Unity Drops Its Controversial Per-Install Pricing Plan Entirely
from the about-face dept
It was almost exactly a year ago to the day that Unity updated its pricing program for its game engine in a way that seemed perfectly designed to piss everyone off. Whereas Unity was once a subscription-based game engine, rather than one which collected royalties, suddenly Unity went in the opposite direction, with per-install fees that amounted to royalties. And, worse, the company decided that this wasn’t merely a go-forward plan, but one that would be retroactive, meaning that gamemakers who built their games on Unity under one pricing structure would suddenly be forced into the new one. For gamemakers that chose very small dollar amounts at which to sell their games, the new pricing structure could literally mean that every purchase of a game could result in net-negative dollars for the creator.
The fallout was widespread, with angry developers and those in the developer ecosystem rebelling and going elsewhere for their game engines. Unity’s CEO resigned a few weeks later. The competition began marketing their own engines by using the woes of Unity. Several months after the pricing change, things got bad enough that Unity laid off a quarter of its workforce.
All of which got us to today, one year later, with Unity scrapping the new pricing structure entirely and putting things back the way they were.
Unity, maker of a popular cross-platform engine and toolkit, will not pursue a broadly unpopular Runtime Fee that would have charged developers based on game installs rather than per-seat licenses. The move comes exactly one year after the fee’s initial announcement.
In a blog post attributed to President and CEO Matt Bromberg, the CEO writes that the company cannot continue “democratizing game development” without “a partnership built on trust.” Bromberg states that customers understand the necessity of price increases, but not in “a novel and controversial new form.” So game developers will not be charged per installation, but they will be sorted into Personal, Pro, and Enterprise tiers by level of revenue or funding.
On the one hand, it’s good the company has recognized the mistake this was and has rolled it back. But one does have to wonder aloud about just how many developers will return now that the trust has been broken. The rollout of the new plan was done fairly suddenly without nearly the level of communication to customers that is needed when you have changes as drastic as these were. Sure, now the company appears to be focusing more on its customers’ desires rather than merely scraping for every last penny… but if the company can misbehave once, it can do so again.
And in this kind of business, there aren’t a lot of chances to rebuild trust once its gone. Which is probably why Unity is certainly making even more efforts towards luring developers back in.
Instead of ramping from there, the Runtime Fee is now gone, and Unity has made other changes to its pricing structure:
- Unity Personal remains free, and its revenue/funding ceiling increases from $100,000 to $200,000
- Unity Pro, for customers over the Personal limit, sees an 8 percent price increase to $2,200 per seat
- Unity Enterprise, with customized packages for those over $25 million in revenue or funding, sees a 25 percent increase.
That new structure is obviously geared directly towards the smaller indie developers who were so angry about the runtime fees previously in place.
Again, that’s good! But it’s not clear that it’s going to be enough to win back the very customers who had their trust violated in the first place.
Filed Under: developers, per-install pricing, pricing, video games
Companies: unity
Comments on “Unity Drops Its Controversial Per-Install Pricing Plan Entirely”
Trust is like a spinal cord: It only takes a moment to sever and it’ll never work the same even if you manage to repair it.
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seems to me that the only question here is how long until they do the same thing again.
Unity paid $4.4bn — over twice their annual revenue — for advertising / tracking company ironSource, and they aren’t going to let that go to waste; the per-install runtime fee was clearly designed to force developers to bundle ironSource with their games to track installs so they could pay Unity. that didn’t work out, but you can bet they’ve spent the past year thinking of another plan to make that investment pay out.
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Remember that the install fee was meant to be retroactively applied to all games. Including those where the developer no longer exists any more.
Were they expecting the storefronts like Steam, Sony, etc to force that update on games without permission from the developer ?
Were they planning to sue each individual developer, in whatever country the dev is in, to force them to include the tracking ?
Were they planning something with AI and hoping that nobody would question its accuracy ?
My guess is that the board members pushing this never thought that far ahead.
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i doubt they care about that. sure, they “lose” some revenue from existing customers they can’t enforce the terms on, but all new customers have to agree to the new terms, so they just need to wait a few years and everyone is following the new terms.
of course that didn’t work out, so i don’t know exactly what they’ll do next, but i’ll honestly be really surprised if they just leave things how they are now.
