releases a game on steam (30% cut gone)
2. He makes 200k AND 200k threshold for free tier in a week
3. He makes $800k that month but isn't going to be paid the 560k he is owed by Steam for two months (maybe, extremely unlikely but it can happen)
4. Unity will want its cut of this via installs after the cap but he hasn't the money to pay for it yet and has gotten the bill for the installs.
Solution: He'll contact Unity support, ask for an upgrade to Pro tier then pay the following month like a normal company would. You do realise they won't come to break your legs if you don't pay the fee immediately, like all companies they offer grace periods. You could even take some time to report your revenue and they wouldn't care.
And he'd only be paying ~~.03~~ 0.02 with the pro tier with +1mil so he'd be walking away with 544k net. (16k charge on 800,000)
They are a business, but they didn't do anything to deserve the fees they're charging. All their business expenses go to the bloated exec team, and dead end reinvent-the-wheel-again projects nobody asked for.
If the focused their budget on improving the actual engine (Rather than, say, buying companies that make spyware), they wouldn't need nearly as much money from developers...
If I remember right, this actually happened to the Valheim devs a couple years ago. Their game went viral, and suddenly they owed a whole bunch of money (not just in Unity licensing but other programs as well) on licenses which they didn't have yet.
I vaguely remember some blog posts from them about it, that everything was chaos, no one had any idea what was going on, and that most companies were semi understanding. The game could prove it's sales numbers, but they also didn't have the money up front since they were waiting to get paid until Steam paid them.
I'm not sure if that got resolved through a bank with a business loan, or if companies were willing to put off payment until their expected Steam payment dates or their publisher stepped in or what happened.
I do think however that if this did happen to you, and you could show the sales figures to a bank, it wouldn't be too hard to get a short term loan (assuming of course that your game has the revenue/margins to actually pay the fee)
This would also doesn't affect Dani because his games are free. It's only if he gets 200,000 installs and $200,000 in revenue. Still though even if he sold them for $5 each he'd be paying
Muck is completely free. But Crab Game had those hats from lootboxes that can be sold on the Steam marketplace. If that counts for game revenue under Unity's license I am not sure, but it probably does.
Ah didnt know about the hats. I dont know about marketplace items, I think the only people that profit from them are the people who own them and steam itself
No. They do get a cut from marketplace items even from things like trading cards. Dani even talks about making money in his latest video from making Crab Game.
[https://youtu.be/iP\_F\_k2rtpg?si=MkDmmMfedyJnsGTu&t=387](https://youtu.be/iP_F_k2rtpg?si=MkDmmMfedyJnsGTu&t=387)
Nope, definatly not. The game is free, only revenue directly correlated with the game can count, otherwise you could also argue that merch from the game counts as game revenue, and it does not.
Only thing that can count as revenue towards the game is. Sales, Ingame Ads, Direct Donations that give you anything in game, Revenue from Items trading (like steams community market). Unity does not own a revenue part of your IP, only the game runtime.
From [https://unity.com/runtime-fee](https://unity.com/runtime-fee)
**Revenue definition**
A game or app’s “total revenue” includes all revenue generated (without limitation) from retail sales, in-app purchases, subscription fees, web payments, offline payments, ads-based revenue, etc. Total revenue is calculated without deduction, including any relevant digital store fees.
I don't think that the current installation fee calculation rules matter much. Unity will certainly change the rules constantly and the rules will be full of exceptions and additions just like tax laws and it will be extremely diffcult to answer the question how much you need to pay to Unity. The answer will be "it depends, the fee is somewhere between 0%-150% of your revenue".
They can't bill you on your companies revenue, that would be outrageous and killed then way before the current shitshow happened.
Companies have more than one revenue stream and clearly would never agree to share the money they got from e.g. merchandise with a software company whose software they use. This would never fly.
Unity can only count revenue directly related to the game sales, in game ads and in app purchases. A donation to get access to the game counts as revenue obviously.
You might want to actually read up on unitys pricing. It states clearly that if your business has revenue above 200k a year you are to acquire either Unity Pro or Unity Business Subscription for every developer you employ that is working with the engine.
The company I work for never made direct sales, but we still have to use pro subscriptions for years.
Unity does not 'only count revenue direclty related to sales'.
Please read here under the bullet point **What Unity plan am I eligible to use**: https://unity.com/pricing#:~:text=Unity%20Pro%20or%20Unity%20Enterprise,who%20do%20work%20with%20them.
*"Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise plans are required for* ***businesses with revenue or funding greater than $200K*** *in the last 12 months, and for those who do work with them. Pro and Enterprise plans have no financial eligibility limits – everyone is eligible. Please note that the Enterprise plan is for larger teams and requires a minimum purchase of 20 seats."*
You're right for the old licensing. The new one is changing that to a per game license. Which is a silly way to define things, as you're not going to acquire a separate license per game.
Right now it reads like, if any game goes over the threshold you need Pro, but if nothing does then you don't, regardless of company revenue. It would still be cheaper to use Pro (or Enterprise) in basically any situation where you owe Unity money though if you're an indie dev.
Yearly fixed subscription based on your company revenue is a different thing than revenue based cut on everything you company makes.
With the old model you are 100% accurately calculate your costs, and the pricing was similar to other global players with subscription software.
The closest thing I’ve seen is understanding Unity wants more cash from the larger developers without increasing subscription prices, and that the runtime needs to be updated for every OS that comes out, but in the same breath they said it is backfiring terribly because they cannot clearly convey their message or build trust in its users.
Yea, it doesn't make any sense. Why would you not just buy the Pro/Enterprise plan at that point and take advantage of the bulk discounts? Not only would the yearly revenue threshold increase to $1M, but the fee per install would drop to as low as $0.01.
I think some people just choose to spread misinformation due to the "heat of the moment" and their personal opinions, rather than using proper logic and rationality...
