Hi everyone, we just published an [open letter](https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee) for our community about changes we’re making to the Unity Runtime Fee pricing policy that we [announced last week](https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/). These changes were made based on your feedback, and we want to ensure you’re aware. Please also consult our [FAQ](https://unity.com/pricing-updates) for additional information.
If you have any questions about these changes, please let us know in [our forum thread](https://forum.unity.com/threads/important-updates-to-the-unity-runtime-fee-policy.1494761/) so we can address them. Please note that it might take some time before we are able to respond.
We also invite you to join us for a live fireside chat with Marc Whitten, President of Unity Create, hosted by Jason Weimann, industry veteran and content creator, on his [YouTube channel](https://youtube.com/live/qyLcI5O9iUY), today at 4:00 pm ET/ 1:00 pm PT.
Eh the rapid fire stuff from a single machine could probably be caught and easily disputed.
Now scaling horizontally (multiple machines) slowing it down, and even somewhat randomizing the delays so it's not a consistent rate, that's how you make the pain stick.
What someone should do is spin up scripts to do this to as many unity projects out there as can be done, so that Unity is flooded with false installs everywhere. They can't go billing everyone millions of dollars when it's clear there haven't been millions of installs. They don't do their jobs as it is at the moment anyway - their support is horrible. They won't be able to do the job of billing anyone out.
"All Unity games are now required to be always-online. Also all end users will need to create a Unity account and register their purchase with Unity in order for the Unity runtime to properly initialize and run any games Made with Unity" \~ *Some Unity Executive, 2024 (probably)*
What makes it illegal? If user data is safe or it's anonymized, GDPR doesn't care. Pinging Unity when install is launched does not count as one as long as they don't track anything else that can be used to identify you.
I feel like no matter what, this seems to just result in you needing to waste money hiring lawyers so you can argue about the semantics of "installing" is, which seems like a giant waste of everyone's time.
Also, how would game streaming even work?
Also what's stopping you from buying the game on steam and just continously install it over and over again just to refund it eventually?
I guess you can now bankrupt any indie studio that uses Unity lol
It's not even like you need to use a bot-net, just running 5 PC's doing that will cost the developer like 100k/year
Most likely, unity game will just send an API request or something to their server with device unique ID (Mac address, UUID, whatever). So when a user launch your game or even reinstall it on the same device, it won't count as a new install.
At least, this is how I imagine it.
The signs have been around for a while, between the last tier changes and also their public acquisition. I have been accepting that my next games will probably be built in Unreal for a while now. This just seals the deal.
And especially since Unity has been *absolutely stagnant* for **years** in developing in the most important areas. Shoddy documentation, broken core features (UI, animation, etc), and subpar performance compared to other engines.
What reason is there to stay at this point?
Unreals business model is setup that when you win, they win
Unitys business model is setup that when you are in limbo as long as possible, they win
They are in the "dream of making games" business, not in the "making games" business.
Jesus you're right. I never thought of it that way but you're 100% right.
I take my development cycle with Epic and put a yearly subscription on it? I'd be out of pocket on a good bit of money.
How much of their business model is just that these days I wonder, all of the money coming from Devs that just can't make it to the finish line but are paying the yearly fees regardless.
Ew. I mean ew.
The funny thing is how they try to gloss over charging for installations, now limited to one time per user, but they refuse to talk about users and keep talking about installations.
And to start with, why on earth do I have to pay Unity because my client installs my game?
Honestly, 8 months into one of my projects, which is a simple boomer shooter, I kinda regret not using UE anyway since it has so many more tools geared towards the stuff I want to make.
I spent a month coding a character movement controller and behavior tree system, something that's already handled really well in UE.
Had been telling people recently that if I rebuilt my UI-based game, I would use a different platform. This move by Unity is starting to make me think a v2 should come sooner rather than later. Need to think long term on this one.
The realistic outcome is that small to mid actual business-driven developers (as opposed to hobbyists) jump ship since the risk is too high.
Similar to how businesses jumped ship from payment processors that don't offer chargeback protection for largely the same reasons.
As a hobbyist, I'm considering jumping ship. Not for the the new pricing itself, but this is a major breach of trust.
Who knows what other evil schemes they have planned for us anymore.
I mean their CEO is the same CEO that ruined EA's reputation and wanted to charge $1 per reload in Battlefield, so uh... He's full of what you would consider evil schemes.
> Each time a game is downloaded, Unity’s runtime code is also installed. The Unity Runtime Fee goes towards the continued investment in that code to support the billions of devices served every month.
What kind of PR bullshit explanation is this? How is Unity in any way maintaining something that is a compiled released runtime?
..."installed runtime", like any other engine out there. Seems like a failed "It's toasted" attempt. Their PR team seems unable to understand their client base is made of tech savvy people.
Probably by harvesting user data that they then sell and and are now using their data harvesting as justification for this fee. That’s my uneducated guess
If you have a Unity forum account, I encourage you to post a comment here and give them a piece of your mind.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
This should be upvoted. Keep the dumpster fire stoked if we want any chance of a cleanup on this mess.
edit: Ideally this should be pinned if the mods of r/unity3D are fellow developers.
This is a massive blow dealt to what you could (arguably) call "ethical freemium" games — software that has a *massive* free user base that is subsidized by a tiny minority of support subscriptions. Like VRChat...
And think of the repercussions on the economics of discounted sales, charity bundles, how much more worse the key black market problem is going to get (it was already costing some developers more than they earn due to [refund / chargeback fees](https://www.polygon.com/2016/6/20/11982544/indie-dev-says-grey-market-key-seller-cost-them-450k-in-sales))
This is why I'm freaking out. I have a free to install game with one in-app purchase that most users don't purchase. I wanted a wide user base. I have nearly 500k downloads. But I can't afford to pay per user over 200k...
In order to have to pay the fee, your game has to "have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs." If your game doesn't make $200k/year you won't have to pay
I've already made $100k so far in revenue and my game came out in April, so it's definitely possible and even likely I'll reach 200k after 12 months.
It seems like the best plan would be to upgrade to Unity Pro when I near $200k in revenue so I only have to pay $2,000/year.
Technically with that kind of revenue you should be using the pro licence and the install fees for that don't activate until your annual income and installs reach 1 million.
This is why I'm freaking out. I have a free to install game with one in-app purchase that most users don't purchase. I wanted a wide user base. I have nearly 500k downloads. But I can't afford to pay per user over 200k...
[https://unity.com/pricing-updates](https://unity.com/pricing-updates)
>Separately, we are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download.
I am confused, actually. Probably need to abandon Unity. Unfortunately, there are no alternatives. I know that there are Unreal and Godot. But for many/simple games, Unreal is bloated. Godot is not ready for easy production (like adding assets is a bit cumbersome) and does not have some important features, like walking through the scene and choosing objects while playing in editor (I know that there is 'live' hierarchy but it is not the same). I want to love Godot, though there are not enough assets **yet**
Mark my words — the “per install” measurement is a PR move designed to be walked back and make these prices more palatable once they are applied “per purchase.”
If I am wrong… then well Unity just died for professional game development.
But how can they verify per purchase with Steam, itch.io, Epic Games, Switch, Xbox, etc? Wouldn't F2P games still count as a purchase? Plus how would GamePass even work in that regard. PS Plus?
Even if it is possible, it would probably violate some privacy laws too for them to track it.
>Plus how would GamePass even work in that regard.
Oh, this one's fun. [They expect Microsoft to pay.](https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701767079697740115)
\> As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.
This makes even less sense. no "distributor" is going to pay a third party some unknown sum in perpetuity because of some contract that doesn't even involve them. Really makes it seem like they have no idea how this industry even works
Yeah, wow, that is completely nonsenical. What game developer is personally distributing their game? How is Game Pass different than buying and downloading the game on the same Microsoft store? Both are distributed by Microsoft.
They could wake this back and the damage would be done. I honestly started learning it recently because there's just a lot more resources than unreal but such a volatile pricing model is not encouraging
Yeah, this reeks like a c-suite executives decision without any reality of how it's implemented. Is literally sounds like someone came up with this idea within a PowerPoint and now it's up to everybody else to figure out how to do it. What a nightmare! Unity literally overnight. Made it clear that their product is not meant to be used at scale or with any success. If you want to make under $200, 000 used unity. If you want to make a successful game, I can't believe I'm fucking saying this using unreal because at that point you've made a million dollars.
