Unity Introduces New Runtime Fee allowing them to charge per installation beginning in 2024

[Brooksie359]

5 hours ago, noenken said:

So, if I understand this correctly ... Unity just started a bar fight against

 

• Epic Games (Fall Guys)
• Nintendo (Pokemon Go)
• Activision-Blizzard (Hearthstone)
• Disney (Marvel Snap)
• and basically China (Genshin Impact)

 

And these are just examples of singular games. I bet Playstation, X-Box and Steam are absolutely stoked about the great news as well.

 

There is no coming back from this for Unity. I don't even think they could fix this or even survive it if they do a 180 right now.

 

They have not pissed against the wind, they are currently actively projectile vomiting downwards while falling ... after uppercutting themselves out of a plane without a parachute.

 

Also love this:

 

 

Yeah it almost feels like someone cheating on them and trying to make the relationship work after asking for forgiveness. They have basically broke people's trust in them and probably makes most developers wary of using them as an engine because they could easily pull something like this again and if you are mid production on a game in unity you are basically screwed. 

[Quackers101]

RIP, now people are harassing everyone and making bomb threats.
Some so serious they started to cancel meetings and offices.

[Quackers101]

oh god, rumors of there being sneaky deals behind the scenes.
to switch to something like "levelplay". but got to wait to see where that goes if true.

not to mention how older games with older TOS was impacted with these unity changes.

[Thaldor]

39 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

not to mention how older games with older TOS was impacted with these unity changes.

This is actually something really interesting here because the TOS change that makes it possible for Unity to apply the runtime fees retroactively is from April 2023. Could be interesting court cases over the applicability of TOS's if there isn't a loophole how Unity can apply that April change retroactively into all of the old games done under way older terms.

 

At least what I know while in the US TOS is almost next to the declaration of independence in it's holding, in EU it's much more like "well, it's a binding contract BUT that part is against the law and/or that second part is just completely unfair, so, we will put this paper here into this nice little shredder and see what our laws say about this matter". Especially EU side will be coming interesting if there was just individual people without companies taking this to the court because then we would go to more into the consumer vs. corporation side of things which has way stricter margins what companies can demand from consumer.

 

E: And I would like to welcome Apple developers to develop for the Apple Vision Pro with...... Unity! Poor people, it's either to make your own engine or use Unity, Unreal or any other VR ready game engine (at least now) doesn't have Apples blessing to be used for Vision development.

 

Oh and another thing that hasn't been brought up that heats the discussion: Unity has ended Unity Plus licensing and while Plus members can buy Pro license for a year with the price of Plus license, after that the cheapest more serious license for Unity will be the Pro that is $2,040/year while Plus has been $399/year. This far if you have wanted the Unity Pro features like own splash screen, release on consoles, Unity Mars tools (for native AR/MR, these are kind of... well, they work but you can live without them), Havok, crash and error reporting, cloud diagnostics and some lighting and other things and you have been a small developer (<$200,000/year profit) you can have had more affordable license to release more professional looking game, NOT ANYMORE better get used to the kneecapped Free license or get back to MacDonald's to make that $2,040/year or $185/month. And yeah, they are still taking that 5% but you will get a lot cheaper runtime fees.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Thaldor said:

 

 

Oh and another thing that hasn't been brought up that heats the discussion: Unity has ended Unity Plus licensing and while Plus members can buy Pro license for a year with the price of Plus license, after that the cheapest more serious license for Unity will be the Pro that is $2,040/year while Plus has been $399/year. This far if you have wanted the Unity Pro features like own splash screen, release on consoles, Unity Mars tools (for native AR/MR, these are kind of... well, they work but you can live without them), Havok, crash and error reporting, cloud diagnostics and some lighting and other things and you have been a small developer (<$200,000/year profit) you can have had more affordable license to release more professional looking game, NOT ANYMORE better get used to the kneecapped Free license or get back to MacDonald's to make that $2,040/year or $185/month. And yeah, they are still taking that 5% but you will get a lot cheaper runtime fees.

 

Lets' do some math, because people always forget math:

Cost to license engine itself: $5000/yr

Cost to put games on iOS/iPadOS : $100/yr + 30% of all revenue in the app + 0.20 per install

Cost to put games on Android : 30% of all revenue in the app + 0.20 per install

Cost to put games on Windows/Steam: 0$ + 15% (Steam) + 0.20 per install

Cost to put games on Nintendo and Playstation: Likely the same as Android

 

So if you develop with Unreal, you might be losing 35% of your revenue, where as if you develop with Unity you might end up having to pay $5000, per year to maintain a free app, and if that app isn't regularly bringing in $500/mo you might just withdraw the app from all platforms to avoid having to keep paying Unity.