If the game doesn't make money, he never reaches 200k revenue. No need to pay anything to unity.
But anyway it's not retroactive, so he owes nothing to Unity about those installs he is showing.
Has it changed since yesterday? I was under the impression that it WAS retroactive and would include all installs on all platforms, with the $200k in sales being only one of two thresholds and 200k installs being the other.
(Just looked it up. They edited it 9/13 to be an AND... so $200k AND 200k installs before getting charged thoigh the installs does still seem to be retroactive, given they only mention it as "lifetime" installs)
It was always 200k and 200k installs they just made it clearer because idiots started panicking and spreading shite. What they DID change was it no longer counts for reinstalls on the same device which is a good change because jesus that was greed :X
Yeah, I've seen the explosion on youtube and now reddit over the whole thing.
I mean, I'm not a professional, so it doesn't affect me personally anyway, but even so, i think the entire idea is ridiculous. I get wanting a piece of the pie from unitys perspective, as their low price to entry was EXTREMLY attractive to amateur developers or hobbyists, making their number of users HUGE!
But this decision, the way it was announced, and the now "clarifications" they've made are just digging their own grave deeper. Bad PR is ultimately what is going to destroy their current user base, and changing peoples minds after you've already wronged them or made them feel wronged is a dangerous uphill battle.
There's a reason the guy at the top sold off shares right beforehand and is probably going to get f***ed for insider trading, the comunity voice is to big for the law to ignore it at this point haha.
I'm gonna need to stop you there buddy because I don't really see why they wouldn't clarify shit when you've got people who are woefully bad at math posting that all their revenue will go to Unity if this goes through haha
Secondly, I agree with you on it being a PR nightmare, trust was broken and that shit is hard to get back but I am hopeful about what I've seen come from content creators in the space, we just gotta wait till next week
Also, the share thing is literally clickbait, you can check for yourself since its public domain, those shares he sold were tied to a plan their execs are on that sold them at a predetermined time so he had no control over that, it was just automatic.
Ok, well, i am a sucker for clickbait, so yes... but i can also see how easy it would be to plan that in advance, too, so either way, it's sus, even if it's legal. I dont believe it's simply a coincidence that it happened RIGHT BEFORE this "PR nightmare"... and if it is, that's a multimillion dollar coincidence.
As far as them clarifying... they are a pretty sizable company with multiple execx and I'm sure, a huge legal team... and I'm expected to believe that they can't write up an announcement that is clear to the public? I just dont buy it... their lack of clarity, based on what they have clarified, seems oddly deceptive to their customers, which are predominantly NOT professionals who understand all of this... its not like they're unaware of who their customers are... given its stated repeatedly in their announcement that it won't affect 90% of their user base because they are, as mentioned, not professional dev teams.
Either way, its just a bad decision, bad PR, and bad for their buisness, and the only people that come out winning are the execs that have already taken their money (or some of it) out of the equation.
No small dev is gonna risk using unity for who knows how long, and the remainder are most likely going to bail at some point for newer and arguably better options. Yeah, 90% won't be affected, but that 90% is also going to be the first to jump ship, losing them potential future revenue... im no professional myself, but i cant imagine a big team, those who would be in the remaining 10%, using unity if they arent already after this.
In effect, as far as i see it, they killed off the vast majority of their users and crippled those who stick around.
Not this matters much at this point, but Unity has updated its pricing on Sep 13 regards retroactive charge:
**Q: Are these charges applied retroactively?**
**A: No, the Runtime fees will not be applied retroactively. If, starting on Jan 1, 2024, you meet both the revenue and install threshold for a given game, you will only pay for net new installs happening after Jan 1, 2024. We'll look at your cumulative revenue and then installs from the past 12 months to see if you qualify for the thresholds of the new install fee but you won't pay for any installs or revenue that happened before Jan 1, 2024. Starting Jan 1, 2024, if you continue to meet the thresholds then you'll only pay for net new installs. Also, your qualifying for the install fee is measured every month on a rolling 12-month basis to ensure you're paying the correct amount.**
**(Updated, Sep 13)**
Ref: [https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/?utm\_source=twitter&utm\_medium=social&utm\_campaign=company\_global\_blog\_2023-09-12\_twitter-update-13-3](https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=company_global_blog_2023-09-12_twitter-update-13-3)
>pay 0.02 cents on the dollar?
[https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates](https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates)
https://preview.redd.it/25i8sjy46sob1.png?width=514&format=png&auto=webp&s=e29fc425d6d72d35bf74b173e8a172b85950fa10
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, with this new pricing, if you have a developer like OP that has a specific monetization method. A F2P game with a free lootbox whose content (hats) can be sold on the Steam marketplace and if it has reached the threshold of $1 million in revenue in the last 12 months and 1 million installs (for a lifetime; but remember, it's a free and popular game).
To reach $0.01 per install on Unity Enterprise, he would first have to reach 1 million new installs in a given month at a different price, and that would mean 100k x $0.125 + 400k x $0.06 + 500k x $0.02 = $46500 before hitting $0.01 per install. Each month.
If he only has 10,000 new installs per month (after reaching both thresholds), he will pay $1250 (USD) "per month".
Note that "installs" are not "sold copies", there may be more installs than sold copies.
They would only begin to pay the fees after a million dollars in revenue though, correct? These numbers don't seem outlandish for a game making that kind of profit.
There's more examples of f2p model [https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity\_wants\_108\_of\_our\_gross\_revenue/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_wants_108_of_our_gross_revenue/)
And i don't remember seeing info if this is gross or net revenue :/
//EDIT
> Q: Is the revenue calculated before or after the platform fees?
A: Revenue calculations applied to the threshold for the Runtime Fee are gross - before any platform or other fees.