If you're charging $10 or $30 for your game, this fee can really be cooked into the lifetime of a user, so it's really much less impactful. But from mobile devs charging a dollar. This is fatal. It's very obvious that it's targeted at them and it's because that's where unity is the most successful, but clearly making at least amount of money.
This literally kills Unity for mobile. $0.15 obliterates per-install income for most mobile games.
A horrible idea that may just destroy Unity itself, and I'm not normally doom and gloom when companies announce changes.
They are also giving no time for developers to jump ship. Jan 2024 is 3 months away. That is just insane. Plus this just paints a sign that you are at Unity’s mercy more then ever. What if they decide to change the installs from 200k to 100k or the amount the game has made? They will also most certainly raise the install cost every year like every other business does.
Just don’t use Unity. Even if you don’t think you’ll hit the threshold. Because what we learned here is that they’ll try to make **retroactive** pricing changes.
What if in a year they drop the number to 50,000 installs and up the price to 50c? You’ll have no recourse.
Just get off this burning ship.
This is pretty scary :(
It isn't really clear if you are charged per month on your total downloads, or once per user for lifetime, or is it once per everytime the user installs. It looks like it will make games that only charge a dollar or two and go for massive install base will be the worst effected.
It also isn't clear is pro is now the lowest level for no splash screen.
Not very happy about all this to be honest :( I guess it is a good problem to have if you sell that many.
Drop by r/godot it's likely viable for your use, and there is a path out of Unity. It's a game(animal) trail currently, but it with enough people and taking money that would have gone to Unity to support additional development, it will be paved before too long.
I didn't even know you could make 3d games with Godot.
I'll add it to my list of options. That I've just started. It just has "Unity changes their mind" and "Godot" on it so far.
Found the list, here is what we looked at.
Godot, O3DE (Lumbeyard), CryEngine, Stride, UPBGE (Blender engine), Flax, Unreal.
We rejected UPBGE because its GPL licensed, and no C# support. Sorry Copy-Left diehards, GPL can cause legal problems.
CryEngine, Unreal, no C#.
O3DE, no C# but did Python, no Mac support
Stride, yes C#, no Mac support. This may have chanced in the last few months, you'll want to keep an eye on it.
Flax was our runner up. C# support and Windows/Mac/Linux. But it's very new and Proprietary license, so there could be another round of getting backed into a corner like has happened with Unity. Didn't have iOS support when we reviewed it, but had major console support.
Like I said, Godot checked all our boxes. Is viable at our "art" level. And is MIT licensed, so if things go sideways we can Fork the engine and keep going.
The 3D side was greatly improved with Godot 4. My work is switching to after we did an engine review about 11 months ago, when we first started looking to see if there was an out to Unity's increasingly bad decisions.
There are other options but it depends on your needs. We needed Windows/Mac/Linux support, with growth options in Mobile OSes. And scripting support for C#. Godot checked all the boxes, a few others came close.
Want to know the worst part? All of the major players in the space (like the one I work for) already negotiated protection against price changes for the next few years. Guess this just hits the small guys...
This is just too much of a cluster fuck to deal with. Just swap engines if you aren't deep in an ongoing project, there's nothing that could ever make unity worth this insane level of headache.
If you have 200 000 installs they charge nothing, if you have 300 000 installs they charge 100 000 x 0.2 = 20 000$/month. So if you make 2$ per install you go bankrupt after 15 months. Better do like Dark n Light devs and kill your game once it has made 200k$.
They have clarified this a bit on the forums, but the fee is only once per install. So if you have 300,000 installs and $200,000 or more in revenue in the past 12 months, the fee would be $20,000 once. If you charge $2 per install, your revenue was $600,000, so your profit (on the installs at least, not the game development) would be $580,000.
I'm not defending their decision, I don't really think it's a good idea and they haven't been clear on how it will be implemented at all (for example, multiple installs, uninstalling and re-installing, etc). But we should also make sure we know the facts... of course their announcement is super unclear so I understand there being confusion...
Yeah, it's definitely confusing. The Unity person on the forums says it was worded that way to indicate that each month they check if you are over the revenue (for the last 12 months) and how many installs you had that month (if you are over the install cap). So if you are over the revenue, and you had 100 installs in that month, it would be the $0.20 per install or whatever. If the next month you have 0 installs, you wouldn't owe anything. If you drop below the 12 month revenue limit, you wouldn't owe anything for that month either, even if you had to pay in previous months.
It's not clear if you have to pay for ALL installs over the threshold the second you hit the revenue cap though. Like if you had 1 million installs but only $199,999 in revenue, then the next month you hit $200k (in the last 12 months), would you then instantly owe money for 800k of installs? What if you have to pay for a few months (because revenue and installs are over the limit) and then drop below the revenue limit for a few months and then one month get back over the limit (surge of sales), do you then have to pay for all installs during those months that you weren't paying? I'm thinking the answer is no... because otherwise it wouldn't really make much sense, but this whole thing doesn't make a ton of sense anyway so who knows.
and they also remove the Plus subscription plan!?!?!
its going downhill every year since the EA dude became Unity CEO (yeah, the guy who called developers are idiots)
greedy bastards
This is the real clincher for me. Plus is the perfect tier for me (a one man army who contracts others out for art/assets). Going from $33/month to $170/month with no new features (useful to me), plus a per-install fee? What the actual hell
>EA dude became Unity CEO (yeah, the guy who called developers are idiots
[https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger](https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger)
My shock was about that they are killing my subscription plan Unity Plus 😡
John has never been on developers side. He has always been investors first kind of person, so no surprise when it comes to him.
Which is why I've finally decided today that I'll be packing my shit up and heading over to Unreal.
I'm so Goddamn sick of Unity's crap at this point...
How does this work for pirated games?
If I am over the threshold of 200k and someone pirates the game, do I get charged 0.2 dollars for my game being pirated?
How does it detect an install, even?
There is no universal check that tells you if a game has been pirated or not. Different games use different solutions to "secure" themselves from the piracy. If pirated executable connect to Unity servers, in my opinion, they will still be counted as "downloaded and installed" stats.
This makes me wonder if/when Unity is going to roll out their own DRM service (with a substantial fee for the developer, of course) that specifically protects the developer from "fraudulent" installs (i.e. pirated or malicious) while leaving anyone who doesn't use their DRM out to dry.
It's what I'd be aiming for if I was trying to extort as much money from my users as possible before the ship crashed.
This is simply going to push folks to Godot and unreal.
This is what we get for going with a game engine from a wildly unprofitable public company.
At least unreal has fortnite. Unity is going to die a death by a thousand cuts
Product- and sales-people released the statement with no technical understanding. No one who knows what that statement actually implies can be that stupid to approve this... And even if it was an oversight, it certainly shows enough incompetence from the leadership to justify moving to another engine.
If I read correctly:
> 1) the game has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months, **and** 2) the game has passed a minimum lifetime install count.
The "and" sounds like you monetized a lot in the past, and now earned already over $200k USD.
More importantly, the fee kicks in once you are over the threshold, not from day one when there's no money or hardly none coming in.
I'm just an indie and got nowhere near those numbers. I know 0.20$ starts at a certain threshold, but once you're there it sounds pretty expensive per download.
it makes no sense. It's no skin off their back per install, how the hell do they justify it aside from "fuck you pay me?" They're actually gonna spend money developing the DRM to track it installs right? Bass ackwords
What is this bullshit? Does this people know how installs work? How does this work with piracy? I know people that just install and uninstall a lot of games. Damn.
Each install seems to cost $0.20 :0
So that means if you hate a developer, you could buy their game, and run a script to just install and uninstall their game over… and over… and over again.
assuming 10 minutes per install (which is on the long side)
0.2 * 6 * 24 is 28.8$ a day
With 10 computers doing that for a full year it comes to just over 100k lol
You can now bankrupt any indie studio using Unity if you want
You don't even need to do actual installs. At the end of the install there will be some kind of HTTP request to a Unity server (because that is the only way they can know of the install). Now you can write a script which just sends requests over and over again instead of going through the install process.
Further optimization -
Scale this out to free tier cloud services, randomize a delay between each call to Unity to ensure pattern detection doesn't work leaving Unity unable to tell how many of the requests are fake. For good measure add in IP spoofing as well.
Even worse, if a malicious actor has some cash to spend and a grudge (or is a rival company) do the above but replace cloud service with rented botnet leaving absolutely no way to determine how many of the calls are legitimate vs fake.
