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incredulous  Joined: Today Posts: 1 Current Unity employee here. I feel compelled to post something because I'm completely appalled at some of the initial choices for this new pricing model and most importantly at the poor and confusing communications around it. I and many, many of my colleagues have had a very bad last 12+ hours. We work hard to give you the tools to create amazing games all the way from indie to large studios. We love celebrating your successes with the Unity engine and many of us are up in arms internally about all this. Let's explain what the changes are about in plain English: 1. Unity needs to generate more revenue to eventually be a profitable company so we can sustain developing Unity for many years to come. Employees need to be paid or there's no engine, as simple as that. 2. Many very profitable game studios pay very little to Unity compared to their other costs of business, despite the Unity engine being an essential part of their game/product. The price changes are aimed at this ~10% of customers as a way to scale their costs with success via revenue+installs. 3. Yes, there's also a will to bring more users on Unity pro when they use Unity to build a product for a business with meaningful revenue. Sadly, good news of the extended availability of Unity free to larger funding thresholds and some extra features were buried in everything else. To focus on a few key points that have somewhat changed since the initial announcements... Sadly the OP and FAQS haven't been fully updated yet with some of these changes. 1. Installs 1. Installs are meant to be per unique user. 2. Cl, tests, and other automations will not be charged 3. We don't want to charge for fraudulent installs (install bombs, piracy, etc.) 4. There will not be an embedded "phone home" mechanism 5. Unity hasn't actually completely figured out how to count installs yet. Whatever the solution is, it will be conservative. It will potentially/probably undercount installs, but definitely not overcount. 2. We will not charge for charities 3. For subscription services, Unity will talk with the subscription service's distributor, not the game creator 4. There will be an online calculator very soon (TM) to model your potential costs 5. Yes, in this current form, it's possible for successful games with very high install counts and low enough per- install revenue to lose money when more people install their game. 1. When this is raised internally, the answer is "we would fix this with the customer to not bankrupt them". It would be great to prevent this upstream in the actual policy. Know also that all of the concerns that are understandably blowing up at the moment have been raised internally by many weeks before this announcement. Why it was decided to rush this out anyway in this way I can only speculate about. Personal hopes for further corrections to this pricing model: 1. Address point 5 above so we don't punish success 2. Reverse course to charge per-install fees to already published games (that still generate sizable revenue) 1. And change the terms to guarantee that a similar retroactive price change can never happen again! 3. Get our act together in terms of comms and marketing to avoid generating so much needless panic and anxiety both from you all and internally. Take care of each other, and take a break from all this for your mental health if you need it. And don't stop respectfully yelling at crazy ideas so they can be corrected. incredulous, 14 minutes ago Report Last edited: 8 minutes ago # 2745 Like Reply

Statement from alleged Unity employee


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Origin Entry: Unity Installation Fee Controversy

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K Kotaku @Kotaku A Year Later, Unity Cancels Controversial Runtime Fees Completely dlvr.it/TD9GN6 Traduire le post ☑Unity • 5:28 PM 12 sept. 2024 14 k vues 3 121 49 ☐ 4 ↑
IGN @IGN In the wake of a massive controversy regarding previously announced (and then walked-back) install fees, Unity's CEO John Riccitiello is stepping down. bit.ly/48LeHyw Traduire le post Unity® 5:00 PM 9 oct. 2023 249,3 k vues .
Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen. No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee. For those creators on Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, we are also making changes based on your feedback. The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included - unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity. We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using - as long as you keep using that version. For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self- reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.
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Uploaded Sep 13, 2023 at 03:35PM EDT

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Unity Installation Fee Controversy

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