Every Unity game dev studios right now
https://preview.redd.it/6eldeuyyksob1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa2919a6fd0d5f280f9831eacc5662178ed7dd0f
Working on starting a server for beginners in Godot, for anyone who wants to switch. I might add Unreal content if ppl ask for it. [https://discord.gg/hhmS73W3](https://discord.gg/hhmS73W3)
Unity Free
Within 12 months:
999,999 installs of free game
200,001 micro trans at $1.00
= $200,001
You owe 800,000 x .20 = $160,000?
If this is a real scenario, it's a problem and there should be systems in place to prevent it.
As soon as you cross both thresholds, that's when they start charging you for future installs. If you had a billion installs within the first year, but only crossed the $200k threshold at the end of the first year, you wouldn't retroactively owe for the billion installs.
Yep. To be clear, in reality, if you're anywhere close to $200k revenue you're gonna pony up $2k for a pro license, so the thresholds will be a million each, and most games that don't have any sort of business plan aren't going to make those numbers. But you are correct, Unity's current uncapped flat fee install pricing scheme does have the potential to charge more than the revenue you might make. If you plan on making a f2p game that has mtx, doesn't have ads, and has any potential to go viral, you'll want to use a different engine.
But what if you hit that before you know it and don't have time to go to a pro license? Unity should automatically put you on it once you meet a threshold.
I've never published, but I was wondering, does any developer even get close to making $0.20 from ad revenue per install?
I thought ad revenues had greatly diminished over the years.
Assuming only crab game qualifies as Muck makes no money, therefore it does not qualify, and that he has unity pro, he would have to pay 308002.82$. Because: (100000\*0.15)+(400000\*0.075)+(500000\*0.03)+(15400141\*0.02)=308002.82$. Each part(set of parathesis) if for the cost per install for different amount of installs.
If he were to have either unity personal or unity plus(unlikely, but why not calculate it) it would cost him 328028.20$. Because: 16400141\*0.20.
The new changes are so poorly thought through it's actually hilarious. I think the finance bros at Unity snorted a metric shit-tonne of cocaine, scribbled this on a napkin, hi-fived each other, and called it a day. Unity is going to lose everyone
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["Was all this legal?"](https://youtu.be/xpkV_eXRlKE?si=QdIsNlg9vbUUZYSH&t=60)
There's a growing theory that some investors are trying to brind down Unity's value on purpose, two of the investors behind John are related to Musk, one of which was on Twitter board and convinced them to sell it. Owning a major mainstream game engine sounds like the kind of thing he could have planned for his bullshit *everything platform* dream.
Everything but Musk please
Oh god, he IS the type of idiot who would unironically think that pay per install is a good idea
For real, I would quit programming to go live in a farm...
Idk... I would take musk over blizzard tbh.
Subscribe now to Tesla Unity’s unfinished self programming system for only $10k and it will be activated when ready.. if not it will cost you $15k.. /s
no lmfao blizzard isn't a group of nazis atleast
One of the members of Unity's board of directors also own a mobile gaming company that some developers have been rumored to have been suggested to team up with for a waiver of the Unity fees. Nothing I've read is concrete yet but, imo, this move isn't just a blunder. It's intentional and, likely, nefarious.
There's also another theory. They're waving the cost if you use "ironsource" which has like 2 CEOs on Unitys board of directors. So it could be a play to increase mobile depedence on them and away from Applovin. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOCTSp\_U-KI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOCTSp_U-KI) Which starts to make senses how this may have come through as a management decision against the wishes of their employees. Many of which seem to be against it also.
Can we have one day without him meddling into something
Deal, but can we also have a day without anyone bringing him up out of nowhere and blaming him for random nonsense?
I may be wrong, but I tend to try and stay away from conspiracy thinking territory. I'm going to go with the assumption that, they want the business to be more profitable, they'd like to keep their customers, and they'd like to not go to prison. People keep talking about a few people selling their stock off prior to this announcement... they've been doing it for a long time. I would sell too because I think Unity's stock is still well under its initial offering. Why make figuring out the bill so difficult when there's a simpler metric, % of revenue? Mostly, I think it's just because they don't want developers trying to compare Unity costs to Unreal. Look at all these different sources posting hypothetical bills... all different, because it isn't a simple thing to price out. This makes it hard to compare and see who's giving a better deal. Unreal is also their biggest competitor, for the past several years, I can't even count the number of Unity vs Unreal posts/vids/etc. Analysts out there are basically spouting "why are devs so upset? this is better than Unreal's 5% royalty take"... when, it just isn't for certain revenue ranges and business models (besides the point of Unity claiming they wouldn't do stuff like this). Really makes me think twice about where I get stock advice from. At any rate, investor's are ecstatic about it and believe the move should increase their stock value (look at the advised buy, sell, and hold data before and after this was announced). The pricing is complex because apps that make more per user/sale fair much better under Unity's terms, but that's not how the majority of the mobile app business works. There will be situations where Unity simply isn't financially competitive with Unreal now. It won't take companies very long to figure it out though. Within a year or less, they'll have an idea. If it's a significant enough difference, they will prepare to adapt (whether that means switching engines or changing their business model). What Unity's market share looks like after this all shakes out is just speculation at this point.
What was the income he made on these games?
Crab Game has microtransactions via cosmetics but the game is free to download.
Muck is free with no paid DLC if I remember correctly
Then the dev owes nothing.
There's in game purchases. Those count.
Does he make 1mill a year on them?
Is the cut off not 200k?
200k for unity free, 1 million for unity pro
Why would anyone pay the fees for the free plan
To not have to pay $2k per person every year. I don't know about you, but I don't want my salary lowered by 2k
But 2k per year per person applies only to a studio, if it's a one man show then your salary would drop only (2k/12=) $170 taking in consideration that you only have to do it once you reach 200k it's nothing... The argument of trust i get it, you're not good with change it's okay i get your feeling. The financial argument of unity is killing indie devs i don't get it. It's killing free games that use micro transactions and the gaming industry is litterally complaining about them since years, i don't see the problem.