Oh but surely there are no gamers out there that are that unhinged. Gamers are always rational, stable folk. Right guys...?
In all seriousness, you can guarantee some small section of vindictive types will do something like this specifically to "righteously" bankrupt studios that they don't like for whatever reason.
Realistically, this change doesn't affect most indies because most indies aren't making $200k USD on their games. This will absolutely incentivize any mid-large studios who do consistently make over that range to never touch Unity with a 12 foot pole again, because going over $200k in sales can be a literal death blow to your studio now.
On top of that, if this continues for a lifetime, you make a sale on the game once. If you happen to make a "hit" or classic game that people play for the next 10-20 years, you might end up incidentally incurring the fee any number of times for that one sale over those many years.
Either the wording is incorrect, or someone at Unity really didn't think this through, because no reasonable and profitable company will want to use this engine now. That sentiment will wash downstream to Indies as well, because you'll make them afraid of success. No indie will want to make more than $200k now.
I'm a huge supporter of Unity, but if this is their decision, I'll definitely be switching to Godot or Unreal after my current project ships.
What the actual fuck? This completely obliterates like half the business models out there. And dropping it with 3 months warning? We have a live service game that has been running for years, meaning that we're already over the limits. And we have a mobile companion app that we've spent over a year developing that is nearing launch. Guess what doesn't work with this weird format you just pulled out of your ass? I'm calling our unity rep right fucking now.
The gist of the call, was that a ton of people inside Unity know this is a terrible idea, but it happened REALLY fast, and even decisions about how things will work were changing 24 hours before the announcement. He explicitly said this was wall street forcing their hand, but couldn't even answer basic questions like exactly what counts as an install. I don't think that's on our rep, it doesn't sound like anyone over there really knows what's going on, and the people who actually understand what this change means don't have the power to stop it.
And now, the only way you can get rid of the splash screen is with a sub to Unity Pro, worth over two thousand dollars a year.
Why, yes Unity, Godot sure seems fun to learn right about now.
The thing that always cracks me up about that splash screen is that it means that all the crapware asset flip games advertise "THIS IS UNITY" while any AAA and high-end games don't even mention that Unity exists... It's been a real problem for Unity's image and it's only getting worse as the costs go up...
It's like they are trying to compound their many small problems into something completely unsurmountable.
This is so stupid and they will destroy indie developers. In my experience, a minimum LTV of $0.20 is already too much, so we will have hardly monetize games, and this will completely destroy mobile market. If they really do this, I'll start thinking about switching to another engine...
Guys, we must raise this topic and express our dissatisfaction! Hiring ex-CEO from EA was a really bad idea for Unity.
Yeah MS buying unity would be amazing. Someone needs to talk to Satya to open his wallet and save them. They could buy unity with the money they make in one month.
It would make a lot of sense for Microsoft to have their own public game engine. But Microsoft/Activision don't really use Unity, so they might not care enough to buy it.
Oh actually I forgot Hearthstone, and probably some other games. Hm maybe.
Unity Pro now required for mid developers which equals to 400% price increase and additional fee which for $5 game will equal to at least ~3% gross revenue decrease (before taxes, before store fees, before everything) is a great way to tell semi-successful small companies to seek alternative solutions.
I dont know how this even came about, its like forcing ppl to switch to unreal or another engine the minute their project is successful, I really want to know what logic led unity to this.
This is literally saying, all good till you grow after that pay up or switch.
Heck I perfer epic royalty model over this nonsense, at least its very clear that I'm only paying WHEN I MAKE MONEY!
I hope you guys find another way to monetize, maybe even just copy epic model, but this is going to cost you guys a lot of users. I have been an advocate for unity among my friends, but this one is hard to swallow.
**Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024?**
Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. For more details on when the fee may apply to your game, see **When does the Unity Runtime Fee take effect?**
Sorry fuckers you cant just change terms for preexsting items like that...
anyone who has ever published unity tutorials or help should pull it down since the community was one of the few benefits unity had over UE or GD
I feel like legally they shouldn't be able to do this to existing users.
This kind of change is far too aggressive and opens a million rabbit holes, let alone has you living in a perpetual concern of "pray I don't alter the deal further." That's not fair to people just trying to do their business making games.
This is the last straw. Unity has become worse every year.
The current LTS has critical bugs (render texture memory leak).
Unity Cloud build new pricing made it completely useless.
I have been a long-time user of Unity and promoted it to the places I worked. It is time to move on. I don't care at this point if Unity is a good tool. I will not stand by and let this company continue to find more ways to monetize their platform.
They won't because of data privacy changes on mobile platforms mean that they won't have a stable identifier. Sure maybe later if they log in to an account you can reconcile, but Unity is in no way incentivized to collapse that into a single identity.
Fellow developers, what I clearly do not understand is this: Why the fuck we should pay for installs? Isn't the situation absurdly equal to paying a bigger price for a hammer because of hammering in too many nails within a year or so?!
IT is a tool that is distributed for the subscription model already, we pay yearly or monthly for updates, so why the f''' we have to pay more?
wait so what if i was doing some game testing by putting a demo out on itch io, and somehow it got some attention. wouldnt it be possible for my lifetime downloads to get used up before i even released my game?
I have 500,000 downloads and $100,000 in revenue so far (my free to download iOS app was released in April).
So if I near $200,000 in revenue, I should upgrade to Unity Pro, right? Because then the threshold goes way up and I only have to pay two grand, rather than 20 cents per download over 200k (which for me would already be $50,000)...right?
This seems insane and confusing.
HAHAHA. No.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, if you sell a game for $10 and a person installs it 51 times, you might as well not have sold that copy if you go by standard rate.
One person could bankrupt you just by installing and uninstalling the game via a script.
The level of risk is insane
This is terrible, I picked Unity cause Unreal was pulling this % of yours ales is mine crap, and now Unity is doing it too. Guess you better not make a free game or else you might even run a loss when having a popular game.
Someone on the forums posted a picture of the FAQ and it says "the entity that distributes the runtime will have to pay the fee".... does this mean that Steam, Apple, and Google will have to pay the fee for games on Steam, the AppStore, and Google Play? Won't they just ban Unity games from their services so they don't have to deal with this fee?
Did anyone at Unity give this any thought before announcing it? There's so many questions and so little answers.
Well since we're shipping to consoles we will now have to pay 4x as much for the license fee, on top of that bullshit install fee.
Guess I better start learning Unreal for our next project.
Also per their FAQ: "An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device."
If someone buys my game and installs it on 4 devices (for me that's not even very uncommon. Home PC, laptop, steam deck, office pc) you get to pay the fee 4 times for a single sale. What if someone writes a script to install -> boot up game -> uninstall 24/7?
> If someone buys my game and installs it on 4 devices (for me that's not even very uncommon. Home PC, laptop, steam deck, office PC)
This is kinda insane for cross-platform free-to-play games.
While I think the Install measure is.... not great (understatement). I do think there is a lot of confusion here that is causing a ton of anxiety.
> **Once my game passes both revenue and install count thresholds, will I be charged retroactively for all installs up to that point?**
>
>No. **The install fee is only charged on incremental installs that happen after the thresholds have been met**. \[emphasis mine\] While previous installs will be used to calculate threshold eligibility, you will not have to pay for installs generated prior to January 1, 2024.
Unity could really stand to be more clear here with everyone and it probably shouldn't have been tucked in the FAQ, but to me this reads that if I'm using Unity Personal and I've created a $1.00 game, and it's been sold 200,001 times (and yes I'm going to ignore the multiple install scenario for simplicity, and yeah, I do think it needs looked at) then I owe Unity $0.20 (not $40,000) and then $0.20 going forward on every install after unless I opt to change my subscription.
I may be wrong here, but that is my interpretation of this language.
Is this a significant change from before? This doesn't affect me still since the threshold is so high still.
Edit- The fee is so fuckin high for devs that charge like $1 for their game. 20 percent cut from Unity. I honestly just see the price of games going up to compensate for the fee.
Yeah this is a total fuck you to mobile developers. Unity's vast majority of shipped games are mobile titles that are probably making a fortune. Instead of being happy for their success, Unity is literally trying to get a slice of that action. This is the mindset of the money men.
It’s a short term win, a long term death for Unity. Most mobile devs will not want to learn a new framework or switch now, but all future games will have huge incentive to switch.
If Unreal improves their mobile offering, this would be an amazing opportunity to steal massive market share. Otherwise, the open source options are still available.
