Post by Evolutionary Games in Unity developers, what are your plans after the last annoucement?

Viewing post in Unity developers, what are your plans after the last annoucement?

I assume you mean this announcement: https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

I think it's fair. Unity is still giving a lot for free. Remember, it's not only the installs, it's the installs and money you earn combined. So free games will be exempt, because they will have the installs but not the money component.

If you compare it to GameMaker, GameSalad, Clickteam Fusion, Construct - you pay an upfront fee and then again for new releases. So over a few years you might not make money from your games, but you're paying for the software. With Unity, you only start paying once you start earning.

Unreal charges a percentage of takings and it isn't capped (last time I checked). So they will coin it, if your game becomes popular.

I had played around with Godot a few years ago but it wasn't suited to the way I work - it kept crashing and losing my data. I'm sure it's improved since then, but I'm not going to risk it. Besides, the community must pay for it so the developers can continue its development. So although payment is voluntary, it isn't exactly free.

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Ink271 days ago (1 edit) (+5)

Why are INSTALLS being charged fair?

1) Unity, as far as I know, doesnt contribute to server costs of devolopers or storefronts. So downloading game is not costing them. Nor is installing it. "phoning home" is cost they are making themselves, so that doesnt count either.

2) they are trying to put the fees on gamepass game installs to Microsoft instead of devs with their latest "clarification". Good luck with that. Guess who is gonna "suffer" from that? Either we get another price hike or devs get less money from gamepass deals. And for what? shareholders gettin more money?

3) Game prices are just gonna trickle upwards. Remember that 0.20c is still 1% out of 20 dollar game. Which is per machine they install it to. So potentially 2% with steamdeck and 3% if steam library share counts for example, 4% if person has laptop too etc.

With 5 dollar game, that itch is full of, thats 4% one install, 8% two, 12% three installs. If it breaks the 200k downloads/revenue ofc.

4) Also saw tweet earlier that went basically that "imagine your game being freemium, you get to the 200k revenue. BUT your game has been downloaded something like 3 million times. We now owe Unity 20c per 2.8M installs, $560K".

Would that happen? Would Unity forgive the bill despite agreeing to the terms? I doubt it. Either start to be more agressive with freemium games or have it free forever and dont make dime (which is totally fine)

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Evolutionary Games270 days ago

The reason I'm pro Unity is because I get a lot of resources for free - not only from Unity, but also from an awesome community. Because of the size of the community, you can generally get help. I struggle with software that have small communities to get (a) the developers to take my bug reports seriously (b) help, when I don't know how to do something.

If you're making a lot of money from your game i.e. $200,000 you'd likely upgrade to Unity Pro or Enterprise. At that point the cost per install in your scenario becomes 1c or 2c.

In the meantime, those of us earning a few cents per game can create games in robust software for free.

I agree their argument is weak, but I'm ignoring that, and looking at the bigger picture. They need to make money to stay in business. And they increased the minimum earnings before you need to start paying from $100,000 to $200,000 per year. They have to make up that shortfall somehow.

From my perspective, if my game was making that kind of money, I wouldn't begrudge Unity the money because they take the risk. They say: "okay, you use the software for free and we'll carry the costs of your game development - which is considerable when you start looking at the analytics, UDP, etc. they give me for free. If you're successful, we want to share in that success, so pay us a fee then, but we'll cap our fee or reduce our rate as you grow and use more of our services."

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Maidelen270 days ago(+4)

Let's see if I can tell some things correctly: You have visual and audio resources outside of Unity as well. GDevelop has its own asset download center, with RPG Maker you have all the plugins/scripts and with Godot you have templates for a lot of things. Maybe they don't have the same community as Unity, but between veteran forums and active discord servers there's someone who has written tutorials or fixes, or people that you can talk about the engine.

... Wa,waht, what? 200.000$? In my opinion, at that point you aren't a novice if you get that by game sells. 200.000$ by sells of a indie game means to me that you are doing very well, more than the majority of the people who uses itch.io, or even Itch.io itself. (This is not an insult to Itch.io or its users. I would be insulting myself).

I don't know how to put in precise words, but, do wathever you want, I'm not someone to tell you what to do in game engines but I don't recomend you call yourself a "Pro Unity" or defend the a-lot-of-money company who doesn't know you and if it could, it would make your experience more difficult with the service if it means making more money.