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for one, that was a STOCK trade cost ZERO dollars. you clearly don’t know enough to talk about this.
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Yep. $4.4 billion dollars in stock. And investors had to funnel an additional $2 billion of capital into Unity.
Therefore, Unity had to issue $4.4 billion in stock, watering down the investment of existing investors, who have also had to dump more money into the company. The Unity investors had to turn away a $20 billion buyout from AppLovin to make this deal.
What about the $4.4 billion being in stock instead of cash changes anything? Investors will want a return on that play.
Trust is like a spinal cord: It only takes a moment to sever and it’ll never work the same even if you manage to repair it.
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I prefer the Vince Lombardi quote: “It takes months to find a customer…seconds to lose one.”
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Being killed by a customer is a murder.
Being killed only by a spinal cord is a suicide.
And Unity has ignored customers with spinal cords, thinking it was leashes.
The fact that it took them this long to do the obvious thing tells me that the problem isn’t the CEO, but the board.
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Taking exactly a year makes me wonder if anyone in marketing was involved in the timing.
Unless your business is somehow based on Unity, nobody who rode out the fallout is ever coming back. Godot specifically is the best it’s ever been thanks to the huge increase in support from people who fled Unity, and its FOSS nature means that they can’t screw over their customers like Unity can.
Too little, too late. Unity has been floundering with half-aborted projects for years that have made the engine bloated and impossible to use. I am glad its competitors ate its lunch so thoroughly.
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I wonder how many developers who were too far along on a project to switch engines will stick with Unity for their next project.
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I’d wager it’ll be enough to keep the Unity Death Spiral going.
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They might have reached the start of a traditional death spiral. Push up prices, drive away customers, push up prices more to compensate.
Emily Litella from Saturday Night Live:
“Never mind!”
This is what happens when you hire a former EA executive, they turn your company to shit.
'Trust us', said the known liars
In a blog post attributed to President and CEO Matt Bromberg, the CEO writes that the company cannot continue “democratizing game development” without “a partnership built on trust.”
That bridge has not just been burned it’s had artillery and air strikes called down on it, the rubble further rigged with C4 that was then detonated, and what remains of that covered in radioactive salt.
They introduced an insanly terrible ‘new’ business plan and decided to make it retroactive so that it would apply even to current customers. They only backed off once the blowback was big enough and threw one person to the wolves even though it was undoubtedly a team decision, and it took them a year to come up with a ‘We’re super sorry and hope you can forgive and forget what we tried to do’ statement about how they will totally never do something like that again as soon as they think they can get away with it.
Too little, too late.
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Correction: They promised they will totally never do anything like this a third time.
This is the second time Unity has been caught making stealth modifications to the T&C to try to manufacture contractual consent for a move they knew was unpopular.
Fool me once…..
Not my dev space, but...
…the developers that I know who DO work in that space have unanimously made plans to move elsewhere. Those who were locked into Unity for existing projects are finishing those, but then they’re done. The ones who weren’t locked in have already moved in. And the ones who have projects in the concept stage aren’t even considering Unity.
These people are furious and Unity’s belated halfass attempt at bandaiding this mess has only made them angrier.
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Which just leaves live services. Projects that aren’t intended to ever end, until they suddenly do.
Switching them to a new engine sounds expensive.
Unity is a dead engine.
It needs to burn completely to the ground so NO company tries the same crap again.
They’re just waiting until some big studios commit to Unity and will bring the per-install right back.
they’ve point blank refused to sign legally-binding documents to say they can never do this. I wonder why?
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How about a studio locked into Unity because the game in question is a live service: Hearthstone.
A game made by Blizzard. Who are owned by Activision, who are in turn owned by Microsoft.
Or were you thinking of some other big studio ?
Of course, a big studio own by a major publisher means expensive lawyers. Unless they decide that it’s cheaper to just kill the live service.
Unity “threw CEO Matt Bromberg under the bus” except they made sure there was an ermine-lined pit under the bus, and he was cushioned by falling onto $50 million in cash.
Basically he took the fall for a company-wide decision and they hoped people would forgive and forget.
So they can pull the same shit a 4th time, once a few big studios commit to Unity for major projects.
democratizing lmao. Maybe way back, years ago.
Unity, meet Nokia.
I swear some execs only have the attention span to read the first half of the story about Nokia’s burning platforms memo