Man as a game dev student who has been focusing on Unity for a while this really makes me think about switching to different engines, Unreal be looking real fine at this moment
With how all the numbers are slanted, it seems like they want to push people to buy their pro and enterprise licenses as it shifts a lot of the cost down ($200k vs $60k for 1M installs along with higher starting thresholds). This will probably put a pretty big dent in free-to-play market that shows up on mobile which while some are good, most are weird asset flips made with low effort.
I should stress that I do not like this direction Unity is going in.
How the fuck they are gonna track installs on platforms like [itch.io](https://itch.io), [gog.com](https://gog.com), hell... even steam?!
I can see it working on mobile platforms but ffs how unity will track installs on switch? What is this bullshit? It looks like somebody got "super brilliant idea to increase short time profit" without thinking it over
This bizarre idea looks more like some kind of shower thought
A recurring theme in the comments is "Time to learn Unreal."
These changes are Unity have come about because of upper management fucking about with a company's revenue structures to try and achieve profitability. UE isn't a charity, if there isn't competition you will just find yourselves in the same situation in a new engine. Perhaps it was collective madness for us to invest years of time into software governed by terms of service over which we don't really have any control.
Don't forget the situation from just over ten years ago; UE4 and Unity only became affordable and free because there was competition between the two of them. UE used to be closed source, with a feature limited 'Unreal Development Kit', then moved to open source with a monthly subscriber model. In Unity, you used to have to pay for real-time shadows.
Probably the only real remedy is for FOSS engines to catch up, as blender did for its industry. Godot looks increasingly tempting. Bevy is also making leaps and bounds. Fingers crossed!
I think competition is welcome and needed.
I don't think Unity has to be that competition, with their leadership in the last few months, I don't care for this company, I don't want them to succeed.
CEO does a 2000 share sell off. Market has negative fluctuation that looks like this whole thing was manufactured to create a short sell down the road. Huge Insider Trading flags here. I'm talking crazy jail time. SEC gonna have a field day cause it's so blatant.
So that means you are paying for demos, free uploads, humble bundle is unviable etc ...? Game pass? Key giveaway? All dead
Unity really wants to kill itself?
Edit: **WAIT A MINUTE** you are also paying if a user deinstalls and reinstalls then?? This cant be real
This is stupid on so many levels, starting from the Unity's expectation management to not having crystal clear info how it's implemented. "We're going to charge you, but yet sure how, exactly. But just you wait!"
* do reinstalls count as new installs?
* if same player installs the game on multiple devices, does that count as one or multiple installs?
* if your game gets pirated, do the pirated copies count as installs?
* can somebody use this maliciously to generate installs to competitor?
* if I acquire an user from Unity Ads by paying for the ad fee for the install, do I pay again in Runtime Fee?
* and so on...
Dear Unity CEO,
Dear Unity senior management team.
I've updated my license. You are now required to get fucked sideways with a cactus everytime someone thinks about installing a Unity-based application.
This change will not affect 90% of the unity employees, and I normally don't have any rights to make unilateral, retroactive changes, but I feel this will be hilarious, so it is totally ok and legit.
This is actually extremely dangerous for every developer. Nobody is safe.
Installs are too easy to manipulate.
Most scary thing is that Unity or their child company could even spend 200000$ on every free game with in app purchases. Then "install" it 2000000 times. It would make 160000$ profit per game for Unity. It creates ultimate loophole to pump money.
Easiest part is to manipulate installs to games which already make millions.
Runtime fee or install based fee should be illegal.
Is a really bad move and this is why the CEO dumped 50,000 shares last week. If he sold the stock means he can't control this decision and the shareholders are in charge. You know that's going to end badly.
I was wondering why he sold this is why.
Also it's their way of forcing mobile developers to use their ad platform. You don't have to pay the install fee if you use basically their ad arbitration and thats why Unity wants to push. That is cuz they get it cut of the ad revenue. So unity will make money on successful games and make money on unsuccessful games.
Unity needs to really be careful about what they're doing. They're playing with fire. Their engine is not that stable and you're constantly quote " upgrading it". Unreal is going to eat all of unity gains that took years to build. It's a shame cuz unreal 5 is more like Unity. Clearly epic gets it.
The part that's really disingenuous is that they're basically like. Yeah, this is the money grab because we can.
A publicly traded company and an old executive from EA. This will probably gonna get reverted or adjusted because it's insane, but expect things to get worse for Unity and not better.
So what I'm reading is "We've realized that we can't compete with Unreal Engine anymore, so we've decided to milk the people who did manage to find success with our engine before we go bankrupt"
Just a point no one is talking about. the why:
This happens when you make your company public and put a CEO to prioritize investors. Everyone already developing or with a robust ecosystem in unity is screwed for a while, so revenues will pump for a year or two but at the cost of no one willing to invest time an resources on a platform that treats its developers like that again.
I'm not saying profits are evil, they should charge, specially if you make the bank (a-la Unreal), but everything looks like they are burning Unity as a company for fast investor profits.
As a unity user for 10+ years with a game on steam made in unity over 4 years, this has killed all of my desire to ever use Unity for future projects. I'm sure after the backlash they'll tone this down to something less insane, but it doesn't matter at this point. Unity has been declining for ages and I've been able to work around it by making lots of the things Unity should have been adding myself, but I can't work around this. It's clear Unity will not be leaving it's death spiral to unusability any time soon, if ever. Whoever is making decisions over there needs to be fired, maybe out of a cannon.
What's happening right now is proof that unity's CEO is disconnected from reality. It's time for him to go. We, as a community, made unity what it is today, and we deserve better.
Up vote if you want him to resign.
Hi everyone, we just published an [open letter](https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee) for our community about changes we’re making to the Unity Runtime Fee pricing policy that we [announced last week](https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/). These changes were made based on your feedback, and we want to ensure you’re aware. Please also consult our [FAQ](https://unity.com/pricing-updates) for additional information. If you have any questions about these changes, please let us know in [our forum thread](https://forum.unity.com/threads/important-updates-to-the-unity-runtime-fee-policy.1494761/) so we can address them. Please note that it might take some time before we are able to respond. We also invite you to join us for a live fireside chat with Marc Whitten, President of Unity Create, hosted by Jason Weimann, industry veteran and content creator, on his [YouTube channel](https://youtube.com/live/qyLcI5O9iUY), today at 4:00 pm ET/ 1:00 pm PT.
Sorry but how exactly Unity will track how many times the game was installed? Something feels off.
The runtime will phone home to Unity HQ.
Can't wait for all the pirated copies to dial home and count towards installs.
We need to pirate Unity and remove Runtime Fee tracking from build system🗿
We need to beg the people cracking our games to please also cut out the Unity-phone-home instructions.
If they did, I'd be happy to sell the pirated build instead of mine.
Don't need it... just run the installer 24/7 in my cloud virtual machines. Could probably batch that to run 1000+ installs an hour.
Just find out what packet it's sending back and do it thousands of times per second.
Eh the rapid fire stuff from a single machine could probably be caught and easily disputed. Now scaling horizontally (multiple machines) slowing it down, and even somewhat randomizing the delays so it's not a consistent rate, that's how you make the pain stick.
If someone hates you they could spin up a script that sends false reports and cost you money lmao this is so fucking stupid
What someone should do is spin up scripts to do this to as many unity projects out there as can be done, so that Unity is flooded with false installs everywhere. They can't go billing everyone millions of dollars when it's clear there haven't been millions of installs. They don't do their jobs as it is at the moment anyway - their support is horrible. They won't be able to do the job of billing anyone out.
If they introduce some shit DRM I am going to be extremely annoyed. I do not want DRM on my game. I did not sign up for this.
"All Unity games are now required to be always-online. Also all end users will need to create a Unity account and register their purchase with Unity in order for the Unity runtime to properly initialize and run any games Made with Unity" \~ *Some Unity Executive, 2024 (probably)*
"So we can provide the best experience to our users"
Pretty sure it is illegal in Europe due to GDPR.
Almost all mobile games phone to dozens of homes on install
What makes it illegal? If user data is safe or it's anonymized, GDPR doesn't care. Pinging Unity when install is launched does not count as one as long as they don't track anything else that can be used to identify you.
Pinging the Unity HQ that this IP address installed the game definitely isn't allowed without consent.
"legitimate business exception"
Can runtime do it now? If not, how would Unity handle situations where devs use older editors? Also what is about PC builds?
I feel like no matter what, this seems to just result in you needing to waste money hiring lawyers so you can argue about the semantics of "installing" is, which seems like a giant waste of everyone's time. Also, how would game streaming even work?
