Developers fight back against Unity’s new pricing model

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23875396/unity-mobile-developers-ad-monetization-tos-changes

29 46 3 years ago

lionkor2• 3 years ago

Am I missing something in Unity's new pricing model? They want a cut, ranging anywhere from 0.02 to 0.2 USD per install of the game, if you sell more than somwthing like 100k or 1 million copies. Sounds reasonable? Who feels they've been shafted by this? Raise your game price by that much and you're good, no?

RamblingCTO• 3 years ago

You also pay for installs of unused Games. The issue is also about ToS changes, intransparency and a felt shift in values with Unity.

ranguna• 3 years ago

People online have talked about things like "install bombing", where you install and reinstall a game repeatedly, which causes the 0.02-0.20 price to stack. But tbh I haven't read the new model and ToS fully, so this might be BS.

Also, retroactively applying the new model to already exiting games was also a bit of a bad move. You make a game and decide the business model based on what you know at the time and what you can predict will happen in the future, predicting that unity would change their pricing model like this is near impossible, so the business model you picked for your old games is now unfit.

lemoncookiechip• 3 years ago

Installs by Unity's own admission, only count each new machine, which I guess can be faked by malicious entities who want to hurt certain developers. This also counts pirate installs, but Unity claims to have a way to discern what is and isn't a pirate install.

Honestly, this is mostly going to hurt indie devs who make it, but aren't quite in the same successes bracket as a game like Cities: Skylines, Hearthstone, Rimworld. And also F2P games, especially mobile ones, where Whales can easily spend $200k or $1mil, but you have millions of installs of people just trying the free game and deleting it, or installing it on multiple devices.

The Runtime fee can easily exceed Unreal Engine's own 5% flat Royalty Fee by a fair margin (easily 10%) depending on the money you ask for and method of distribution, for example, you won't want to give out copies or discount the game as much after meeting the requirements.

StopHammoTime• 3 years ago

The problem is not that they wanted a cut. The problem is that they want to retroactively apply to all games that have ever been published and even those that aren’t using the most recent engine.

Also, there are cases where a developer might squeeze $100k out of sales and then get a game pass deal where they get another $100k that would result in them getting 5 million downloads. That would result in the fee being $1 million because they’re on the lower tier subscription.

They are doing this for two reasons from what I can tell: a) they want a cut of game pass volume b) they want to worse high volume micro transaction games onto their own ad network (if you sign up to their ad network you don’t pay the fee)

The biggest problem is them attempting to bill people who have already released games and might still get the odd download. It’s crazy cause these developers never agreed to the new license AND it’s highly doubtful this would be legal anyway because contracts need consideration. “We just want more money” probably won’t cut the mustard.

lionkor2• 3 years ago

Ah shit okay, thats bad. Thanks for getting me up to speed, their original announcement didnt make that clear enough for me to get it!

pelasaco14• 3 years ago

That's not 100% true. Fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. That's because otherwise is really hard to pin a TOS version. I'm not lawyer, but for all services that we use, i.e paypal, we receive monthly emails about TOS changes, and you have to accept them, to keep using their services...

xmodem3• 3 years ago

Take a game like vampire survivors - not a unity game, but one that I have installed 10+ times at this point. They have put the price up slightly since launch - I paid €2.39 for it.

The most objectionable thing about Unity's new pricing is it hits hardest the smaller indies with the lowest budgets. The AAA studios will barely notice it and are probably negotiating better terms anyway.

pelasaco14• 3 years ago

Not really. Look the pricing and the AND condition:

"Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:

Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs."

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...

So if you sold in the last year more than 200k AND have more than 200k game installs and have the unity personal version, then you have to pay for install...

distract8901• 3 years ago

Because you aren't paying unity for each copy you sell, you're paying for each time a user installs the game, which will basically always be much higher than the number of copies sold. I regularly install my games on 3-4 different machines. My activity would cost the developer 3—4 times as much in unity licensing.

Unity has clearly stated that they will charge for reinstalling, installing on multiple machines, and implied that pirated copies also count.

If you get unlucky and your game is popular with pirates, you're suddenly paying for a ton of licenses on copies of the game you never even sold.

You can quite literally script a process to repeatedly reinstall a single copy of the game to rack up unity charges for a developer you don't like.

That's not really very reasonable.

nickthegreek• 3 years ago

Unity can’t tell you if the installs were from a pirate copy or not.

kruuuder• 3 years ago

This sounds so much like the Reddit drama. I doubt that this pushback matters. They expected the negative feedback, for sure, did the math, and decided that it's still worth it.

u/spez was right, I guess. "The protest over the API changes will pass".

Yaina2• 3 years ago

I do think the current reactions are a bit out of proportion, although that might be to pressure Unity into reversing their changes.

Unlike for Reddit users though, these pricing changes impact revenue calculations of developers and there are viable alternatives. Additionally from what I gleaned a lot if developers are not particularly happy with the state of the Unity tools, and sudden pricing changes surely don't inspire much confidence either.

So, I don't think no games will release in two years or so made in Unity, but this might have kicked off or accelerate an erosion of Unity's developer base. At least those developers that give Unity the prestige of being the engine of choice for Indie and AA games.

Maybe all of this is, purely from a revenue point of view, still worth it for them though.

glimshe• 3 years ago

I think that the bulk of the complaints is that Unity has become unusable for small developers due to the pricing model changes. It's not unusable in the sense of a personal pet peeve, but in the sense of not being commercially viable versus existing options, which include Godot, GameMaker, Love, etc.

Maybe Unity no longer cares about small indie developers so they priced them out of the engine, but only time will be able to tell whether they made a major business miscalculation. It's possible that larger developers are the bulk of Unity's income and they will be totally fine with the changes.

Still, I don't see a world where what Unity did was a good business move due to the trust issues mentioned by so many other people. I think that a model more similar to Unreal's would have been much better received.

MrMember• 3 years ago

I don't know, I think the unpredictability of how much you will owe Unity each month will be a big sticking point for all developers, big and small. A percentage of revenue is easy to account for; if we make this much money we will pay this much to Unity. A bill based on the vague "number of installs" calculated by a black box at Unity themselves is a financial disaster waiting to happen.

gorlilla• 3 years ago

They didn't pass for me. I do not use reddit on mobile whatsoever anymore (was daily, active user). Unfortunately Reddit still seems to be the best place (aside from lurking hundreds of telegram channels) to get up to date info on Ukraine.

I went from probably 150-200Hrs/Mo. To about 5.

I know I cannot be the only one. Reddit will live on; but technically so did MySpace.

sebazzz2• 3 years ago

Exactly. I don't use Reddit anymore and when they will inevitably kill old.reddit.com I will stop altogether.

As for Twitter I'm one leg into Mastadon, but the space flight news folk is still on Twitter.

bentt• 3 years ago

Congrats. What are you doing with that extra 195 hours?

brokenmachine• 3 years ago

I'm the same.

My reddit usage is now about 5% of what it was before. I also use it for Ukraine info, but now I do it at home on old.reddit.com, and not doomscrolling on mobile throughout the day.

pelasaco14• 3 years ago

As indie game developer myself, again: It only affect people developing mobile games, which mostly are full of ads and are super addictive. I see people trying now to get attraction to godot and etc, but the fact is that mostly "game studios" affected by the new pricing model, are studios releasing mediocre mobile apps, full of ads, addictive, which are just money grab. I for sure dont support Unity, I don't like their new strategies, the ironsource thing, but looking who is affected by that, basically are companies developing "games" that IMO shouldn't even exist.

pelasaco14• 3 years ago

for the mobile game developers downvoting me https://venturebeat.com/games/game-devs-with-2b-installs-say...

pelasaco14• 3 years ago

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:

So, if you have the Pro or Enterprise that most studios have, they should have more than 1 million Revenue in the last year AND have more than 1 million game installs.

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...

livefox5• 3 years ago

"it mostly affects people I don't like" doesn't make it good (or legal) policy.

Take for example genshin impact: it's made in unity, has a high production value, is f2p with a in-game currency that can be purchased, and meets the threshold for the change requirements. The same company has several other similarly modeled games released across multiple platforms (PC and PlayStation).

Without any sort of heads up this company now will face massive charges because of high install volume, especially if the average user installs on multiple devices, but low individual income.

Should Hoyoverse have to remake all of their games in a new engine or deal with this new price structure with no way to plan for how much the new structure will cost them?

The game is also often review bombed by rival games. What would stop a rival company from setting up a bot that just mass installs on VMs to try and charge up their bill?

If that company sticks with the pricing structure there is a high chance production value will go down simply because costs have skyrocketed.

Unity has basically entrapped developers. Whether the devs are worth saving doesn't come into play - whether you can trap someone into using your product then retroactively charge them for their success is the question, and I think most game devs would say "no".

pelasaco14• 3 years ago

I understand your point, but tbh:

"Take for example genshin impact: it's made in unity, has a high production value, is f2p with a in-game currency that can be purchased, and meets the threshold for the change requirements. The same company has several other similarly modeled games released across multiple platforms (PC and PlayStation)."

From what I can tell, if you were to sell a $5 game made with Unity and made $200,000 per year, the total charge would be $8,000. But that charge would be $40k if your game was only $1 and $800 if your game sold for $50. For Unity Pro if you made $10 million selling 1 million copies you would be charged $60,000. That same studio making $10 million on a game written with Unreal Engine would be charged $500,000 in royalties. That is far more than $60k for Unity. It still appears that Unity is the budget option, it just isn't quite as cheap as it used to be.

Considering Unity has a negative operating margin of around 50%, it seems clear they need to start making more money. Customer acquisition and R&D costs have been growing much faster than revenue so they need to start making more money somewhere. R&D costs have risen by 275% over the past 3 years, and sales/marketing costs have increased 175%. Revenue has only increased 150% over the same period.

pelasaco14• 3 years ago

The game is also often review bombed by rival games. What would stop a rival company from setting up a bot that just mass installs on VMs to try and charge up their bill?

This is FUD, but its covered by Unity FAQ. Either way, I would like to see "rivals", aka game studios, developing such amazing technology.. it would show even more that such "indie studios", developing high addictive, full of ads and "in game currency" are just bad for the whole game ecosystem and society.

Yaina2• 3 years ago

Seems like an unattractive pricing model for developers.

Why would you tie your pricing to something like installs, which is completely unrelated to the profits the game is making.

This just means that developers will still have to pay install fees for their old games, as people re-install them on different machines, while not making a lot of profits in sales from that game anymore. Developers might be incentivized to remove older games from libraries like steam.

pelasaco14• 3 years ago

You just have to pay the runtime fee, in the following conditions:

"Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:

Comparing with Unreal that take 5% from your profit, if your game makes more than 1,000,000 USD, Unity still cheaper

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...

inparen• 3 years ago

Thinking about learning game dev, but just curious about what features unity have which open source game engines are missing ?

syspec• 3 years ago

It's not neceesarily features, but overall it's much much easier to use and dive into co side ring what it is capable of.

The asset store with its integration is another huge selling point. For example, if you're like me, you're more of a coder than an artist. With the u it's asset store you could spend 0.00 - 100 dollars and buy some amazing assets to help jump start your hobby project.

I'm sure some will disagree.

Developers fight back against Unity’s new pricing model

Related Stories