 

35% of 0 is still 0.

 

That does seem to explain why so many Japanese F2P games are sunset, because they can't justify paying for the engine fees to begin with unless it's making money hand over fist.

 

In an ideal situation, the developer would just have the choice of picking one of these license models:

a) 0$ per mo + 0$ of revenue = Game engine will display game engine advertisements (splash screen/startup screen and always show the engine name in the titlebar/task list) and require always-on telemetry. Game is F2P without microtransactions

b) $X per developer seat + X$ per subscriber + 0% of revenue = Game is a MMO/subscription

c) X$ per developer seat + 0% of revenue = Game is a F2P with microtransactions

d) 0$ per developer seat + X% of revenue = Game is a Retail Indie game without DLC

e) X$ per developer seat + X% of revenue = Game is a AAA game with DLC

 

At no point "runtime" should ever be a thing, because this unfairly punishes games that become popular that don't want to have to become subscription/lootbox-hell games just to maintain themselves.

 

Like it could be said that this runtime fee is an attempt to turn all Unity games into subscription games and kill all "free to play" games.

 

I don't see why Unity even feels entitled to a runtime fee. Adobe didn't even have the balls to do this with Flash, and had Adobe done that, Flash would have never had any install base. It's unheard of.

 

[Thaldor]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

-snip-

Just couple notions:

- Unity license is "per seat". As in you pay that $2,040/year/seat so if your studio has 10 developers officially you need to pay $20,400/year for Unity Pro licenses +5% revenue after $200,000 profit on game and then the runtime fee after $200,000 revenue and 200,000 installs. Unofficially you can get by with one paid Unity license and just use one PC to do the builds.

 

- Console development is expensive AF. Not only you need the Unity license but the revenue share is up to 50% if you have physical sales and you have all kind of fees for distributing patches and whatever the console manufacturer finds out to be feeable, like you almost get fee for fee of feeing you. Not only that you pay for the release and the game engine but if you are going with more than indie launch you need to pay for localization and kind of "reparations" for Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo (they want to make sure your game is fitting to the markets and they need a bit guarantees that if your game gets them trouble, they ain't paying that completely from their wallet), this is more AAA stuff but still something to keep in mind.

 

-For anyone running a bit bigger operation all of this is pennies, you pay way more to license Photoshop and stuff like 3Ds Max and the hardware than you pay to license Unity. But Unity has always been more the "small" engine for indies and already only the runtime fee is good scare to not make the next Flappy Bird or anything that may bring you $200,000 in few days as it blows up and the ads roll. The removal of affordable Plus license is really a bad kicker because going from $399 to $2,040 is pretty steep jump and if you have even a little confidence in your product that $0.20 per install after 200,000 installs vs. progressively smaller fee is a bit extortion.

 

-Pretty much any volume sale strategy with Unity is now dead. Making cheaper early access with lower price and hope enough people buy it and give you more budget to develop is dead.

 

-There's that big word called "revenue". Is it more profit or net revenue still remains a bit negotiable thing.

 

- Unsurprisingly Unity has pretty much since Unreal 4 been the more expensive option out of the two. Unlike Unity, Unreal 4 coming with the same 5% revenue split made the big separation from Unity that has been a bit taboo when talking about Unity, Unreal only has two licenses, the "free" one and then the Enterprise one. You didn't need to pay even that $399/year/seat to get the same Unreal 4 as AAA studio gets (minus the enterprise benefits like on-site/personal support, getting rid of the 5% split, negotiable things that just bring more value to the deal). There's no strings attached, no "this feature is only available on Pro version", no bullshit, just "here's the engine, go and do your thing, if you make it extraordinary huge, we will call you". You can have 200 seat studio developing on Unreal without paying a cent to Epic before they find out you have reached the revenue cap and need to pay the 5%.

[Stahlmann]

Great, that means customers have another weapon against tone-deaf developers: Hate-installing their games over and over to have Unity charge them on our behalf.

/s

[Kisai]

37 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

Just couple notions:

- Unity license is "per seat". As in you pay that $2,040/year/seat so if your studio has 10 developers officially you need to pay $20,400/year for Unity Pro licenses +5% revenue after $200,000 profit on game and then the runtime fee after $200,000 revenue and 200,000 installs. Unofficially you can get by with one paid Unity license and just use one PC to do the builds.