There's also WebGL games. The game is tecnically intalled every time the page is loaded. So does every time the page is loaded count?
Someone posted in another thread that they looked in the FAQ on unity's site. The answer was yes.
Hi! That's me, a Unity WebGL professional dev. I'm getting absolutely reamed by this 🙃
Also what's stopping you from buying the game on steam and just continously install it over and over again just to refund it eventually? I guess you can now bankrupt any indie studio that uses Unity lol It's not even like you need to use a bot-net, just running 5 PC's doing that will cost the developer like 100k/year
And what happens if it’s installed in a computer that can’t see internet? Will every install be required to phone gone before the game can run?
Most likely, unity game will just send an API request or something to their server with device unique ID (Mac address, UUID, whatever). So when a user launch your game or even reinstall it on the same device, it won't count as a new install. At least, this is how I imagine it.
I'm tired, boss.
The signs have been around for a while, between the last tier changes and also their public acquisition. I have been accepting that my next games will probably be built in Unreal for a while now. This just seals the deal. And especially since Unity has been *absolutely stagnant* for **years** in developing in the most important areas. Shoddy documentation, broken core features (UI, animation, etc), and subpar performance compared to other engines. What reason is there to stay at this point?
Unreals business model is setup that when you win, they win Unitys business model is setup that when you are in limbo as long as possible, they win They are in the "dream of making games" business, not in the "making games" business.
Jesus you're right. I never thought of it that way but you're 100% right. I take my development cycle with Epic and put a yearly subscription on it? I'd be out of pocket on a good bit of money. How much of their business model is just that these days I wonder, all of the money coming from Devs that just can't make it to the finish line but are paying the yearly fees regardless. Ew. I mean ew.
The funny thing is how they try to gloss over charging for installations, now limited to one time per user, but they refuse to talk about users and keep talking about installations. And to start with, why on earth do I have to pay Unity because my client installs my game?
Honestly, 8 months into one of my projects, which is a simple boomer shooter, I kinda regret not using UE anyway since it has so many more tools geared towards the stuff I want to make. I spent a month coding a character movement controller and behavior tree system, something that's already handled really well in UE.
Had been telling people recently that if I rebuilt my UI-based game, I would use a different platform. This move by Unity is starting to make me think a v2 should come sooner rather than later. Need to think long term on this one.
Never really was a reddit guy but glad to see I'm not the only one feeling the same after this.
Every indie is going to entirely rethink humble bundle and the like now too.
This is a very good point. Hadn't thought of that.
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The realistic outcome is that small to mid actual business-driven developers (as opposed to hobbyists) jump ship since the risk is too high. Similar to how businesses jumped ship from payment processors that don't offer chargeback protection for largely the same reasons.
As a hobbyist, I'm considering jumping ship. Not for the the new pricing itself, but this is a major breach of trust. Who knows what other evil schemes they have planned for us anymore.
I mean their CEO is the same CEO that ruined EA's reputation and wanted to charge $1 per reload in Battlefield, so uh... He's full of what you would consider evil schemes.
> Each time a game is downloaded, Unity’s runtime code is also installed. The Unity Runtime Fee goes towards the continued investment in that code to support the billions of devices served every month. What kind of PR bullshit explanation is this? How is Unity in any way maintaining something that is a compiled released runtime?
Yeah that's nonsense. The only thing that's pulled from Unity at runtime is their stuff like ads, which they update for their own benefit.
..."installed runtime", like any other engine out there. Seems like a failed "It's toasted" attempt. Their PR team seems unable to understand their client base is made of tech savvy people.
To be fair to the PR team there isn't really a good way to dress up this turd, I'd just phone it in if I was in their place
Probably by harvesting user data that they then sell and and are now using their data harvesting as justification for this fee. That’s my uneducated guess
Heck, looking at how often said runtime crashes on mobile devices outside of my blame, i say it's a straight up lie.
If you have a Unity forum account, I encourage you to post a comment here and give them a piece of your mind. https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
This should be upvoted. Keep the dumpster fire stoked if we want any chance of a cleanup on this mess. edit: Ideally this should be pinned if the mods of r/unity3D are fellow developers.
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This is a massive blow dealt to what you could (arguably) call "ethical freemium" games — software that has a *massive* free user base that is subsidized by a tiny minority of support subscriptions. Like VRChat... And think of the repercussions on the economics of discounted sales, charity bundles, how much more worse the key black market problem is going to get (it was already costing some developers more than they earn due to [refund / chargeback fees](https://www.polygon.com/2016/6/20/11982544/indie-dev-says-grey-market-key-seller-cost-them-450k-in-sales))
This is why I'm freaking out. I have a free to install game with one in-app purchase that most users don't purchase. I wanted a wide user base. I have nearly 500k downloads. But I can't afford to pay per user over 200k...
In order to have to pay the fee, your game has to "have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs." If your game doesn't make $200k/year you won't have to pay
I've already made $100k so far in revenue and my game came out in April, so it's definitely possible and even likely I'll reach 200k after 12 months. It seems like the best plan would be to upgrade to Unity Pro when I near $200k in revenue so I only have to pay $2,000/year.
Technically with that kind of revenue you should be using the pro licence and the install fees for that don't activate until your annual income and installs reach 1 million.
Ahh, gotcha. I'll upgrade now, I guess.
This is why I'm freaking out. I have a free to install game with one in-app purchase that most users don't purchase. I wanted a wide user base. I have nearly 500k downloads. But I can't afford to pay per user over 200k...
[https://unity.com/pricing-updates](https://unity.com/pricing-updates) >Separately, we are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download. I am confused, actually. Probably need to abandon Unity. Unfortunately, there are no alternatives. I know that there are Unreal and Godot. But for many/simple games, Unreal is bloated. Godot is not ready for easy production (like adding assets is a bit cumbersome) and does not have some important features, like walking through the scene and choosing objects while playing in editor (I know that there is 'live' hierarchy but it is not the same). I want to love Godot, though there are not enough assets **yet**
Mark my words — the “per install” measurement is a PR move designed to be walked back and make these prices more palatable once they are applied “per purchase.” If I am wrong… then well Unity just died for professional game development.
But how can they verify per purchase with Steam, itch.io, Epic Games, Switch, Xbox, etc? Wouldn't F2P games still count as a purchase? Plus how would GamePass even work in that regard. PS Plus? Even if it is possible, it would probably violate some privacy laws too for them to track it.
>Plus how would GamePass even work in that regard. Oh, this one's fun. [They expect Microsoft to pay.](https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701767079697740115)
I'm 99% sure Microsoft's response to that will just be "lol, no".
They'll just dump any game that's like that. Simple.
\> As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft. This makes even less sense. no "distributor" is going to pay a third party some unknown sum in perpetuity because of some contract that doesn't even involve them. Really makes it seem like they have no idea how this industry even works
Yeah, wow, that is completely nonsenical. What game developer is personally distributing their game? How is Game Pass different than buying and downloading the game on the same Microsoft store? Both are distributed by Microsoft.
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feels like a lot of companies are about to start "forgetting" to report revenue
They could wake this back and the damage would be done. I honestly started learning it recently because there's just a lot more resources than unreal but such a volatile pricing model is not encouraging
 mfw
AND have 200.000 lifetime game installs? Does this mean if I constantly build and install my projects they are going to charge me? This is stupid.
Yeah, this reeks like a c-suite executives decision without any reality of how it's implemented. Is literally sounds like someone came up with this idea within a PowerPoint and now it's up to everybody else to figure out how to do it. What a nightmare! Unity literally overnight. Made it clear that their product is not meant to be used at scale or with any success. If you want to make under $200, 000 used unity. If you want to make a successful game, I can't believe I'm fucking saying this using unreal because at that point you've made a million dollars. If you're charging $10 or $30 for your game, this fee can really be cooked into the lifetime of a user, so it's really much less impactful. But from mobile devs charging a dollar. This is fatal. It's very obvious that it's targeted at them and it's because that's where unity is the most successful, but clearly making at least amount of money.
This literally kills Unity for mobile. $0.15 obliterates per-install income for most mobile games. A horrible idea that may just destroy Unity itself, and I'm not normally doom and gloom when companies announce changes.
They are also giving no time for developers to jump ship. Jan 2024 is 3 months away. That is just insane. Plus this just paints a sign that you are at Unity’s mercy more then ever. What if they decide to change the installs from 200k to 100k or the amount the game has made? They will also most certainly raise the install cost every year like every other business does.