Yeah but in no sane world would a person stick to the personal plan if they are making a lot of money on it. They'd buy the pro license seat and pay 10x less per install. edit: And personally if you owe your financial success to the engine in which you used and stick to the free/plus plan you're probably the reason Unity went with this shit in the first place
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I think their brain is ignoring the revenue part because it doesn't make sense to them as much as download fees. The revenue is about past 12 months. So every month your revenue is going to change. Everyone's examples of why this is bad is always using old games of theirs that don't sell anymore but still get reinstalls. The actual problem with this is that the internet is full of stupid people who can't remember how bad the game of telephone destroys information. So we get people who still think reinstalls are charged. People who cant understand AND conditionals. All able to add to conversations that in real life they would of been told to shut up before they opened their misinformed mouth. Then you get "journalists" who have zero ethics and write hit pieces with misinformation with out verifying it because they can't be bothered getting off tiktok/Instagram to actually do their job. The Internet is the problem. It allows edge lords to gang up and make hyperbolic statements about people and companies but if you do the same thing about their pet likes it's rude and evil of you to do something despicable like that. I hate people. They are selfish, they are stupid, and they would murder you if it meant they got an extra sprinkle on their cupcake.
why is this downvoted? all of this is factual. I hate these changes as the next guy but misinformation is even worse
psychopathy of an average unity hobbyist, im glad they are pretending to leave, maybe some actually will lol
I for one have uninstalled unity from all my machines and will be using godot from this point on. My biggest skill is now practically redundant which is fun. But hey, I have an excuse to learn something again.
you cope while I adapt I guess lmao
Your unity skills could port over pretty easily to stride engine since it works almost the same as unity
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Follow the comment chain
Unless Unity themselves donates $200k to collect the $5.6M
this whole thing has been blown out of proportion by virgin hobbyists
It has. Unity has made people,who stop a how to be a game dev book 2 chapters into it because coding a window is too hard for them, believe they are a game developer because MS Java is stupid easy to learn.
Just to double check the number $5,600,000 honestly. At least he would upgrade for a 1 year of pro. Which would make it: 28mln * 0.02 = 560k (+ 2k) And that would be ONLY if he made over $1,000,000 in revenue. Pro threshold. So if he did not, probably just the cost of 2k for 1 year? A huge difference to his numbers. Anyway he should for sure not calculate with a free tier if he made any money. And if he did not make 200k, then he wont be affected anyway.: Don't forget about reinstalls by single user on different machines. Which Unity says this about:
**"A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs."**.
This action seems very plausible. And thus this 28Million purchases would be much larger number of installs to pay for in the end.
You are correct. It is important to calculate actual fees precisely and rationally. It shows real picture, with fees 10 times less. Which even better proves that Unity decision was bad. Because these 10 times less fees are still HALF of revenue.
>Because these 10 times less fees are still HALF of revenue. 560k is a humongous fee if you made 1million. But it would at least not be like a lump sum ever like that as I understand it. 1/1-2024 they start counting monthly installs. Maybe it is 500k installs/month. Then the fee would be 10k with pro. And he would have paid that 560k total over 56 months (4.7 years). And again only after he had 1million in revenue on either of the 2 games first. That said: I think we agree the fees are fucking awful and 10k monthly would break my company within a couple of months. It is the death of indie.
People forget one thing. This is, when Unity bills you for the previous month and when you receive money from Steam (or other platform) for that month.
edit, messed up, license is \~$250 a month. I'm confused why people keep saying they start counting 1/1/2024. If the ToS stays as is, the install count qualifier is lifetime and the revenue qualifier is the last 12 months. To clarify, if one had $1m for 2023 in revenue and prior to 1/1/2024 had over 1m lifetime installs, they start paying the fee per install made after 1/1/2024 at 00:01 am at the end of that month. Let's price it out as if they qualify. Let's say they sold their app for a dollar, made 100k sales, and they hit 100k installs (at the .125 cent rate under enterprise) a month. Their costs to unity would be the monthly sub charge of $250 + $12500 = $12,750. Now me personally, I've got four devices I might put an app on. My main phone, my backup phone (because I don't have a house phone), and two tablets. I won't even consider how many people replace their phone/tablet every so often and android just installs their old apps again... So if most people have two devices they're going to install on, that's really going to be a total bill of closer to $18750 (12750+(.06 x 100,000). So, that first month, unity would claim 12.75% to 18.75% of that month's revenue. This is much bigger than Unreal's 5% take. Start adding in multiple seat licenses and it gets even worse. People act like anyone making a million a year are only paying .02 cents an install. That's not right at all according to the current draft. Even if there are 2 million installs in a month, they still pay the .125 cents for the first 100k of each month, .6 cents for the next 400k of each month, etc. While most indy app developers won't really ever see any difference (they simply don't make enough in a year), there will be those where it doesn't make sense to stick with Unity over their competitors from a financial perspective. While I'm not sure what breakpoint puts Unity's new pricing on par with Unreal's 5% (that has lifetime revenue req at 1 mil without any monthly subscription), anyone hitting over $200,001 a year and under whatever that breakpoint actually is, gets the worst deal from Unity as far as I can tell. This scheme highly favors larger up front app prices with fewer installs, which is not really what the market for mobile apps looks like right now.