 

We're just going to assume that developers aren't explicitly trying to cheat Unity, but given my experience with enterprise software, usually it's "no install of anything unless you absolutely need it, use free option when available"

 

So it is entirely possible that everyone working on the game at present has Unity installed, but only the build machines actually have a license on them. Everyone else likely works on their parts outside of Unity unless they are actually running the builds. (C# can be worked on in Visual Studio, and Art/sound assets can be worked on in their respective tools.)

 

Like bean-counter logic at work here, I would be telling developers that all Unity projects are not yet in a shipping state to consider stopping and switching to Unreal immediately, and any free2play games are now banned from using Unity.

 

Nintendo, which promotes Unity (and only Unity) is likely going to be furious about these changes, as it also makes the Switch as an undesirable platform to develop for unless you have an Unreal Engine pipeline.

 

And using Unreal to do 2D stuff is some massive overkill. 

[SolarNova]

Well if anything, atleast it will encourage devs to move to a better Engine, resulting in 'hopefully' better games. The obvious example being Unreal Engine, with its latest versions opening up the possibility to very good looking and performing games. We all know how slow game devs are to move to a superior Engine due to associated costs. They'll milk an old engine for as long as possible even if any given game could look, play, and perform better on a different engine.

 

ofc it could also encourage them to a worse engine ... but lets be optimistic

[PocketNerd]

On 9/13/2023 at 12:25 AM, KaitouX said:

How much money would Unity get from Among Us alone if it was released after those changes?

Think bigger…

 

Genshin Impact

[Avocado Diaboli]

I just had another thought that I don't think has been explored yet. Most of the discussion has been surrounding consequences for developers. The other side of the coin is what effect this has on customers.

 

Steam currently honors downloads of games you've bought that have been removed from sale for one reason or another, like music licences running out. Now let's imagine a scenario where a game has declined in popularity that much that the developers are seeing more installs than sales could reasonably cover. At that point, it makes sense to pull the game from the service entirely. By that I don't mean just discontinuing the sale of a game, but outright removing access to the installation files from Steam's servers outright. Any second they stay on that server while the game isn't generating revenue makes a developer liable to pay the install fee to Unity. 

 

So what future will this introduce: Will Valve and other store fronts make good on those caveats in their terms of service that you're technically only buying a licence to access something and that access could get revoked at any point? Does it make sense for Valve to even sell Unity games if that's something they potentially could have to deal with in the future? Does it make sense for customers to buy Unity games, if they could potentially run the risk of losing access to them? What does this mean for game preservation? Are Unity going to release their grip after a certain period so the games can be properly archived?

 

The way I see it, unless Unity make a complete 180 here, buying a game made with that engine in the future puts you on thin ice as a customer. And if enough people become aware of that consequence, this could result in a massive backfiring for Unity, because no customers means games not reaching the threshold for the payout, not enough installs to levy the fee either and the revenue they're hoping to generate from this move will not come to pass. It's almost as if Unity want to not only get rid of their customers, but also their customers' customers.

[NobleGamer]

Non-update from Unity:

Quote

@unity: We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.

Source: https://x.com/unity/status/1703547752205218265

[jagdtigger]

On 9/14/2023 at 9:16 PM, Thaldor said:

Could be interesting court cases over the applicability of TOS's if there isn't a loophole how Unity can apply that April change retroactively into all of the old games done under way older terms.

Well some constitutions flat-out prohibit any retroactive effect so it will be an interesting mess....

[Quackers101]

Stuff is changing all the time, and nobody is happy and unity are still sinking. which sucks for the gaming market, but other engines could get some boosts, but not against unreal. You do have a lot of custom tailored engines to cryengine. but yeah.

 

a bit different content to some posts above.

[Poinkachu]

19 hours ago, NobleGamer said:

Non-update from Unity:

Source: https://x.com/unity/status/1703547752205218265

Pretty sure the "talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners" should've been done before throwing shit towards the fan.

 

Anyway, does this makes companies can try to make their rival goes bankrupt ?

[porina]

Quote

Under the tentative new plan, Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million and said that installations counted toward reaching the threshold won’t be retroactive, according to recording of the meeting reviewed by Bloomberg.

Quote

One of the most controversial elements of the policy concerned how Unity would track installations of its software. Although the company first said it would use proprietary tools, Whitten said Monday management will rely on users to self-report the data.