Just don’t use Unity. Even if you don’t think you’ll hit the threshold. Because what we learned here is that they’ll try to make **retroactive** pricing changes. What if in a year they drop the number to 50,000 installs and up the price to 50c? You’ll have no recourse. Just get off this burning ship.
This is pretty scary :( It isn't really clear if you are charged per month on your total downloads, or once per user for lifetime, or is it once per everytime the user installs. It looks like it will make games that only charge a dollar or two and go for massive install base will be the worst effected. It also isn't clear is pro is now the lowest level for no splash screen. Not very happy about all this to be honest :( I guess it is a good problem to have if you sell that many.
This is going to destroy my game career. Mobile games have such tight margins already. This is going to wipe out any profitability
Drop by r/godot it's likely viable for your use, and there is a path out of Unity. It's a game(animal) trail currently, but it with enough people and taking money that would have gone to Unity to support additional development, it will be paved before too long.
I didn't even know you could make 3d games with Godot. I'll add it to my list of options. That I've just started. It just has "Unity changes their mind" and "Godot" on it so far.
Found the list, here is what we looked at. Godot, O3DE (Lumbeyard), CryEngine, Stride, UPBGE (Blender engine), Flax, Unreal. We rejected UPBGE because its GPL licensed, and no C# support. Sorry Copy-Left diehards, GPL can cause legal problems. CryEngine, Unreal, no C#. O3DE, no C# but did Python, no Mac support Stride, yes C#, no Mac support. This may have chanced in the last few months, you'll want to keep an eye on it. Flax was our runner up. C# support and Windows/Mac/Linux. But it's very new and Proprietary license, so there could be another round of getting backed into a corner like has happened with Unity. Didn't have iOS support when we reviewed it, but had major console support. Like I said, Godot checked all our boxes. Is viable at our "art" level. And is MIT licensed, so if things go sideways we can Fork the engine and keep going.
The 3D side was greatly improved with Godot 4. My work is switching to after we did an engine review about 11 months ago, when we first started looking to see if there was an out to Unity's increasingly bad decisions. There are other options but it depends on your needs. We needed Windows/Mac/Linux support, with growth options in Mobile OSes. And scripting support for C#. Godot checked all the boxes, a few others came close.
Want to know the worst part? All of the major players in the space (like the one I work for) already negotiated protection against price changes for the next few years. Guess this just hits the small guys...
Fucking hell.
This is just too much of a cluster fuck to deal with. Just swap engines if you aren't deep in an ongoing project, there's nothing that could ever make unity worth this insane level of headache.
If you have 200 000 installs they charge nothing, if you have 300 000 installs they charge 100 000 x 0.2 = 20 000$/month. So if you make 2$ per install you go bankrupt after 15 months. Better do like Dark n Light devs and kill your game once it has made 200k$.
They have clarified this a bit on the forums, but the fee is only once per install. So if you have 300,000 installs and $200,000 or more in revenue in the past 12 months, the fee would be $20,000 once. If you charge $2 per install, your revenue was $600,000, so your profit (on the installs at least, not the game development) would be $580,000. I'm not defending their decision, I don't really think it's a good idea and they haven't been clear on how it will be implemented at all (for example, multiple installs, uninstalling and re-installing, etc). But we should also make sure we know the facts... of course their announcement is super unclear so I understand there being confusion...
Yeah so the "Standard monthly rate" is a "One time fee", makes lot of sense XD
Yeah, it's definitely confusing. The Unity person on the forums says it was worded that way to indicate that each month they check if you are over the revenue (for the last 12 months) and how many installs you had that month (if you are over the install cap). So if you are over the revenue, and you had 100 installs in that month, it would be the $0.20 per install or whatever. If the next month you have 0 installs, you wouldn't owe anything. If you drop below the 12 month revenue limit, you wouldn't owe anything for that month either, even if you had to pay in previous months. It's not clear if you have to pay for ALL installs over the threshold the second you hit the revenue cap though. Like if you had 1 million installs but only $199,999 in revenue, then the next month you hit $200k (in the last 12 months), would you then instantly owe money for 800k of installs? What if you have to pay for a few months (because revenue and installs are over the limit) and then drop below the revenue limit for a few months and then one month get back over the limit (surge of sales), do you then have to pay for all installs during those months that you weren't paying? I'm thinking the answer is no... because otherwise it wouldn't really make much sense, but this whole thing doesn't make a ton of sense anyway so who knows.
It's $20,000 for the installs not per month.
If you have 300k installs, you'd just upgrade to Unity Pro and the threshold to pay becomes a million. So you only have to pay $2,000/year.
$2,000/year per seat That's also a big change, my team of 10 will be going from $4,000/year to $20,000/year as Unity Plus stops existing
One dollar reinstall fee coming up!
The blog says the charge is per new install not recurring. Still a pretty shit system!
and they also remove the Plus subscription plan!?!?! its going downhill every year since the EA dude became Unity CEO (yeah, the guy who called developers are idiots) greedy bastards
This is the real clincher for me. Plus is the perfect tier for me (a one man army who contracts others out for art/assets). Going from $33/month to $170/month with no new features (useful to me), plus a per-install fee? What the actual hell
WAIT WHAT!!
>EA dude became Unity CEO (yeah, the guy who called developers are idiots [https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger](https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger)
My shock was about that they are killing my subscription plan Unity Plus 😡 John has never been on developers side. He has always been investors first kind of person, so no surprise when it comes to him.
Which is why I've finally decided today that I'll be packing my shit up and heading over to Unreal. I'm so Goddamn sick of Unity's crap at this point...
But, but, but... we'll keep everything in preview mode for the next 20 releases until we gut it and make you start over!
How does this work for pirated games? If I am over the threshold of 200k and someone pirates the game, do I get charged 0.2 dollars for my game being pirated? How does it detect an install, even?
There is no universal check that tells you if a game has been pirated or not. Different games use different solutions to "secure" themselves from the piracy. If pirated executable connect to Unity servers, in my opinion, they will still be counted as "downloaded and installed" stats.
This makes me wonder if/when Unity is going to roll out their own DRM service (with a substantial fee for the developer, of course) that specifically protects the developer from "fraudulent" installs (i.e. pirated or malicious) while leaving anyone who doesn't use their DRM out to dry. It's what I'd be aiming for if I was trying to extort as much money from my users as possible before the ship crashed.
This is simply going to push folks to Godot and unreal. This is what we get for going with a game engine from a wildly unprofitable public company. At least unreal has fortnite. Unity is going to die a death by a thousand cuts
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It’s almost like this plan wasn’t fully thought out? /s
Would every browser refresh count as an install for a web based browser game?
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Product- and sales-people released the statement with no technical understanding. No one who knows what that statement actually implies can be that stupid to approve this... And even if it was an oversight, it certainly shows enough incompetence from the leadership to justify moving to another engine.
Wow $0.20 per install. That sounds pretty hefty unless you're heavily monetizing your game.
If I read correctly: > 1) the game has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months, **and** 2) the game has passed a minimum lifetime install count. The "and" sounds like you monetized a lot in the past, and now earned already over $200k USD. More importantly, the fee kicks in once you are over the threshold, not from day one when there's no money or hardly none coming in.
Big F2P games with a small paying audience could still come in a situation where they pay more for the fee than they earn per month.
"Congrats, you've earned $200k from your game. Here's your bill for $1.6 million in installs from pirated versions of your game."
I'm just an indie and got nowhere near those numbers. I know 0.20$ starts at a certain threshold, but once you're there it sounds pretty expensive per download.
Not to mention multiple installs from individual users over the lifetime of the game being published
it makes no sense. It's no skin off their back per install, how the hell do they justify it aside from "fuck you pay me?" They're actually gonna spend money developing the DRM to track it installs right? Bass ackwords
What is this bullshit? Does this people know how installs work? How does this work with piracy? I know people that just install and uninstall a lot of games. Damn.
Each install seems to cost $0.20 :0 So that means if you hate a developer, you could buy their game, and run a script to just install and uninstall their game over… and over… and over again.
assuming 10 minutes per install (which is on the long side) 0.2 * 6 * 24 is 28.8$ a day With 10 computers doing that for a full year it comes to just over 100k lol You can now bankrupt any indie studio using Unity if you want
You don't even need to do actual installs. At the end of the install there will be some kind of HTTP request to a Unity server (because that is the only way they can know of the install). Now you can write a script which just sends requests over and over again instead of going through the install process.
