New Unity Pricing Has Leaked

all right so according to a leak from Bloomberg basically Unity is going to do what unreal is doing um it says here Unity overhauls controversial controversial price hike after game developers Revolt video game tool maker Unity said Monday it's backtracking on major aspects of a controversial price hike telling staff in an all hands meeting that it's now considering changing changes including a cap on potential fees under the tentative new Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game's revenue for customers making over a million bucks and this is important guys it said that installations counted towards reaching the threshold won't be retroactive um this this conversation in particular about retroactive game sales but for example I have two games released on every platform they were made with unity pinstrip and never song do I retroactively owe money to Unity uh

well the answer is no to me it was obvious that this was no from the beginning of course not I mean that's not I don't even know if that's legal for them to require me to pay it's like if uh Papa John's Pizza said hey by the way we're changing the prices of our pizza every Pizza you bought for the last 33 years Thomas you owe an additional dollar that's not legal you can't do that however this does this does um shed light on how poorly un has communicated with us now it's not only a communication issue there's there's there's several other issues here and we're going to talk about that in a second before we talk about that guys I did want to let you know there's a link below it's a free course um I'm not going to make money off you from this it's totally free I just want you guys to succeed whether you're using gdau Unreal unity game maker it doesn't matter whatever engine you're using you can make six figures with just a demo um I've done this I think five different times um there's a variety of ways to make money and I'm going to show you how to do it it's totally free click below I

just want to see you succeed okay let's go let's compare their communication skills with unreal's communication skills so this is unreal's um license uh uh page it basically describes the the unreal free license okay they give us a very detailed breakdown of exactly what payment is going to look like okay so for example the following simplified examples illustrate how royalty alternative alternative exclusion work your publisher pays you $100,000 in advance on a royalty product you are developing you do not owe any royalty payments on the advance because you have not earned a million dollars in lifetime gross revenue they continue notice how they're being very specific here giving us actual real world examples of how exactly we're going to owe money to Unreal okay Unity did not do this in their announcement and they should have they should have given us an actual equation or example your publisher pays you $1.1 million on a

royalty product you are developing that the publisher May recoup against future sales of your royalty product notice how they're going into the very nitty-gritty here these are questions that real game developers who work with Publishers who get advances are actually thinking you owe only $5,000 to Epic for that Advance 5% of $100,000 because you do not owe royalties on the first million okay so all these questions that pop up in game developers heads for example okay if I make over a million do I owe 5% on the million no you only owe it on the 100,000 so as you can see they're very precise about that 5% okay now let's go back to the leak here I'm pretty sure Unity is going to do this exact structure okay however they're going to try and give us an olive branch give game developers an olive branch and say hey we're actually better than unreal we're 4% not 5% for customers over making a million bucks

now what is the problem here okay man I hate to say it because I've met John I've talked to John I've I think I had an uh 45 minute conversation with John in he was really a nice guy incredibly nice guy I liked him a lot he was fun uh he was funny he was conversational he was sweet it seemed I was in the unity offices with him and he seemed like he had good rapport with the team however the problem here is yes you can say all day long and and and leak the leaks are kind of frustrating to me because I'm pretty sure Unity is PR team leaked this on purpose um but this 4% um no matter how low it goes 1% 0% it doesn't matter because the leadership here um has lost uh rapport with the development the the developers right so you can you can

change your pricing structure all day you can backpedal all day but now developers are concerned about the future they do not know what the future holds because the leadership is the same so if the leadership is the same then developers are going to wonder okay what's the pricing structure going to be is it going to be 4% for 12 months is it going to be 4% for 24 months or is it going to be 4% for two months and then it's slowly going to go up and it's going to sort of happen secretly so that developers don't really know what to expect Again Games guys they take forever to make i' i' I've spent Five Years on one game before um our current game has taking two years again these are built in in unity the problem here is that um if if it's 4% this year is it going to be 10% by the time I'm done with my game that's the real struggle okay and when you have leadership that has lost Rapport and people have lost faith in that leadership they're going to be scared to make make that long-term

investment in the software again unity's tweet here clarifying their statement we have heard you we apologized for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused well it's caused more than confusion right um and and now frankly everybody's even more confused because they've backpedal and the reason why is because when you you're constantly making changes in over the course of a week you lo you just basically create this very unstable environment again it's like the stock market okay I talked about this yesterday in my video it's like the stock market if pricing structures are constantly changing with software and that software is is used over a long period of time it creates instability and that instability causes people to want to to choose something that's a little bit more stable or at least open source like gdau okay unreal being stable stable in its pricing structure they don't they don't announce crazy changes often uh whereas gdau is is open source right so those are the two