Some key points from the Bloomberg article a couple posts up.

 

The partially addresses two of the problems I saw that were needed. A revenue cap means f2p games can still exist without being destroyed by install counts. I still dislike the metric of "installs" as opposed to copies sold, or accounts used in game if f2p for example.

 

This might "save" Unity for projects that are already well into the dev process, but the question remains if devs will try switching to other engines for new works going forwards.

[thechinchinsong]

3 hours ago, porina said:

Some key points from the Bloomberg article a couple posts up.

 

The partially addresses two of the problems I saw that were needed. A revenue cap means f2p games can still exist without being destroyed by install counts. I still dislike the metric of "installs" as opposed to copies sold, or accounts used in game if f2p for example.

 

This might "save" Unity for projects that are already well into the dev process, but the question remains if devs will try switching to other engines for new works going forwards.

At this point I think the general fiscal changes to their payment changes are actually decent, where they are still raising prices but it seems to not be outrageous anymore. The pain points come from literally everything else, like communication to the community, installation vs other metrics used, timeline for changes, etc. It doesn't help that Unity was already facing some negative image issues in recent times, which like you said, have caused devs to question their relationship with Unity, especialy for future projects.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

Unity went Public with an IPO on on september 2020, it was on borrowed time since then.

Insiders have been getting fat bonuses and unloading stocks for years after the IPO, while the company is deep in red, reporting a billion dollar loss per year (https://s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/files/doc_financials/2023/q2/2023_Q2-Shareholder-Letter_vF.pdf). Now, why are executive getting bonuses while the company is tanking is not obvious to me, and to me it looks as if this was an exit on IPO money all along. I suspect for the people involved it could have been a company making toasts for all they care.

  

On 9/15/2023 at 5:23 AM, Kisai said:

At no point "runtime" should ever be a thing, because this unfairly punishes games that become popular that don't want to have to become subscription/lootbox-hell games just to maintain themselves.

If you are really charitable, you could see this as a ploy from the ex-EA executive to force all games built on unity to stop "undermonetize" their games. All developers would add a microtransaction shop and make their unity game a grindy pay to win casino, to milk more money out of unity games, and some of that extra money would be pocketed by unity.

I suspect the ex-EA executive cannot even conceptualize the idea that developers exist that want to build a good game at a fair price. In his mind is just idiots leaving money on the table that could easily be taken.

[tkitch]

I thought this whole unity debacle smelled familiar...

And it was:

 

For reference:  WotC was threating to revoke the OGL (Open Gaming License) from all of it's products, and charge creators royalties to even say their products worked with D&D.  And the community backlash was /beyond/ epic.  

 

WotC *had* to walk it back, and quickly, cuz it was turning into an absolute disaster for them  

[Kisai]

15 hours ago, tkitch said:

For reference:  WotC was threating to revoke the OGL (Open Gaming License) from all of it's products, and charge creators royalties to even say their products worked with D&D.  And the community backlash was /beyond/ epic.  

 

WotC *had* to walk it back, and quickly, cuz it was turning into an absolute disaster for them  

WotC had to walk it back because there is no way to un-publish material. Literately trying to do this would vaporize the secondary market and every D&D project in existence.

 

Like it is a common thing to stream D&D on twitch and youtube. Doing that would result in nuking those videos and the streamers wouldn't be able to "make their own campaigns"

 

Literately what does WotC own that wasn't previously part of LOTR? What is traditional European, Asian or Native American lore? You can't tell me that WotC has a trademark on every single race, monster, weapon, in existence. It's just not viable to be that greedy.

 

A genericized d20 RPG is a thing. Many exist. TTRPG's and CRPG's don't have to be D&D, and many people stick to D&D simply because the mechanics are a known thing. People are familiar with it. Nobody is gonna learn a new 7000 page Dungeon Master manual full of rules and lore for everything just to avoid saying "Dungeons and Dragons", or "DM"

https://trademarks.justia.com/863/75/dm-86375868.html

 

No, the most likely scenario when a company tries to asset control over user-generated content derived from their permissive IP, is that people abandon the IP entirely. Patreon tried to do this, X formerly known as Twitter is trying to do this.

 

[Stahlmann]

They can walk it back all the want. Point is, the damage is already done. Everyone now knows Unity has no problem in altering the deal retrospectively. No (sane) developer will take this gamble with any future projects.

