Unity Plan Pricing and Packaging Updates

[Lo Zeno]

Unity has announced major changes to their fee structure due to the 'confusion and angst' caused by the previous announcement.



While this is definitely a step in the right direction, I still think Unity needs to clarify and come clean about their previous announcement where they implied they could directly track installs, which rightly caused an uproar over privacy and vulnerabilities concerns.

There is still the trust they have to rebuild, it's not going to be repaired overnight.

Strong WoTC vibes, right?

[SilentRuin]

Unless they back off install fees I see nothing that will not keep dev's in rebellion. There is simply no way to fairly implment that per previous statements about it.

[Sulimo]

Strong WoTC vibes, right?

Yeah, I was not really impacted by the WotC stuff, as I don't play anything related to those properties (OGL or otherwise), but I could see where the community was coming from.

At least one of the Unity execs actually said the words 'I'm sorry' instead of trying to blame everyone else for not understanding their intent. They screwed up with the initial announcement, it had lots of defensive language in it, so they knew it was going to be controversial.

This is simply walking it back at least partially, only LTS versions released in 2024 and later are now affected. As it stands right now, SmiteWorks can continue to use the LTS version they have, and not incur any fees, but eventually the LTS version will be EOL, at which point there will be no choice but to upgrade and get hit by the new fee structure. It does however give more room to explore options than the previous announcement gave (if that is of interest).


Unity still has work to do, some developers seem happy enough with the changes, while others are still unhappy (who can really blame them?).

[ddavison]

This is much better. It only applies to future versions of Unity's runtime engine and we can decide at that time whether or not we want to adopt that. A cap of 2.5% of revenue or installs that is self-reported means that we can report the numbers that make sense for our usage and that we believe make sense based on our usage. For us, that would mean not reporting free installs or re-installs, but actual paying customers. Based on this, we don't qualify for the new fee and we would continue to use our existing monthly plan. If FGU grows in popularity above 1M engagements, then we would be billed up to $25K per $1M in revenue.

[Lo Zeno]

Looks like the latest development is that John Riccitello (Unity's CEO, and the one who apparently got the idea of making developers pay per installation) has been showed the door:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/1...e-immediately/

In all honesty, he doesn't have a brilliant track record (EA was performing really poorly compared to the years before he got at the wheel, and it's during his time at EA that he made the infamous remark that gamers are idiots and that they could be made to pay a dollar each time they reload their guns in Battlefield), so it was just a matter of time before he had to leave.

[Jiminimonka]

Looks like the latest development is that John Riccitello (Unity's CEO, and the one who apparently got the idea of making developers pay per installation) has been showed the door:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/1...e-immediately/

In all honesty, he doesn't have a brilliant track record (EA was performing really poorly compared to the years before he got at the wheel, and it's during his time at EA that he made the infamous remark that gamers are idiots and that they could be made to pay a dollar each time they reload their guns in Battlefield), so it was just a matter of time before he had to leave.

He is gone but the price change remains... so just a lump of sugar to soothe the share holders..

[Lo Zeno]

He is gone but the price change remains... so just a lump of sugar to soothe the share holders..

Yes, but as @ddavison said the revised price change is much more acceptable than the original plan that Unity put out. From all I read before, during and after the debacle it was actually expected by everyone in the industry that Unity would change its pricing scheme - it made sense, because for over a decade Unity has been operating at a loss. It was unsustainable, and needed to start making some profit or it would close up shop sooner or later (which would be the worse possible outcome for everyone currently using the Unity engine). All the complaints after the price change announcement were not about the fact that there was a pricing scheme change, but about:
1- how easily exploitable the "pay-per-installation" was, making developers pay when someone would cyclically uninstall-reinstall a game
2- the fact that it retroactively applied to any previously developed game
3- the vagueness on how would Unity determine if an installation was legit or pirate - and since it's factually impossible, the risk that developers would pay for pirated installations, instead of the pirates
4- the fact that most freemium mobile games developed with Unity easily surpassed the installation threshold before making ANY kind of money
5- the idea that a demo with "full acces to the code" would pay the installation fee, even though the user has no access to the full features set - this would have affected FGU in particular
6- the claim that the change would affect "only 10% of Unity's users", which was blatantly false
7- more importantly, the fact that the pricing scheme was designed, decided and published without any consultation with the teams actually using Unity (which would have immediately shown that the pricing scheme was designed with one single and limited commercial model in mind, that of AAA videogames, and was not compatible with the dozens of other commercial models such as FGU's where players play free with the "demo" and only DM/GMs pay licences subscriptions).

In fact, the first suggestion that the Azure collective made when they published their open letter was not "roll back the changes to how it was before", it was "why didn't you instead ask for a percentage of revenue like your competition?"

So, keeping in mind that some pricing change was not only going to happen, but expected to happen anyway already before this ****-show, I'd say booting the guy who didn't think about involving the game development companies before designing this price change is a bit more than just a lump of sugar. More like a rather welcome Snickers bar when you're not yourself because you're hungry.

[ddavison]

Lo Zeno covered it well. A price change on future dev environments that is the lesser of “percent of revenue” or “per installation” is acceptable and fair. We don’t want Unity to go out of business and we don’t mind supporting them. It just has to be fair and not retroactive. It is that now.

I also think it is great that the person behind it is gone.

[SilentRuin]

Though the "trapped" in unity will see this as fair - many others will still be abandoning unity "as they can and are not tied to it" and it was the breaking of trust where this retroactive and per download stuff was sprung with little thought to how it would be realistically implemented and with no input from their users at all. Backtracking and purging the top boss will win back some - but not all for sure.

[Jiminimonka]

Yes, but as @ddavison said the revised price change is much more acceptable than the original plan that Unity put out. From all I read before, during and after the debacle it was actually expected by everyone in the industry that Unity would change its pricing scheme - it made sense, because for over a decade Unity has been operating at a loss. It was unsustainable, and needed to start making some profit or it would close up shop sooner or later (which would be the worse possible outcome for everyone currently using the Unity engine). All the complaints after the price change announcement were not about the fact that there was a pricing scheme change, but about:
1- how easily exploitable the "pay-per-installation" was, making developers pay when someone would cyclically uninstall-reinstall a game
2- the fact that it retroactively applied to any previously developed game
3- the vagueness on how would Unity determine if an installation was legit or pirate - and since it's factually impossible, the risk that developers would pay for pirated installations, instead of the pirates
4- the fact that most freemium mobile games developed with Unity easily surpassed the installation threshold before making ANY kind of money
5- the idea that a demo with "full acces to the code" would pay the installation fee, even though the user has no access to the full features set - this would have affected FGU in particular
6- the claim that the change would affect "only 10% of Unity's users", which was blatantly false
7- more importantly, the fact that the pricing scheme was designed, decided and published without any consultation with the teams actually using Unity (which would have immediately shown that the pricing scheme was designed with one single and limited commercial model in mind, that of AAA videogames, and was not compatible with the dozens of other commercial models such as FGU's where players play free with the "demo" and only DM/GMs pay licences subscriptions).

In fact, the first suggestion that the Azure collective made when they published their open letter was not "roll back the changes to how it was before", it was "why didn't you instead ask for a percentage of revenue like your competition?"

So, keeping in mind that some pricing change was not only going to happen, but expected to happen anyway already before this ****-show, I'd say booting the guy who didn't think about involving the game development companies before designing this price change is a bit more than just a lump of sugar. More like a rather welcome Snickers bar when you're not yourself because you're hungry.

I am hungry now... and not until I read this! ��

Good point.