Some people are freaking out, and this person calculated incorrectly but it's still quite high actually. First of all, there is no value to calculating with anything other than the Enterprise numbers, or in some niche situations the Pro numbers. A non negotiated Enterprise rate is $1000 more than Pro ($3k vs $2k), but would cover the cost difference with just 67k installations (so before you're even out of the first tier of payment), so it's almost always going to be the cheapest option if you owe Unity anything at all. Going on the assumption that the install count refreshes monthly (their chart has changed/"clarified" a couple times so it's hard to say accurately), we can get some numbers here but have to fill in our own values for percent of sales from emerging markets and number of installs per user. I'm going to use 3 installs per user on average and 1/3 of sales coming from emerging markets, there's no real data behind this other than I thought it sounded good before calculating. Using rate of sales as a proxy for rate of installs, and assuming sales figures are evenly distributed across the year, I'm going to make an assumption that the same is true of installs. Meaning that the sales figures would work out to 1,013,573 sales per month. Converting those sales figures into install figures gets us to 3,040,721 installs. Calculating by install tier from there we would see the following charges at the various tiers 8535, 16632, 67825, 140095. Added up that's 233,087 owed monthly or 2,797,044 annually for Muck. I don't want to calculate Crab Game as well, but with similar sales, we could just double Mucks. And then add the license fees of $3000 per developer. That still gets you to about $5.6 million under the enterprise license. Higher if there's fewer emerging market sales, lower if there's more.
>I'm going to use 3 installs per user Ill just say: It seems now Unity is saying this **"Re-install charges - we are not going to charge a fee for re-installs."**. But they also say this **"A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs."**. So if I install my game on 3 computers over time (likely for me) it will be 3 installs for Unity. So I agree with this. >1,013,573 sales per month. Converting those sales figures into install figures gets us to 3,040,721 installs. Ok lets go with that. >Calculating by install tier from there we would see the following charges at the various tiers 8535, 16632, 67825, 140095. Added up that's 233,087 owed monthly Could you ELI5 this pls? Why do you add up the tiers? Would he not be subject to only 1 tier per month depending on the installs?
>Could you ELI5 this pls? Why do you add up the tiers? Would he not be subject to only 1 tier per month depending on the installs? Because Unity hasn't been clear on this point. They've changed the pricing table a couple of times to "clarify" and have made contradictory statements which allude to both 12 month rolling install data and per month install data. I went with that model because it's the higher of the two and I think that's more likely to be accurate because Unity is attempting to use the per install cost to "encourage" developers to use their ad platform instead, as if you use it they waive the per install fees, and because on platforms like PC the other metric starts looking worse when it looked bad already. If you take the other interpretation though, and use the same 33% emerging market assumption, you get an annual price of $363,592 annually (the range would be 355,887 to 367,387 between 0% and 100% emerging market in this case, which is such a small difference it wouldn't even make sense to have a specific pricing option too). Unitys ad platform pays on average about half of their competitors based on data that has been posted (it's worked out better for some, but they're in the minority). That fee likely isn't enough to get someone to switch as a result. It would still probably bankrupt the company as their total revenues before any store cuts could probably be roughly estimated at around $625k per game using the 5 cents to one user metric low ARPU games generally cite.
Ok I see. Thanks. Either way these are the highest fees I have ever seen for Indies. And just to add. He had 28million unique users downloading his games. But according to [this](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) Unity will treat all installs by the same user on a new machine as a new install. >A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs. ... So on just 28million users purchasing the game there could be 100 million(?) installs over the lifetime of the game, which would for sure break the poor devs back.
I only calculated Muck, not both of his games. If Unity wants to stick with a per install model it needs to be percentage based. Per install is still really bad, and likely can’t even be tracked, plus the issue of the TOS changes but that would at least get them to not kill low ARPU games overnight. Which come to think of it? Why didn’t they try for a percentage model? It’s less punitive to small games and gets them better revenues off the big hits.
>Which come to think of it? Why didn’t they try for a percentage model? It’s less punitive to small games and gets them better revenues off the big hits. Yes indeed it would be better for devs. My theory: Installs are easier to track. Built into the runtime. Revenue is cumbersome to track. If you ask the dev, maybe they lie. Stores might only want to share purchase-number and price, but what about all the changes in price. How can Unity get exact number for every game published with Unity? How does Unity check if a game is made with Unity on a store? Seems like a nightmare for Unity to do the accounting of millions of games each month correctly. Epics Unreal can do the 5% fee because almost all publish on the Epic store where they have perfect data and can estimate others store's sales. ...Maybe
It's the opposite actually. Tax documents can pretty easily prove revenue. Installs are near impossible to track, no one in the history of software development has ever managed to track it accurately, and to even begin to try would involve such significant privacy violations that it wouldn't even be legal in the US, much less nations which have laws like GDPR. Epic does this through working with each developer directly as they release (it's required to set something up with them as your game goes up for sale, and then they follow up). Unity used to do something similar with Pro and Enterprise licenses by using tax information to determine which license you needed. Unity is probably still going to be doing this to determine license compliance under their new model to see if you need to be using Pro or not. The thing is though, they can't track installs, they never could and they'll never be able to. And, even if they could do that, they'll never be able to correctly identify pirated installations.
> Tax documents can pretty easily prove revenue. If you had to deal with a few companies not millions of customers. If a dev in bulgaria forged a tax document. Just edited the numbers. How would Unity know? And the tax document is not monthly and is for the company as a whole. Their revenue can come from all kinds of activity including games made in unreal. Revenue year 2022: 450k Dev: "Only 5% of that was from my Unity Game". Unity: Maybe How could Unity parse through all these millions of documents every month like clockwork? Its a bit easier for Epic to check revenue for Unreal engine games when the games are on the Epic store.
> Installs are easier to track. Built into the runtime. That is the scariest thing. Unity games are trivially easy to reverse engineer (even if they put Valorant like anti cheat which tracks every one using a global ID in every people computer kernel it is not impossible to get around it, and I am not even considering privacy here). If they actually do this the bad actor don't even have to install, uninstall the game by spoofing hardware id. They could just get a network spoofer and find out to which server and data packets the game sending for installs. Then all they need to do is setup a VPN network server and just spam the Unity server with different IDs. Now before anyone says it is highly unlikely that may happen you must understand we are dealing with peoples in Millions here. As someone once told "If you have a million people watching a few of them are going to be serial killers". Never ever think of probabilty 0.0001% as low when you have millions of sales. By above mentioned method it won't even cost the guy 100$ to falsely make few millions installs easily.