Regarding Godot, you don't lose anything by giving it a try, or Gdevelop, both engines are free and open source. Note that my main engine is a paid one and is closed source, but I admire Godot and Gdevelop, both the people behind those engines and their developers. And if I stopped using a software because it suffered a crash that caused it to lose data, I wouldn't be using a computer.

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redonihunter270 days ago (1 edit) (+7)

I believe many people are not enraged for Unity trying to make money, but that they try to change their method to charge per install.

It currently to my understanding is this: if you are under 100k revenue in past 12 months, you can use Unity personal for free. If you are above, you have to use one of the subscriptions that start at roughly 2k a year. So very roughly, they are now charging like 2% ish of yearly revenue. Or less, if your game is popular.

As someone pointed out, if you have a low cost game, maybe free with ad revenue, you might clock in with millions of downloads. A hit like angry birds has 100 + million downloads. So even with the highest tier of only 1-2 cent per install we look at over a million $ in cost what previously was a couple thousand.

Oh, and from what I could dig up on their faq, the subscription fee for Unity pro + is still to be paid...

So, assuming a subscription of 10k a year and being "eglible" for that runtime fee. Having a tremendous amount of success and managing to have 1000000 downloads of your game is doubling your cost. It costs at least 1 cent, that is 10k. Oh, and if you manage to garner 2 million downloads, now your costs are not 10k for your subscription, but 10k subscription and 20k runtime fee. But 2 million are likely to get 10 million, making the yearly subscription only 10% of your costs, and having 90% of the cost being that runtime installation fee.

Small but successful devs might want to switch to an engine with more calulateable financial risks. As it is now, if you are not very careful, you might end up in a paradox situation, where success can spell out financial ruin for your gaming company.

There will be consequences. And there already are, judging from various news articles about this.

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Maidelen270 days ago(+1)

Yeah, I don't saying that the person/team/company behind a service software can't make money with it, the thing is the methods that they are gonna do to get profit.

These are cool calculations, although I'm not someone who does that kind of accounting (yet).

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redonihunter270 days ago(+3)

It is just rough estimates based on the table Unity has on their site.

The cheapest is like 1 cent per install. But it starts at 20 cent. Granted, there is a threshold, but what aspiring dev would not want to have success in the future. So even amateurs will be wary what engine to learn for future success - even if that success might not come.

The pricing model they plan to have is especially detrimental to the pay-what-you-want model popular on itch.

So if you had a very popular pwyw game and had the gigantic success of making the threshold, what would that boil down to? You used Unity personal of course, because you are one of those indie devs that have no money. And that one stays at 20 cent. So you have 1 000 000 downloads a year of your Unity personal game. 20 000 of the players tossed you a 10er for the game. Bringing you above the threshold. Your payment due to Unity? 200k. And if you have a single download more, now you lost money by having a popular game. Maths is fun.

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redonihunter270 days ago(+1)

They should change it to a percentage of sales. That would benefit them quite the same, while also not exposing some devs to financial risks.

If the only games you offer for download are making money per download, there is not much argument. They get their cent for the game, the player pays whatever the game did cost, and so on. (Plus additional costs for keeping track, that are unneccsary if they would just have kept it at sales income.)

But charging for installs is disconnecting the money the game makes from the costs. Sure, they have that threshold, but imagine a company that barely breaks even, but with 200k revenue per year. Maybe free to play with premium version. The premium gets the money. But Unity will charge for the installs of the ftp, not for the amount of money the company made.

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Eris Lord Freedom269 days ago(+1)

Whether or not it's "fair" for Unity to charge per install...

they're being very cagey about how they're going to get that number.

Example: I download a Unity game from itch.io. It's in a zip file. I unzip & click on the .exe. Is that an "install?" I put it on a flash drive and run it on a different laptop. Is that a second "install?" How can they tell? If I'm offline when I do this, how do they even know it exists?

Are Steam, Itch.io, GOG, and Epic going to give them access to the number of installations of Untitled Goose Game next year?
Right now, Unity's info on their counting method is "Just trust us, bro."

...I can't wait for the lawsuit when someone they bill demands they prove how many installations happened for that game.

