More fun developments! An employee (developer) posted (anonymously using a new forum account) the following on the Unity forums.
The mere fact that an employee feels the need to take direct action like this is a very bad sign of the current state of in-company politics.
What a mess.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Installs
Installs are meant to be per unique user.
CI, tests, and other automations will not be charged
We don’t want to charge for fraudulent installs (install bombs, piracy, etc.)
There will not be an embedded “phone home” mechanism
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.
We will not charge for charities
For subscription services, Unity will talk with the subscription service’s distributor, not the game creator
There will be an online calculator very soon ™ to model your potential costs
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.
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:
Address point 5 above so we don’t punish success
Reverse course to charge per-install fees to already published games (that still generate sizable revenue)
And change the terms to guarantee that a similar retroactive price change can never happen again!
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.