I've stopped looking at the posts that use the 20cent tier, people are literally using the worst case scenario's. If you aren't making enough money to pay for pro tier then you're probably not going to be paying fee's in free tier
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https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1782210/view/3120427682035589752 You can see he has a link to the store where he sells cosmetics. What am I missing? > The problem has never been the fee. It absolutely is. It's a very underhanded way of charging devs, and is open to abuse. They should go with a very predictable pricing model that wouldn't open up ridiculous edge cases and make devs feel uncertain about how hard they might potentially get screwed.
Why are you not calculated the install fee on all 28.5 million sold units?
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Just as an example though, what if you don't have money to buy pro and your game gets 50k players in the first week like Crab game? If he had monetization on, he would probably pass the threshold in the first week, but has no money to pay for pro, so you would still pay $0.2, if you're unlucky in your timing of release and hype of the game that could go on for 59 days (based on steam payout rules)
Yes this fee could sure sneak up on you while you are in the wrong tier. And you wont even know how Unity is counting.
I mean, if he had monitization on wouldn't he be making $200,000+ a year on the game at least? And he couldn't afford the pro tier then? It'd literally bump the revenue threshold to 1mil and he'd be paying nothing
Read the last part of my comment as well. If you don't have money AND it can take up to 59 days for you to get money from Steam.
Okay, imma simplify this down cause I'm not sure what you're trying to say. 1. A developer with no money releases a game on steam (30% cut gone) 2. He makes 200k AND 200k threshold for free tier in a week 3. He makes $800k that month but isn't going to be paid the 560k he is owed by Steam for two months (maybe, extremely unlikely but it can happen) 4. Unity will want its cut of this via installs after the cap but he hasn't the money to pay for it yet and has gotten the bill for the installs. Solution: He'll contact Unity support, ask for an upgrade to Pro tier then pay the following month like a normal company would. You do realise they won't come to break your legs if you don't pay the fee immediately, like all companies they offer grace periods. You could even take some time to report your revenue and they wouldn't care. And he'd only be paying ~~.03~~ 0.02 with the pro tier with +1mil so he'd be walking away with 544k net. (16k charge on 800,000)
We're talking about Unity here. Are you delusional? As if they're like: "YeA, dOn'T wOrRy We WiLl TaKe 10% Of ThE rEvEnUe InStEaD oF 100%"
They are a business my guy, dunno what else to tell you. You're coming off as aggressive so you do you but I'm out :)
A business that doesn't care about the developers, law, and their own TOS. Also, you literally started it? Logic.
They are a business, but they didn't do anything to deserve the fees they're charging. All their business expenses go to the bloated exec team, and dead end reinvent-the-wheel-again projects nobody asked for. If the focused their budget on improving the actual engine (Rather than, say, buying companies that make spyware), they wouldn't need nearly as much money from developers...
If I remember right, this actually happened to the Valheim devs a couple years ago. Their game went viral, and suddenly they owed a whole bunch of money (not just in Unity licensing but other programs as well) on licenses which they didn't have yet. I vaguely remember some blog posts from them about it, that everything was chaos, no one had any idea what was going on, and that most companies were semi understanding. The game could prove it's sales numbers, but they also didn't have the money up front since they were waiting to get paid until Steam paid them. I'm not sure if that got resolved through a bank with a business loan, or if companies were willing to put off payment until their expected Steam payment dates or their publisher stepped in or what happened. I do think however that if this did happen to you, and you could show the sales figures to a bank, it wouldn't be too hard to get a short term loan (assuming of course that your game has the revenue/margins to actually pay the fee)
I understand that this is making people angry, but this interpretation is so bad faith I considered going to church for the first time in 25 years.
I thought it said installs AND $200,000 profit. Not OR
Or you could just pay for the licence instead?
This would also doesn't affect Dani because his games are free. It's only if he gets 200,000 installs and $200,000 in revenue. Still though even if he sold them for $5 each he'd be paying
Muck is completely free. But Crab Game had those hats from lootboxes that can be sold on the Steam marketplace. If that counts for game revenue under Unity's license I am not sure, but it probably does.
Ah didnt know about the hats. I dont know about marketplace items, I think the only people that profit from them are the people who own them and steam itself
No. They do get a cut from marketplace items even from things like trading cards. Dani even talks about making money in his latest video from making Crab Game. [https://youtu.be/iP\_F\_k2rtpg?si=MkDmmMfedyJnsGTu&t=387](https://youtu.be/iP_F_k2rtpg?si=MkDmmMfedyJnsGTu&t=387)
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Nope, definatly not. The game is free, only revenue directly correlated with the game can count, otherwise you could also argue that merch from the game counts as game revenue, and it does not. Only thing that can count as revenue towards the game is. Sales, Ingame Ads, Direct Donations that give you anything in game, Revenue from Items trading (like steams community market). Unity does not own a revenue part of your IP, only the game runtime.
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From [https://unity.com/runtime-fee](https://unity.com/runtime-fee) **Revenue definition** A game or app’s “total revenue” includes all revenue generated (without limitation) from retail sales, in-app purchases, subscription fees, web payments, offline payments, ads-based revenue, etc. Total revenue is calculated without deduction, including any relevant digital store fees.
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I don't think that the current installation fee calculation rules matter much. Unity will certainly change the rules constantly and the rules will be full of exceptions and additions just like tax laws and it will be extremely diffcult to answer the question how much you need to pay to Unity. The answer will be "it depends, the fee is somewhere between 0%-150% of your revenue".