And that's before we get into, "how are they going to prevent hostile bot installations" - someone who decides they hate a dev, so they rig a bot to a VPN and a cluster of virtual machines to make it look like there's 5,000 new installations. Or 50,000.

Charity bundles are exempt... what counts as a charity bundle? Does that mean any bundle, or are they picking which ones count? (Do they have ANY IDEA AT ALL how many game bundles are active at any given time? Or do they think there are, like, six game distributors on the internet and only two of them run charity bundles?) What about not-charity bundles, like the Humble Trove - those are "pay $15/month for a subscription; get a cluster of high-value games, plus keep access to a swarm of over 50 small indie games as long as you're subscribed."

How are they going to figure out whether a game has made more than the threshold? AFAIK, financial records of gaming distribution sites are not open to the public. (Has Untitled Goose Game made more than $200,000 in the last year? How would Unity know?)

They're dodging a lot of very basic questions about how they'll get the numbers they plan to use to invoice people.

Even if they had that - this is the end of Unity as the default "not sure what engine to use? Here, this is free and fairly easy to learn." Because shifting from "free forever" to "maybe we'll charge you some day, some amount that we'll decide, based on numbers that maybe we made up but we're not going to tell you any details," means it no longer works for people getting started in the industry.

(Right now, they're saying they'll charge up to 20 cents per installation. What prevents them from deciding to change that to $1 per installation next year?)

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Evolutionary Games268 days ago

Unity's analytics can tell them how many installs there are. It will only trigger an install if someone actually opens the game. So downloads, without opening it, does not count. I have a game published through Unity's UDP that have many downloads (shown by the store) - bots I assume - but Unity shows there's only 1 person who actually opened my game (I assume the tester). I had queried it with them, and they explained how their analytics works.

In contrast, Unity has no way of knowing how much the game actually earns. They will have to extrapolate that from x installs with this funding method is likely to yield x return.

Note the analytics and UDP, and their own marketing division, gives them a lot of data, and they might have implemented their pricing plan based on the data they have. This data most likely excludes small developers, but the price point of $200,000 also means most of us will never need to pay for the software.

I can foresee a scenario where someone earns on average 10c per install, and now faces a bill of 20c per install. But as far as I can determine that's only after earning $200,000, and not retrospective. Their pricing shows it is a cost per new install. So the developer at that point would need to change their pricing model or talk to Unity about it.

What concerns me is everyone is looking to currently "free" software as an alternative. That software is not free, someone is paying for it in the background. It will come down to your risk tolerance - I see using "free" software as too risky - if something happens to the sole developer, can the software continue? I don't foresee most of my games ever reaching $200,000 in earnings and I'm excited about some of the new tools Unity is developing. So I have no reason to abandon Unity. But this is a personal decision every developer must make for themselves.

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redonihunter268 days ago(+2)

Interesting. On their faqthey claim differently. Or they try to make it seem that they claim differently.

Is collecting the install data GDPR and CCPA compliant?

The method we are using to calculate installs is currently derived from aggregated data from various sources collected in compliance with all privacy laws and used to build a confidence around our estimate. If anything changes, we will provide you with notice and compliance mechanisms to assure all parties remain in compliance with applicable laws. Please note we will always work with our customers to ensure accurate billing.

What various sources were used to estimate that your tester used the game?

Will games made with Unity phone-home to track installs?

We will refine how we collect install data over time with a goal of accurately understanding the number of times the Unity runtime is distributed. Any install data will be collected in accordance with our Privacy Policy and applicable privacy laws.

So actually, they do not have the slightest clue how to collect the data, and hope they will come up with something that does not get them sued over breaking privacy laws. And this one will be tough. Will players have to agree to tos and eula of Unity now, for playing games made in Unity? Retroactivly? Because all this applies to already made games as well.

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Eris Lord Freedom268 days ago(+1)

Godot is open source. That means it's not being maintained by a sole developer - anyone can make a copy of the code; anyone can make edits. The current developer decides what goes in the main version, but anyone can develop their own fork of it - and if the developer abandons the project, or decides to inflict adware in it, someone will grab the last stable version and make a new project where other people can develop that. (Tenacity is a fork of Audacity after its hostile takeover.)

You can, of course, keep using Unity... and hope that next year they don't decide "actually it's 50 cents per install, even for free projects." Once a company has decided to squeeze money out of formerly non-paying participants in their project, they don't stop.

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