options you have a stable option unreal and then you also have an open source option gdau okay Mark Whitten a Unity executive said the company hasn't yet announced the latest changes because executives are still running them by partners and don't want to repeat last week's Communications Deb debacle which led to several clarifications I mean this is a problem I think with just publicly traded companies right um it things just take forever to move um repairs take forever has not put out that many statements you can imagine if this was a private company if it was my company I would immediately walk back the pricing structure I would immediately do a public announcement saying I am an idiot I shouldn't have done this um this is the pricing structure it's permanent or at least it's this is a two-year pricing structure gives some sort of promise that it's not going to change for a while and it would happen immediately whereas with a public company like Unity these statements take forever to come out and so trust is slowly degrading

over time as we wait for all of these higher ups and all of these partners and the board in all these different uh sea level positions to agree on something right um one of the most controversial elements of the policy concerned how Unity would track installations of its software so yes unity's original pricing structure had it has U uh this proprietary software that's basically it feels like malware that's put in your in your game and then you that that data is then sent to to Unity and unity knows how many installations uh you you've you've sold or have been pirated that's what they say but you as the developer do not the good news about this leak is that it is all self-reported now so if my game makes a million bucks it's up to me to report that to Unreal finally in the meeting John

rello um I I still don't know how to say his last name but John emphasized that the new policy is designed to generate more revenue from the company's biggest customers and that more than 90% of unity users won't be affected again this is frustrating because it's basically just saying I talked about this yesterday but it's basically just saying that you know most Unity developers don't make enough money to to live on and most Unity developers don't don't uh make money off their games so most of you are fine but again I think John is confused because developers are dreamers developers they they want to make something big and they're making an investment to learn Unity just because I'm a Unity user that makes no money doesn't mean that my dream isn't to one day cross that finish line and become that 10% well why would I invest my time two years of my time learning a software when once I reach the 10% I'm going to get charged some with charged with some strange algorithm that I don't understand right John finally said I don't think there's

any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened I don't know why he would say that um there's a there's a lot of different Alternatives here the first one is yes the pricing structure stays the same but they they their statement is incredibly clear about piracy it's incredibly clear about Game Pass right so for example if Game Pass sells a million free cop I of your game with their Subscription Service Unity will not charge those granted how do they even know right but at least in their initial PR or their initial public statement they could have said that and and that wasn't even addressed right uh retroactive game sales right charging retroactively for previous Unity games that could have been addressed in the in the initial announcement um you can you could see here he says it's a it's a massively transformational

change to our business model and I understand that I understand that Unity has to make money um they have to start being profitable especially as a publicly traded company I mean if we go ahead and Google uh how they're doing um Unity stock you can see here they've got to start making some progress here and you can see that this is this isn't attempt to jumpstart um some profitability with unity but this this is the opposite of that um now am I in conclusion here am I happy am I happy about this I I am because I'm using Unity for for a game we've been working on for two years it's called Twist of tower I'm happy about that but I'm also very apprehensive knowing that they're publicly traded and knowing that they've they've they've tried to pull

the rug out from under us under us before with a weird pricing structure I'm I'm apprehensive and I don't know exactly what they're going to do for the next couple years um I'll be honest with you guys I am hopeful I'm hopeful that the leadership changes and that Unity goes through a Rebrand um um and that there's a genuine change not necessarily in heart because they are a company right they the ethics of a company I I don't usually rely on the ethics of a company I would I rely on what what is actually profitable right so Unity is probably going to think about be thinking about profitability until the end of unity right uh unreal is going to be thinking about profitability that's probably going to be their primary motivation however just because you're thinking about profitability does doesn't mean that you're not going to make the right

decision meaning Unity if they know it is not profitable to do this kind of these kind of weird pricing structures if they know that that hurts their brand and that that ultimately hurts profitability hopefully they will never do that again and instead they will check with developers before they decide to make some crazy decision um I think it was lost Relic I was watching one of his videos about this and by the way if you haven't followed lost Relic he's a great YouTuber uh game developer basically said look you could have just asked developers like we want to we want I I genuinely me as a developer I want Unity to be profitable ask me exactly what uh po poll developers ask them what they're willing to pay and how they would like to pay um because I want Unity to be profitable it's a symbotic relationship right Unity stock collapsing is not good for me

either because I need Unity to survive to make great games so ultimately Unity needs to work with developers to be profitable I think that that is the ultimate solution it's a it's a great ethical decision to ask developers what they think but more importantly it's a profitable decision because developers are going to be the ones who make Unity profitable so why not partner with them and ask them exactly what um how they would like to pay so anyways guys thanks for watching and again just be sure to check out the webinar below top three secrets to making six figures selling your indie games this is totally free um I'm not making money off of you for this I just want you to learn what I've learned which is uh well how to make money before you even release your game in these turbulent times whether it's Unity unreal gdau game maker what this teaches you is regardless of the software you use how to make six figures before before you even sell your game it's not a gimmick I've done this I

think four or five different times um I know how to make money with my games before I even finish them and I teach you how to do it in this free course all right guys I'll talk to you later cheers