[Thaldor]

Going through the "fun" thing that is called Unity licensing I just found out something interesting. "Interesting", not surprising since the whole quest started from remembering that Unity has revenue limits on their licenses that were earlier $100,000 for Free/Personal, $200,000 for Plus in the past 12 months, as in, if your game/company makes more than the limit, you HAVE TO buy the next license. Now that the Plus license is gone the Free/Personal license cap has been raised to $200,000...

 

...Then who does pay the 0.20c/install when it comes into action only after the game has been installed more than 200,000 times AND made more than $200,000 in the past 12 months when if you have revenue over $200,000 in the past 12 months, you need to buy the Pro license which will then move you over to the progressive runtime fee which is completely pennies?

The Pro license however moves the goal posts of the runtime fee, now you need to pay the fee only after 1,000,000 installs AND after making $1,000,000, at which point it pretty much comes into question do you wanna pay the $2,040/year/seat for Pro license or send couple emails and negotiate the Enterprise license that halves the runtime fees to pocket money.

 

There's a thing thou in the Unity license system that makes this REAL bad. The thing is that you actually buy the Unity license for continuous support or for the next project. As in, you can make a game that can earn you millions on Unity Free/Personal license and Unity won't come and bang on your door demanding you to buy a license BUT if you continue to use Unity Editor after that THEN you must buy the license. You also don't need to maintain a license once you have stopped working on the game.

Unity doing these changes so they work retroactively is the key here, at least after the April TOS change that made it possible for Unity to change their TOS retroactively however they want means that any Unity game released after April is under the runtime fee, depending on the court where Unity would take the older games the chances are that any game ever made with Unity would be under the fee.

However now we have the problem under which license a game has been released and what license applies to it. As in, if you release a game under Free license and for the next game you get the Pro license, is the first game still under Free license and so applicable to the higher runtime fees and vice versa, if you released a game under Unity Pro and then dropped your license, is the game still under Pro license or falls under the Free license and higher fees?

 

[TINFOIL HAT]

I would believe the real thing behind was more the removal of the Plus license than the runtime fee. Unity never had dreams to hold on to the runtime fee but as people are as stupid as they are, they just jumped to the runtime fee like a pack of starving wolves without noticing the other things Unity is doing. While the developers falling to the canyon of $100,000-$200,000 can now use the Free license because the raised revenue limit. BUT Unity Free/Personal isn't the same thing as Unity "Pro", it lacks features and there we have it, basicly making actual good game release with Unity (trust me, you don't want to release a game under Free Unity, msotly because the splash screen is dead giveaway that you use Unity with Free license) the price was raised, multiplied even.

 

And yet, no one barks on that. Hardly even a whisper because everyone is fighting against the runtime fee that is so outrageous that it's odd they even gambled it.

[/TINFOIL HAT]

[Kisai]

3 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

 

I would believe the real thing behind was more the removal of the Plus license than the runtime fee. Unity never had dreams to hold on to the runtime fee but as people are as stupid as they are, they just jumped to the runtime fee like a pack of starving wolves without noticing the other things Unity is doing. While the developers falling to the canyon of $100,000-$200,000 can now use the Free license because the raised revenue limit.

Doesn't matter. What needs to happen is to roll back all this bullshit to 2021 if they want to be seen as credible again. ALL of it.

 

Neither the site formerly known as Twitter, nor Reddit rolled back their stupid API changes, and I don't expect Unity to either. These numbskulls running these companies like vultures would not be missed if they were fired.

 

[Stahlmann]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Doesn't matter. What needs to happen is to roll back all this bullshit to 2021 if they want to be seen as credible again. ALL of it.

 

Neither the site formerly known as Twitter, nor Reddit rolled back their stupid API changes, and I don't expect Unity to either. These numbskulls running these companies like vultures would not be missed if they were fired.

Twitter and Reddit got away with it because ultimately they cater to short-sighted consumers. Both of these controversies have been forgotten within 2 weeks of it all happening because 99% of the outcry came from people that were not directly affected, and just white-knighting for a few 3rd party apps.

 

Unity on the other hand is business to business, where trust is a much more important factor. Because this impacts everyone's bottom line this will not be so easily forgotten. Would you start building a new project in Unity right now, knowing what they just did and with your money on the line?

 

Even if they roll it all back, i suspect that many developers will jump ship in the short to medium term.

[AndreiArgeanu]

Unity getting rammed again. Hit after hit. At least there's now greater support again for open source projects like GODOT and FNA-XNA. Although FNA is more oriented to replicating Microsoft XNA more so.