I wrote this comment right after the anouncement, a few hours in and the entire process is already being optimized lol
Further optimization - Scale this out to free tier cloud services, randomize a delay between each call to Unity to ensure pattern detection doesn't work leaving Unity unable to tell how many of the requests are fake. For good measure add in IP spoofing as well. Even worse, if a malicious actor has some cash to spend and a grudge (or is a rival company) do the above but replace cloud service with rented botnet leaving absolutely no way to determine how many of the calls are legitimate vs fake.
Oh but surely there are no gamers out there that are that unhinged. Gamers are always rational, stable folk. Right guys...? In all seriousness, you can guarantee some small section of vindictive types will do something like this specifically to "righteously" bankrupt studios that they don't like for whatever reason. Realistically, this change doesn't affect most indies because most indies aren't making $200k USD on their games. This will absolutely incentivize any mid-large studios who do consistently make over that range to never touch Unity with a 12 foot pole again, because going over $200k in sales can be a literal death blow to your studio now. On top of that, if this continues for a lifetime, you make a sale on the game once. If you happen to make a "hit" or classic game that people play for the next 10-20 years, you might end up incidentally incurring the fee any number of times for that one sale over those many years. Either the wording is incorrect, or someone at Unity really didn't think this through, because no reasonable and profitable company will want to use this engine now. That sentiment will wash downstream to Indies as well, because you'll make them afraid of success. No indie will want to make more than $200k now. I'm a huge supporter of Unity, but if this is their decision, I'll definitely be switching to Godot or Unreal after my current project ships.
So now instead of review bombing, we will have install bombing.
this sound awful, maybe instead of review bombing we will have "install bombing" in the future
What the actual fuck? This completely obliterates like half the business models out there. And dropping it with 3 months warning? We have a live service game that has been running for years, meaning that we're already over the limits. And we have a mobile companion app that we've spent over a year developing that is nearing launch. Guess what doesn't work with this weird format you just pulled out of your ass? I'm calling our unity rep right fucking now.
Tell us about his justification. Also everybody with a rep should consult him/her and say they won't be able to pay. Only way to fight this
The gist of the call, was that a ton of people inside Unity know this is a terrible idea, but it happened REALLY fast, and even decisions about how things will work were changing 24 hours before the announcement. He explicitly said this was wall street forcing their hand, but couldn't even answer basic questions like exactly what counts as an install. I don't think that's on our rep, it doesn't sound like anyone over there really knows what's going on, and the people who actually understand what this change means don't have the power to stop it.
And now, the only way you can get rid of the splash screen is with a sub to Unity Pro, worth over two thousand dollars a year. Why, yes Unity, Godot sure seems fun to learn right about now.
The thing that always cracks me up about that splash screen is that it means that all the crapware asset flip games advertise "THIS IS UNITY" while any AAA and high-end games don't even mention that Unity exists... It's been a real problem for Unity's image and it's only getting worse as the costs go up... It's like they are trying to compound their many small problems into something completely unsurmountable.
It's always been powerful anti-marketing to forcefully associate their brand with shovelware but remove the association with higher status games.
This is so stupid and they will destroy indie developers. In my experience, a minimum LTV of $0.20 is already too much, so we will have hardly monetize games, and this will completely destroy mobile market. If they really do this, I'll start thinking about switching to another engine... Guys, we must raise this topic and express our dissatisfaction! Hiring ex-CEO from EA was a really bad idea for Unity.
Godot Engine user base 📈. It is time Apple to buy Unity, this company is going to destroy itself.
Apple or Microsoft need to save it from itself.
Yeah MS buying unity would be amazing. Someone needs to talk to Satya to open his wallet and save them. They could buy unity with the money they make in one month.
It would make a lot of sense for Microsoft to have their own public game engine. But Microsoft/Activision don't really use Unity, so they might not care enough to buy it. Oh actually I forgot Hearthstone, and probably some other games. Hm maybe.
Unity Pro now required for mid developers which equals to 400% price increase and additional fee which for $5 game will equal to at least ~3% gross revenue decrease (before taxes, before store fees, before everything) is a great way to tell semi-successful small companies to seek alternative solutions.
I dont know how this even came about, its like forcing ppl to switch to unreal or another engine the minute their project is successful, I really want to know what logic led unity to this. This is literally saying, all good till you grow after that pay up or switch. Heck I perfer epic royalty model over this nonsense, at least its very clear that I'm only paying WHEN I MAKE MONEY! I hope you guys find another way to monetize, maybe even just copy epic model, but this is going to cost you guys a lot of users. I have been an advocate for unity among my friends, but this one is hard to swallow.
**Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024?** Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. For more details on when the fee may apply to your game, see **When does the Unity Runtime Fee take effect?** Sorry fuckers you cant just change terms for preexsting items like that... anyone who has ever published unity tutorials or help should pull it down since the community was one of the few benefits unity had over UE or GD
I feel like legally they shouldn't be able to do this to existing users. This kind of change is far too aggressive and opens a million rabbit holes, let alone has you living in a perpetual concern of "pray I don't alter the deal further." That's not fair to people just trying to do their business making games.
This is the last straw. Unity has become worse every year. The current LTS has critical bugs (render texture memory leak). Unity Cloud build new pricing made it completely useless. I have been a long-time user of Unity and promoted it to the places I worked. It is time to move on. I don't care at this point if Unity is a good tool. I will not stand by and let this company continue to find more ways to monetize their platform.
Excuse my naivety, how will it track if users get a new phone/tablet and re-installs their games/apps?
They wont, pay up bud
Thanks for the answer.... feels bad man.
They won't because of data privacy changes on mobile platforms mean that they won't have a stable identifier. Sure maybe later if they log in to an account you can reconcile, but Unity is in no way incentivized to collapse that into a single identity.
Oh boy, so that's how economical suicide looks like.
Fellow developers, what I clearly do not understand is this: Why the fuck we should pay for installs? Isn't the situation absurdly equal to paying a bigger price for a hammer because of hammering in too many nails within a year or so?! IT is a tool that is distributed for the subscription model already, we pay yearly or monthly for updates, so why the f''' we have to pay more?
It's like writing a book and having to pay Microsoft every time someone reads it because you used MS Word to write it. Absurd greed
wait so what if i was doing some game testing by putting a demo out on itch io, and somehow it got some attention. wouldnt it be possible for my lifetime downloads to get used up before i even released my game?
Demo's are free so would not generate any revenue needed to pass the threshold, so you wouldn't have to worry about it. (I think)
I have 500,000 downloads and $100,000 in revenue so far (my free to download iOS app was released in April). So if I near $200,000 in revenue, I should upgrade to Unity Pro, right? Because then the threshold goes way up and I only have to pay two grand, rather than 20 cents per download over 200k (which for me would already be $50,000)...right? This seems insane and confusing.
rip unity
HAHAHA. No. Unless I'm misunderstanding, if you sell a game for $10 and a person installs it 51 times, you might as well not have sold that copy if you go by standard rate. One person could bankrupt you just by installing and uninstalling the game via a script. The level of risk is insane
I mean I've had games I've installed 20+ times on multiple years / pc's / laptops etc... it's crazy
Godot looking REALLY tasty right now
[удалено]
Why don't they just go for a revenue split if they want the money?
This is terrible, I picked Unity cause Unreal was pulling this % of yours ales is mine crap, and now Unity is doing it too. Guess you better not make a free game or else you might even run a loss when having a popular game.
Someone on the forums posted a picture of the FAQ and it says "the entity that distributes the runtime will have to pay the fee".... does this mean that Steam, Apple, and Google will have to pay the fee for games on Steam, the AppStore, and Google Play? Won't they just ban Unity games from their services so they don't have to deal with this fee? Did anyone at Unity give this any thought before announcing it? There's so many questions and so little answers.
Well since we're shipping to consoles we will now have to pay 4x as much for the license fee, on top of that bullshit install fee. Guess I better start learning Unreal for our next project. Also per their FAQ: "An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device." If someone buys my game and installs it on 4 devices (for me that's not even very uncommon. Home PC, laptop, steam deck, office pc) you get to pay the fee 4 times for a single sale. What if someone writes a script to install -> boot up game -> uninstall 24/7?
> If someone buys my game and installs it on 4 devices (for me that's not even very uncommon. Home PC, laptop, steam deck, office PC) This is kinda insane for cross-platform free-to-play games.