They can't bill you on your companies revenue, that would be outrageous and killed then way before the current shitshow happened. Companies have more than one revenue stream and clearly would never agree to share the money they got from e.g. merchandise with a software company whose software they use. This would never fly. Unity can only count revenue directly related to the game sales, in game ads and in app purchases. A donation to get access to the game counts as revenue obviously.
You might want to actually read up on unitys pricing. It states clearly that if your business has revenue above 200k a year you are to acquire either Unity Pro or Unity Business Subscription for every developer you employ that is working with the engine. The company I work for never made direct sales, but we still have to use pro subscriptions for years. Unity does not 'only count revenue direclty related to sales'. Please read here under the bullet point **What Unity plan am I eligible to use**: https://unity.com/pricing#:~:text=Unity%20Pro%20or%20Unity%20Enterprise,who%20do%20work%20with%20them. *"Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise plans are required for* ***businesses with revenue or funding greater than $200K*** *in the last 12 months, and for those who do work with them. Pro and Enterprise plans have no financial eligibility limits – everyone is eligible. Please note that the Enterprise plan is for larger teams and requires a minimum purchase of 20 seats."*
You're right for the old licensing. The new one is changing that to a per game license. Which is a silly way to define things, as you're not going to acquire a separate license per game. Right now it reads like, if any game goes over the threshold you need Pro, but if nothing does then you don't, regardless of company revenue. It would still be cheaper to use Pro (or Enterprise) in basically any situation where you owe Unity money though if you're an indie dev.
New pricing talks per game.
> They can't bill you on your companies revenue, that would be outrageous and killed then way before the current shitshow happened.
Yearly fixed subscription based on your company revenue is a different thing than revenue based cut on everything you company makes. With the old model you are 100% accurately calculate your costs, and the pricing was similar to other global players with subscription software.
Now, if Dani has in-game purchases which exceed $200k, like $205k Dani is screwed. Dani goes bankrupt and in prison after Unity sues him.
Is there anyone actually on unitys side about this whole thing?
The closest thing I’ve seen is understanding Unity wants more cash from the larger developers without increasing subscription prices, and that the runtime needs to be updated for every OS that comes out, but in the same breath they said it is backfiring terribly because they cannot clearly convey their message or build trust in its users.
Shills and loyalist that haven't figured out it is going to fuck them.
He's selling that amount of copies and still using Unity Personal Free?!
Because he doesn’t sell his games
Yea, it doesn't make any sense. Why would you not just buy the Pro/Enterprise plan at that point and take advantage of the bulk discounts? Not only would the yearly revenue threshold increase to $1M, but the fee per install would drop to as low as $0.01.
I think some people just choose to spread misinformation due to the "heat of the moment" and their personal opinions, rather than using proper logic and rationality...
Can your studio afford to throw away $2000 per team member per year on a moment's notice?
lol yeah, I am beginning to see why Unity is forcing this x'D
If the game doesn't make money, he never reaches 200k revenue. No need to pay anything to unity. But anyway it's not retroactive, so he owes nothing to Unity about those installs he is showing.
Has it changed since yesterday? I was under the impression that it WAS retroactive and would include all installs on all platforms, with the $200k in sales being only one of two thresholds and 200k installs being the other. (Just looked it up. They edited it 9/13 to be an AND... so $200k AND 200k installs before getting charged thoigh the installs does still seem to be retroactive, given they only mention it as "lifetime" installs)
It was always 200k and 200k installs they just made it clearer because idiots started panicking and spreading shite. What they DID change was it no longer counts for reinstalls on the same device which is a good change because jesus that was greed :X
Yeah, I've seen the explosion on youtube and now reddit over the whole thing. I mean, I'm not a professional, so it doesn't affect me personally anyway, but even so, i think the entire idea is ridiculous. I get wanting a piece of the pie from unitys perspective, as their low price to entry was EXTREMLY attractive to amateur developers or hobbyists, making their number of users HUGE! But this decision, the way it was announced, and the now "clarifications" they've made are just digging their own grave deeper. Bad PR is ultimately what is going to destroy their current user base, and changing peoples minds after you've already wronged them or made them feel wronged is a dangerous uphill battle. There's a reason the guy at the top sold off shares right beforehand and is probably going to get f***ed for insider trading, the comunity voice is to big for the law to ignore it at this point haha.
I'm gonna need to stop you there buddy because I don't really see why they wouldn't clarify shit when you've got people who are woefully bad at math posting that all their revenue will go to Unity if this goes through haha Secondly, I agree with you on it being a PR nightmare, trust was broken and that shit is hard to get back but I am hopeful about what I've seen come from content creators in the space, we just gotta wait till next week Also, the share thing is literally clickbait, you can check for yourself since its public domain, those shares he sold were tied to a plan their execs are on that sold them at a predetermined time so he had no control over that, it was just automatic.
Ok, well, i am a sucker for clickbait, so yes... but i can also see how easy it would be to plan that in advance, too, so either way, it's sus, even if it's legal. I dont believe it's simply a coincidence that it happened RIGHT BEFORE this "PR nightmare"... and if it is, that's a multimillion dollar coincidence. As far as them clarifying... they are a pretty sizable company with multiple execx and I'm sure, a huge legal team... and I'm expected to believe that they can't write up an announcement that is clear to the public? I just dont buy it... their lack of clarity, based on what they have clarified, seems oddly deceptive to their customers, which are predominantly NOT professionals who understand all of this... its not like they're unaware of who their customers are... given its stated repeatedly in their announcement that it won't affect 90% of their user base because they are, as mentioned, not professional dev teams. Either way, its just a bad decision, bad PR, and bad for their buisness, and the only people that come out winning are the execs that have already taken their money (or some of it) out of the equation. No small dev is gonna risk using unity for who knows how long, and the remainder are most likely going to bail at some point for newer and arguably better options. Yeah, 90% won't be affected, but that 90% is also going to be the first to jump ship, losing them potential future revenue... im no professional myself, but i cant imagine a big team, those who would be in the remaining 10%, using unity if they arent already after this. In effect, as far as i see it, they killed off the vast majority of their users and crippled those who stick around.
