Unity 3D pricing structure changes - Whats your opinion?

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25 comments, last by BinaryOrange 7 years, 9 months ago

hi all,

It seems that recently unity have changed their pricing structure, which benefits some people (those who develop on a lot of different platforms) whilst simultaneously penalising others (small developers targeting just windows):

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/06/05/subscription-why/

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/273679/Unity_drops_mobile_fees_debuts_new_Plus_plan_in_a_bid_to_expand_its_reach.php

What are your opinions on this? Do any long term users of unity here have any thoughts?

Personally i don't use unity right now, my concern however is that if this price structure change proves a financial success, will other engines such as Unreal Engine follow suit, charging monthly fees again once they see that people are prepared to pay? Or, do you think that in the long term, nothing will change as far as access to game development tools goes?

I am curious to hear everyone's opinion...

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If you make less $100k, nothing changes. Personal edition is still free.
If you make less than $200k, you now get access to all platforms for $420/year (markedly cheaper than it used to be).
If you make more than 200k, it's the same price it used to be, and you no longer need to buy additional platforms.

I'm failing to see what all the fuss is about - this seems like an across the board win for the customer?

Tristam MacDonald. Ex-BigTech Software Engineer. Future farmer. [https://trist.am]

The main objection from people has been what braindigitalis pointed out; if you are only doing a PC game then your costs have gone up a fair amount - and lets not kid ourselves; you can't just recompile a PC and have it work on all the mobile platforms as a good game, nor just go 'ha! VR mode!' and have a good game either.

So those people feel like they are paying more but aren't really getting any more - if you are a mobile dev then life is indeed pretty damned peachy with this and all the added services etc you can access.

PC dev? Less so...

(This is in fact the 2nd pricing change - one was unveiled at GDC and Unity took a battering over it so they went away, reconsidered things and this is what came from it.)

As to the worry, UE4 will change I don't think that's the case.
Epic are bank rolled by a huge Chinese company, have existing contracts and produce their own games to generate income aside from UE4; and if your UE4 game hits it big then they will get PAAAAAAAAID!

So I doubt they will change; the initial fee when UE4 launched was only designed to be a temporary measure anyway, to stem the flow a bit and get things in place. Indeed I heard that the push was to release UE4 'free' as it is now from Day 1 but that was changed for Reasons.

The big change is for big developers with more than 200k$ annual revenue, and only developing for a single platform. They pay WAY more than before.

Pro sub is 125$/month if they haven't changed it. That is 1'500 per YEAR. Yes, that is equivalent to just the basic Pro Price before... if we forget

1) Even with the faster product cycle for Unity 4/5 (2 Years), you are still paying double as much for two years.

2) Before, you got half the price for an upgrade, which was a nice incentive for Unity Pro devs to stick with Unity for another cycle, and get Pro again if they didn't had to because of the annual revenue

Now the Price for a two year "cycle" (Unity said no more full versions of Unity, more minor versions though) is flat out 3000$! For a single seat! That is 4x as much as it was before for longtime Pro customers!

Royalities suddenly look like less of a problem, at least if you are one of the devs just scratching at that 200k$ threshold. 10 Seats are 15k$ annualy... Even if we forget the min threshold for royalitites in UE4 to kick in, 5% of 200k$ is 10k$. Even with just 10 seats, UE4 is cheaper in this one case.

Good thing is they changed their mind about the Plus sub. Looks like it gets almost all the perks of the Pro sub (all the ones Indie devs would care about anyway), yet at a way more reasonable price point of 35$/month. All things considered (200k$/year revenue cap for example), that is not to bad.

Result is that the Plus sub costs you 840$ per 2 year "cycle" per Seat. That is still a price hike (about 40% increase for devs that did preorder upgrades, about 15% increase for the others), but not nearly as bad as the Pro sub. With the added perk to get additional platforms for free, if you need that.

I dislike subs, but as long as the total Price is not (much) higher than before, I don't care. Some people will pay less (mobile devs releaseing to many platforms, studios working on many games for different platforms), some people will pay more (big studios with higher than 200$k revenue and lots of seats just developing for PC will be taking the biggest hit).

If the more regular income allows Unity to prevent the big splash releases and all the bugginess that comes with releasing features to early, I am all for it. Unity 5.0 was a BIG mess, I hope Unity will NEVER EVER repeat that again.

Of course, financially this makes Unity again less attractive compared to Unreal Engine 4. Unity better starts improving their engines quality and their QA, or at some point not even the advantages Unity does have over Unreal can make up for the high price of ownership. Its nice that they want to make the splash screen forced unto freeloaders less intrusive, but its still a forced splash screen.

Personally, I most probably will go for a Plus sub. I don't mind the cost of that sub (wouldn't pay for Pro though, unless I would be forced to), and some things are just a nono for me which come with the free version (light Theme - ugh. Splash Screens - Yikes!). I will for certain stay with Unity for the time being given that Unreal Engine 4 didn't really seem to be a very productive alternative for me personally. For now. Another Unity 5.0 debacle, and I am gone for good.

Even if you're just a windows only developer, so you've suffered a price increase... assuming you're doing gamedev as a full-time job, Unity is still far cheaper than Unreal...