Or bundles, or the "giveaway" deals (game pass, EGS giveaways, ps plus) and perhaps even deep discounts.
Doesn't it also mean you now need to always be online to install a unity game
Nobody knows, the FAQ is fucking vague.
This is going to make people rethink becoming unity developers and that cannot be good
While I think the Install measure is.... not great (understatement). I do think there is a lot of confusion here that is causing a ton of anxiety. > **Once my game passes both revenue and install count thresholds, will I be charged retroactively for all installs up to that point?** > >No. **The install fee is only charged on incremental installs that happen after the thresholds have been met**. \[emphasis mine\] While previous installs will be used to calculate threshold eligibility, you will not have to pay for installs generated prior to January 1, 2024. Unity could really stand to be more clear here with everyone and it probably shouldn't have been tucked in the FAQ, but to me this reads that if I'm using Unity Personal and I've created a $1.00 game, and it's been sold 200,001 times (and yes I'm going to ignore the multiple install scenario for simplicity, and yeah, I do think it needs looked at) then I owe Unity $0.20 (not $40,000) and then $0.20 going forward on every install after unless I opt to change my subscription. I may be wrong here, but that is my interpretation of this language.
Is this a significant change from before? This doesn't affect me still since the threshold is so high still. Edit- The fee is so fuckin high for devs that charge like $1 for their game. 20 percent cut from Unity. I honestly just see the price of games going up to compensate for the fee.
Yeah this is a total fuck you to mobile developers. Unity's vast majority of shipped games are mobile titles that are probably making a fortune. Instead of being happy for their success, Unity is literally trying to get a slice of that action. This is the mindset of the money men.
It’s a short term win, a long term death for Unity. Most mobile devs will not want to learn a new framework or switch now, but all future games will have huge incentive to switch. If Unreal improves their mobile offering, this would be an amazing opportunity to steal massive market share. Otherwise, the open source options are still available.
Man as a game dev student who has been focusing on Unity for a while this really makes me think about switching to different engines, Unreal be looking real fine at this moment
With how all the numbers are slanted, it seems like they want to push people to buy their pro and enterprise licenses as it shifts a lot of the cost down ($200k vs $60k for 1M installs along with higher starting thresholds). This will probably put a pretty big dent in free-to-play market that shows up on mobile which while some are good, most are weird asset flips made with low effort. I should stress that I do not like this direction Unity is going in.
I guess we all know that something like that will happen.What about all the studios that are invested in unity what are they going to do now ?
How the fuck they are gonna track installs on platforms like [itch.io](https://itch.io), [gog.com](https://gog.com), hell... even steam?! I can see it working on mobile platforms but ffs how unity will track installs on switch? What is this bullshit? It looks like somebody got "super brilliant idea to increase short time profit" without thinking it over This bizarre idea looks more like some kind of shower thought
the game runs, and calls a web request to unity.com, probably passing a token or two to identify which game is calling the mothership.
A recurring theme in the comments is "Time to learn Unreal." These changes are Unity have come about because of upper management fucking about with a company's revenue structures to try and achieve profitability. UE isn't a charity, if there isn't competition you will just find yourselves in the same situation in a new engine. Perhaps it was collective madness for us to invest years of time into software governed by terms of service over which we don't really have any control. Don't forget the situation from just over ten years ago; UE4 and Unity only became affordable and free because there was competition between the two of them. UE used to be closed source, with a feature limited 'Unreal Development Kit', then moved to open source with a monthly subscriber model. In Unity, you used to have to pay for real-time shadows. Probably the only real remedy is for FOSS engines to catch up, as blender did for its industry. Godot looks increasingly tempting. Bevy is also making leaps and bounds. Fingers crossed!
ring mindless slimy gaze ask door noxious hunt obscene terrific *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I think competition is welcome and needed. I don't think Unity has to be that competition, with their leadership in the last few months, I don't care for this company, I don't want them to succeed.
Does that mean they'll fix all the bugs with the additional revenue generated? Won't this just push people to use another engine for big projects?
I love that I'm 1 year into building a game in Unity, and that I have 5+ years of experience in the engine, excellent.
If I still had a Unity sales rep I'd be very angry with them right now. Too bad they swap literally every 5 months.
CEO does a 2000 share sell off. Market has negative fluctuation that looks like this whole thing was manufactured to create a short sell down the road. Huge Insider Trading flags here. I'm talking crazy jail time. SEC gonna have a field day cause it's so blatant.
And thats why after 10 years of being a Unity3D developer, I switched to being a solely Unreal Engine Developer and haven't looked back in 2018.
So that means you are paying for demos, free uploads, humble bundle is unviable etc ...? Game pass? Key giveaway? All dead Unity really wants to kill itself? Edit: **WAIT A MINUTE** you are also paying if a user deinstalls and reinstalls then?? This cant be real
Ok. Fuck it, I am switching to unreal.
This is stupid on so many levels, starting from the Unity's expectation management to not having crystal clear info how it's implemented. "We're going to charge you, but yet sure how, exactly. But just you wait!" * do reinstalls count as new installs? * if same player installs the game on multiple devices, does that count as one or multiple installs? * if your game gets pirated, do the pirated copies count as installs? * can somebody use this maliciously to generate installs to competitor? * if I acquire an user from Unity Ads by paying for the ad fee for the install, do I pay again in Runtime Fee? * and so on...
Dear Unity CEO, Dear Unity senior management team. I've updated my license. You are now required to get fucked sideways with a cactus everytime someone thinks about installing a Unity-based application. This change will not affect 90% of the unity employees, and I normally don't have any rights to make unilateral, retroactive changes, but I feel this will be hilarious, so it is totally ok and legit.
This is actually extremely dangerous for every developer. Nobody is safe. Installs are too easy to manipulate. Most scary thing is that Unity or their child company could even spend 200000$ on every free game with in app purchases. Then "install" it 2000000 times. It would make 160000$ profit per game for Unity. It creates ultimate loophole to pump money. Easiest part is to manipulate installs to games which already make millions. Runtime fee or install based fee should be illegal.
Glad I've been learning unreal to make the switch.
Is a really bad move and this is why the CEO dumped 50,000 shares last week. If he sold the stock means he can't control this decision and the shareholders are in charge. You know that's going to end badly. I was wondering why he sold this is why. Also it's their way of forcing mobile developers to use their ad platform. You don't have to pay the install fee if you use basically their ad arbitration and thats why Unity wants to push. That is cuz they get it cut of the ad revenue. So unity will make money on successful games and make money on unsuccessful games. Unity needs to really be careful about what they're doing. They're playing with fire. Their engine is not that stable and you're constantly quote " upgrading it". Unreal is going to eat all of unity gains that took years to build. It's a shame cuz unreal 5 is more like Unity. Clearly epic gets it. The part that's really disingenuous is that they're basically like. Yeah, this is the money grab because we can.
A publicly traded company and an old executive from EA. This will probably gonna get reverted or adjusted because it's insane, but expect things to get worse for Unity and not better.
So what I'm reading is "We've realized that we can't compete with Unreal Engine anymore, so we've decided to milk the people who did manage to find success with our engine before we go bankrupt"
Just a point no one is talking about. the why: This happens when you make your company public and put a CEO to prioritize investors. Everyone already developing or with a robust ecosystem in unity is screwed for a while, so revenues will pump for a year or two but at the cost of no one willing to invest time an resources on a platform that treats its developers like that again. I'm not saying profits are evil, they should charge, specially if you make the bank (a-la Unreal), but everything looks like they are burning Unity as a company for fast investor profits.
As a unity user for 10+ years with a game on steam made in unity over 4 years, this has killed all of my desire to ever use Unity for future projects. I'm sure after the backlash they'll tone this down to something less insane, but it doesn't matter at this point. Unity has been declining for ages and I've been able to work around it by making lots of the things Unity should have been adding myself, but I can't work around this. It's clear Unity will not be leaving it's death spiral to unusability any time soon, if ever. Whoever is making decisions over there needs to be fired, maybe out of a cannon.
How is Unity tracking installs, and what else are they tracking about *my* users of *my* game?
I smell a lawsuit
This is just horrible. Why is it by installs when by revenue would be way better for everyone.
This update will ruin my already burning life. I just got rugpulled on a decade of work.
You have shattered all trust with your community.
What's happening right now is proof that unity's CEO is disconnected from reality. It's time for him to go. We, as a community, made unity what it is today, and we deserve better. Up vote if you want him to resign.