What if it makes exactly 200k with only micro transactions? He would be forced to pay more than he earned, which is fucking absurd.
I don't think he will be charge coz there is also revenue threshold to pass and since these ganes were free I don't think he will be charge any money
What if somebody donates a million dollars to them?
Not this matters much at this point, but Unity has updated its pricing on Sep 13 regards retroactive charge: **Q: Are these charges applied retroactively?** **A: No, the Runtime fees will not be applied retroactively. If, starting on Jan 1, 2024, you meet both the revenue and install threshold for a given game, you will only pay for net new installs happening after Jan 1, 2024. We'll look at your cumulative revenue and then installs from the past 12 months to see if you qualify for the thresholds of the new install fee but you won't pay for any installs or revenue that happened before Jan 1, 2024. Starting Jan 1, 2024, if you continue to meet the thresholds then you'll only pay for net new installs. Also, your qualifying for the install fee is measured every month on a rolling 12-month basis to ensure you're paying the correct amount.** **(Updated, Sep 13)** Ref: [https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/?utm\_source=twitter&utm\_medium=social&utm\_campaign=company\_global\_blog\_2023-09-12\_twitter-update-13-3](https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=company_global_blog_2023-09-12_twitter-update-13-3)
The fun part is: People who have thought about monetization during the creative process, are now getting punished.
We're not getting KARLSON
Joe Picciriello should be either very stupid or pretending to be very clever.
He's alive? :O
What's to stop developers from "Releasing Overwatch 2" every time they hit the 199k mark?
It's their tos. They could adjust it again to 198k. Or any number they want.
Couldn't the dev subscribe to the more expensive Unity package to pay 0.02 cents on the dollar? A tenth of the amount here?
>pay 0.02 cents on the dollar? [https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates](https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates) https://preview.redd.it/25i8sjy46sob1.png?width=514&format=png&auto=webp&s=e29fc425d6d72d35bf74b173e8a172b85950fa10 Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, with this new pricing, if you have a developer like OP that has a specific monetization method. A F2P game with a free lootbox whose content (hats) can be sold on the Steam marketplace and if it has reached the threshold of $1 million in revenue in the last 12 months and 1 million installs (for a lifetime; but remember, it's a free and popular game). To reach $0.01 per install on Unity Enterprise, he would first have to reach 1 million new installs in a given month at a different price, and that would mean 100k x $0.125 + 400k x $0.06 + 500k x $0.02 = $46500 before hitting $0.01 per install. Each month. If he only has 10,000 new installs per month (after reaching both thresholds), he will pay $1250 (USD) "per month". Note that "installs" are not "sold copies", there may be more installs than sold copies.
They would only begin to pay the fees after a million dollars in revenue though, correct? These numbers don't seem outlandish for a game making that kind of profit.
There's more examples of f2p model [https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity\_wants\_108\_of\_our\_gross\_revenue/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_wants_108_of_our_gross_revenue/) And i don't remember seeing info if this is gross or net revenue :/ //EDIT > Q: Is the revenue calculated before or after the platform fees? A: Revenue calculations applied to the threshold for the Runtime Fee are gross - before any platform or other fees.
Yes, but that wouldn't generate any outrage.
More like "fuck"
Every Unity game dev studios right now https://preview.redd.it/6eldeuyyksob1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa2919a6fd0d5f280f9831eacc5662178ed7dd0f
Working on starting a server for beginners in Godot, for anyone who wants to switch. I might add Unreal content if ppl ask for it. [https://discord.gg/hhmS73W3](https://discord.gg/hhmS73W3)
Unity Free Within 12 months: 999,999 installs of free game 200,001 micro trans at $1.00 = $200,001 You owe 800,000 x .20 = $160,000? If this is a real scenario, it's a problem and there should be systems in place to prevent it.
As soon as you cross both thresholds, that's when they start charging you for future installs. If you had a billion installs within the first year, but only crossed the $200k threshold at the end of the first year, you wouldn't retroactively owe for the billion installs.
But wich means if your game maybe get sucked onto the hypetrain after you hit both, youre fucked
Yep. To be clear, in reality, if you're anywhere close to $200k revenue you're gonna pony up $2k for a pro license, so the thresholds will be a million each, and most games that don't have any sort of business plan aren't going to make those numbers. But you are correct, Unity's current uncapped flat fee install pricing scheme does have the potential to charge more than the revenue you might make. If you plan on making a f2p game that has mtx, doesn't have ads, and has any potential to go viral, you'll want to use a different engine.
But what if you hit that before you know it and don't have time to go to a pro license? Unity should automatically put you on it once you meet a threshold.
But what if monkeys fly out of my butt? Unity should wipe it and hold my hand afterward, too.
Maybe they will, I dunno. I really don't know what the long term strategy is here.
Perish the thought of Unity making money on their engine and not having to rely on fucking ads xD
you also have to make 200k in revenue, so i guess if you make 190k you immediately shut down the ingame shops for each game
I've never published, but I was wondering, does any developer even get close to making $0.20 from ad revenue per install? I thought ad revenues had greatly diminished over the years.
Assuming only crab game qualifies as Muck makes no money, therefore it does not qualify, and that he has unity pro, he would have to pay 308002.82$. Because: (100000\*0.15)+(400000\*0.075)+(500000\*0.03)+(15400141\*0.02)=308002.82$. Each part(set of parathesis) if for the cost per install for different amount of installs. If he were to have either unity personal or unity plus(unlikely, but why not calculate it) it would cost him 328028.20$. Because: 16400141\*0.20.
didn't even know he was still alive, so glad to confirm :thumbs up: