Brandon Sheffield wrote:


I'll break down some of the most important factors in this discussion:

- Unity personal, which is free, now cannot be used offline.
- all tiers of unity now require developers to pay a flat fee of a few cents for every game that's installed
- Unity plus (which is going away), and pro, and enterprise levels all cost a subscription, and most professional developers have to use it.
different tiers of downloads and income determine how much you pay.
- Unity has never made money off subscriptions, it has always made money off its ads platform (which you see in f2p mobile games, etc)
- There's a discount if you use Unity Services.
- This money is meant to help with runtime issues when they can't even get their base stable version to run without crashing.

So the problem becomes this: they are already charging a subscription, and now a per install cost on top of that. What's the point of the subscription if we're also paying another charge on top of that? Why wouldn't it be free at that point?

Also, it's on developers to sort through these two types of costs, meaning Unity has added a bunch of admin work for us, while making it extremely costly for games like Vampire Survivor to sell their game at the price they do. Vampire Survivor's edge was their price, now doing something like that is completely unfeasible. Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. As a developer who starts a game under the personal plan, because you're not sure how well it'll do, you're punished, astoundingly so, for being a breakout success. Not to mention that sales will now be more costly for developers since Unity is not asking for a percentage, but a flat fee. If I reduce the price of my game, the price unity asks for doesn't decrease.

This all comes out of the developer's pocket, but publishers won't want to be on the hook for it either - expect fewer games to be pitched with Unity going forward.

And NOW consider bundles. Each install or activation counts as something that must be paid. We did the itch.io bundle for ukraine. That was approximately a million games given out per developer. If all those were installed, developers would owe $200,000 just for having given their game to charity. It makes charity bundles completely unfeasible.

On top of this there is no minimum cooldown period after they change their fee, so they can raise it as they like, whenever they like. Effectively we're all locked into an upward-only, per-install pricing model that can change whenever Unity decides they need extra revenue to make their stock look healthy. No developer would have decided to use Unity if this was the business model from the start.
It proves that they're willing to completely change things up with no notice. January is barely 4 months away, and this decision will affect titles that have been in development for years, and haven't factored this into their budgets. If we had the option, we'd change now, but we're too far into development. Unreal Engine, to their credit, only holds you to the EULA you signed up for, not whatever they've decided most recently.

I want to double down on this point - we did not sign up for this. Frankly the Unity Plus tier, which we currently use, which is going away presently, wasn't even around when we signed up. Oh, and did I mention we're automatically being switched to the more expensive Pro from Plus if we don't cancel our subscription? If the agreement changes underneath you as you're making the game, you can't budget for it, and trust is completely lost. We did not plan for this, and it screws us massively on Demonschool, which is tracking to be our most successful game. You might say poor you, but again, we did not sign up for this and have no option to say no, since we're close to release and this change is 4 months out. You can't simply remake an entire game in another engine when you've been working on it for 4+ years.