Unity has announced dramatic changes to its Unity Engine business model which will see it introduce a monthly fee per new game install beginning on 1st January next year - a move that has drawn considerable criticism from the development community.
Unity - the engine behind countless acclaimed games including Tunic, Cuphead, Hollow Knight, Citizen Sleeper, RimWorld, Outer Wilds, Fall Guys, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Cities: Skylines - was previously licenced to developers using a royalty free model built around subscription tiers. Anyone whose revenue or funding was less than $100k over the course of the year (and who didn't want access to features such as the ability to remove the Unity splash screen) could stick to the free Unity Personal licence, while a Unity Plus subscription was required up to $200k in revenue, and a Unity Pro or above subscription was needed for more.
As of 1st January, 2024, however, developers will be expected to pay an additional monthly Unity Runtime Fee per new game install - seemingly including re-installs and installs across multiple devices - on top of their existing licence subscription, with those fees kicking in for titles that have made $200k or more in the last 12 months and have at least 200k lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise subscribers, meanwhile, will see the fees applied after passing the $1m revenue and 1m lifetime installs threshold.
Once the fees kick in, developers using Unity Personal will be expected to pay $0.2 per new install above the 200k threshold each month, while Unity Pro and Enterprise subscribers will be required to pay $0.15 and $0.125 respectively after crossing the 1m line - a figure that will decrease as higher install thresholds are reached. Unity Plus, meanwhile, is being retired as of today, meaning access to advanced features will now require at least a $2k annual subscription - an increase of over $1,600 compared to Unity Plus.
Unity's new fees will be applied retroactively to all games already on the market that cross its revenue and install thresholds, and to all to all games regardless of price - raising questions around the viability of free game giveaways, game demos, bundles, and more - and there's concern developers may now face charges for pirated game installs. There are also questions around how the changes will complicate the logistics of being on services like Game Pass.
The industry response so far appears to be a mixture of outrage, disbelief, and confusion, with some developers already publicly pledging to switch engines. Eurogamer has reached out to number of studios for their response to today's changes, including Size Five Games' Dan Marshall, creator of the acclaimed Lair of the Clockwork God, The Swindle, and more.
"It's an absolute fucking catastrophe," Marshall told us, "and I'll be jumping ship to Unreal as soon as I can. Most indies simply don't have the resources to deal with these kind of batshit logistics. Publishers are less likely to take on Unity games, because there's now a cost and an overhead," he continued. "How this is being tracked is super vague and feels half-thought-through. It seems open to review-bombing exploits, but in a way that actually costs developers. If someone buys a game on Steam and installs in on three machines, are Devs liable for three payments? If so, that sucks. Gamepass is suddenly a massive headache... the list goes on.
"It's all just utterly horrible, and they need to backtrack on this instantly or every Dev I know is likely jumping ship tomorrow."
"I have a couple of projects on the go in Unity right now," Marshall continued, "and they're far enough along that changing engine isn't an option, and I get a sickly feeling in my stomach just thinking about this. A horrendous policy, presumably dreamed up by the money men. I'm legitimately quite angry. I've been using Unity for over 10 years, that's a lot of investment in a system I'm about to drop like a hot rock."
We'll continue to share developers reactions as we hear more.
Retards
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
Probably ye olde' shock and awe pricing before they 'listen to the community' and tell us the real prices
might be which is still stupid. after devs finish left over projects they ll drop the engine and they ll run out of customers. why entrust your livelyhood tp those maniacs if you got better alternatives out there (at least i guess there are like ue)
This might have been their long game plan after all. bait enough devs with "free" do the switcheroo later.
At this point, indies might as well use Unreal engine. It's very scaleable in the right hands. Can even run on smartphones and is far less of a headache to use.
This smells like a John Ricitello move. Not that he's alone in braindead ideas like those.
I hope Unity is abandoned.
Best part? It will count install-uninstall-install on the same system as two separate instances.
And guess what: their tracking system will be proprietary and devs will not have access to the install data.
Literally "Trust us bro, the game was installed a million times"
"Behind the scenes, CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, as noted by Yahoo Finance, which noted this move was part of a trend over the past year where the exec has sold more than 50,000 shares in total and bought none.
Several others on Unity's board of directors also sold shares in the past few weeks, including president of growth Tomer Bar-Zeev who sold 37.5k shares on 1st September, for around $1.4m. Shlomo Dovrat, meanwhile, sold 68k shares on 30th August for around $2.5m"
As soon as they changed their company vision last year, laid off hundreds of people and hired Riccitiello it was clear that Unity no longer had a future, sadly. That's the same guy who told shareholders they could make up lost revenue through aggressive microtransactions and even proposed to charge $1 for virtual ammo reloads
Retroactive fees --> No retroactive fees.
Charge per every install --> Charge only for first install on a system. Demos are excluded, so are charity giveaways. Somehow.
So there are two options:
1. The revised rules were always supposed to be the real ones.
2. They got surprised by the backlash (which is possible, higher ups can be considerably dense sometimes) and quickly changed some stuff.
Am I missing some part of this situation?
As it seems it would be very problematic for devs even with the new way Bendi mentioned.
Unless they clarify it better, this would charge per install on machine and not per purchase?
Situations like me and my kids would dick them over. I install games from steam on my machine, my laptop for incase I need to travel for work, my kids use my family share on games I have but dont play anymore, so that would be 2-3 more installs.
Now when I rebuild my machine each year, and my kids, thats 4-5 more installs.
So am I reading it wrong its not 'per sale' its literally per install?
-We don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life.
-Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. -G. Michael Hopf
Disclaimer: Post made by me are of my own creation. A delusional mind relayed in text form.
Even the revised rules charge per system. So if you have 5 pc's let's say devs will be charged at least 5 times. And there's no telling how their analytics react to changing the os version, installing new components and the like.
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