Even if you're just a windows only developer, so you've suffered a price increase... assuming you're doing gamedev as a full-time job, Unity is still far cheaper than Unreal...

Care to elaborate?

Given that not every developer out there will make millions in revenue, yet Unity charges a flat cost PER SEAT, I think this not something where you can make a broad statement like.

Sure, still Unity is cheaper for many devs in the lower ends of the revenue scale. It certainly is cheaper for devs that are moving into the higher regions of revenue. Yet there are many scenarios, especially in the lower end revenue area, where Unreals model just makes more sense.

FAR cheaper is too strong a word unless you are getting into territory where you NEED to pay for a full Unreal license to avoid paying through the nose for those royalities.

Generally speaking I'm against renting my tools instead of buying them.

Generally speaking I'm against renting my tools instead of buying them.

Same here, if I don't own the license, i'm beholden to the creator when they decide to increase the price, sell the product off e.g. to adobe (ugh), or even worse if they go bankrupt, or into administration, or if they wrap up the product, and the activation/update servers go down.

I'd sooner own a perpetual license for any software...

The same goes for activation and need for sign-in even for perpetually licensed products. Usually this is a pain and can be a business risk if you're wanting to make a living out of the software.

We had a program at work which was a one-time payment unless you wanted to upgrade. At some later date they went to yearly subscription, and what's worse, if your program auto updated itself it would then update to the subscription version that would start demanding money.

Needless to say i disabled its update facility at our border, and told everyone to never update it or ever give that company money ever again.

Part of me is worried that the same could happen to windows 10 some day, but that's an off topic discussion for another day.

Even if you're just a windows only developer, so you've suffered a price increase... assuming you're doing gamedev as a full-time job, Unity is still far cheaper than Unreal...


Care to elaborate?
Given that not every developer out there will make millions in revenue, yet Unity charges a flat cost PER SEAT, I think this not something where you can make a broad statement like.
Sure, still Unity is cheaper for many devs in the lower ends of the revenue scale. It certainly is cheaper for devs that are moving into the higher regions of revenue. Yet there are many scenarios, especially in the lower end revenue area, where Unreals model just makes more sense.

FAR cheaper is too strong a word unless you are getting into territory where you NEED to pay for a full Unreal license to avoid paying through the nose for those royalities.

I made the assumption that you're doing it as a full-time job -- not an "indie dev" who does it part time as an expensive hobby, but an "indie dev" as in self employed businessman who does it to pay their mortgage and feed and clothe their children, or pay their rent and fund their vacation savings account.

Below is the transition point where one is cheaper than the other, given some more assumptions:

A "starving artist" indie dev has expenses of about 30k a year, which with ~30% income tax we'll say is $43k gross. That'll cover their San Francisco sharehouse and their hipster coffee habit.

An "average developer" in the US expects a salary of $80k a year. They've quit their job at EA because they want to actually profit from their work instead of some executive earning millions.

They're making a Windows game and selling on Steam, who take a 30% cut.

The aim is to break even, by making at retail the salary cost divided by 0.7 in order to cover Steam's cut... but the cost of the engine isn't taken into account yet.

Unreal takes 5% of the retail price. Unreal also gives you a $3k threshold per quarter, but we're going to assume that your game gets 95% of it's sales within the first month of launch, and I'm ignoring the 5% "tail" sales that would extend into the next quarter - so I'm only applying that threshold once per game. In reality, if you're making less than one game per quarter, the threshold will apply to your "tail" sales too, so you'll save a bit more than what I've shown here.

Unity costs $125 multiplied by number of staff and number of months.

The table below is the cost of the engine, given that you've made your sales target of barely enough to cover owed wages.

e.g. 2 "average" devs for 12 months is $160k. Unity costs a flat $3k, but the retail take in order to earn that $160k is ~$229k, so Unreal's 5% is ~$11, minus the $3k threshold, which comes to $8428. So in that situation (shown at the 12 month, average, 2 staff cells), Unity is $5k cheaper.

Orange situations have Unreal as the cheapest option, blue situations have Unity as the cheapest option.

bEg4fLt.png

Unreal is only really cheaper in the cases where you don't expect to make a (USA) respectable wage, and either are a lone starving artist, or a group of them pumping out a new game every quarter... or where you're not actually running a business, and are just making games as a hobby. In almost every other situation, Unity is far cheaper.

And "millions in revenue" isn't actually all that much for an independent game these days. If 8 experienced developers want to quit their jobs spend a full year making a game, then $1M at retail is probably around their "break even" point. With minimal expenses (it's likely they'd have spent considerable money on rent, HW, SW, utilities, marketing, exhibiting at PAX, etc...), they'd make about $80k each, which is the average US gamedev salary. Given the huge likelyhood that they fail to make any money at all, it's a much safer bet to just keep their jobs and not "go indie" :(

I fall into the hobbyist not making a living bracket. I spend a bit of spare time when time permits on my games, and if I ever made any money it would be more than I've ever made from games in over 15 years of on and off gamedev.

I've made more money being a self employed database software developer and freelance computer consultant.

In the current climate going full indie and jacking in my day job to do it is a risk I would never wish on my family when I have young mouths to feed...

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