hi Jake_See, thanks for sharing the financial information of Unity, I always want to know something regarding financial status of a global company and not sure where to read, appreciated for the reference link shared 
The result is shocking, how the company Unity still can operates for years continuously while loosing money ?
Hello,
I am learning unity for the past three years and own several game assets. For someone having spend a lot of his free time and money learning the engine to become an indie game dev and get rid of bosses, I find myself being in a boss situation once more.
And so here is the issue: should I continue to invest with my time and effort to wake up one morning and unity, not being able to cope with the challenges of the stock market, announces some other pricing which basically makes the developer an employee of the company leaving the developer small salary.
And the problem is not on unity alone. Traditionally, all companies that enter the stock market are money hungry in expense of the mass: their customers or employees.
So, we have to take into account intensions and the environment that someone makes business which forms these intentions.
Also there is the issue of what we reward, get more ofâŠ
I am not saying to abandon unity, but with their decisions they force every dev to think the future
I have now updated the link in my comment. Thanks for letting me know. 
They have since updated it again, youâll see updates as (Updated 13th Sept) and (Updated 14th Sept).
Personally if I were you, I would continue learning Unity as itâs a good solution in many regards and to give yourself a backup, learn Unreal OR Godot just in case. From a job perspective there seems to be much more popularity with Unreal than Godot, however in time that may change.
However it is only you that can make the decision on whether you wish to continue on with Unity or not, if you feel you cannot, or itâs a waste of your time, plus do not have any ties to the Game Engine, by all means feel free to learn another Engine primarily.
To give you comfort, I (and Iâm sure others too), will be staying with Unity, at least for the time being. The amount of money, time and effort Iâve poured into the Engine, it would be silly to change currently, however I am also planning on learning Unreal or Godot (currently favouring Unreal, mainly because of the job market, not for any other reason) on the side so I have something to fall back on.
I wouldnât be too concerned with the update unless you have reached the threshold and have a ton of games out, by which point I would advise you to look at Unity Pro license in order to minimise the âtaxâ they have stated.
Further I read something this morning that they will waive the âtaxâ on each install if you use LevelPlay, may be worth reading into that more too.
âŠfrom me, breaking up with Unity is hard to do 
Personally, I am happy that I have a day job, so that I donât depent too much on unity.
However, I have to say that nothing stops Unreal to follow a similar path. On the other hand Godot might be a good alternative, but from what I read the entire project is not solid enoughâŠ
Yes, the Unity CEO wants to make us dependant customers now that he knows we have invested so much, and the problem is who knows what will followâŠ
He knows that there are no real alternatives to unity.
And last year they also updated their pricing. So, we have to think something to not find ourselves in a similar situation next year.
Remember that I said about the being happy with the day job? I work for a big bank (my background is economics) and the scenery is the same: please the stockholders, the CEOs and their selected few are super rich, while we strive to survive.
Itâs sad to know that all the time we spend to learn and work others spend to make us customers.
Iâm treating it as a sort of a holding pattern. Imma keep focusing on making assets in blender for my game and keeping it easy on the coding. I may check out Godot, but Unity is such a good engine for 3D. Cooler heads prevail ^.^
Morning e1,
Just to share a story, in my past experience about using cross platform development products like Embarcadero C++Builder ( formerly known as Borland C++Builder since 1997 after Windows95 is introduced ). I would say, maintaining a cross platform development toolchain like Unity is unlike maintaining an open source application even it is funded somehow.
Here is my first published 2D freeware space game in 1998 using Borland C++Builder with DirectX.
Believe me, many said switch to other 3D engines, how many of them are actually completed a game and published right ?
I paid about USD300 yearly to Embarcadero C++Builder for its Android and iOS platform toolchain, the company always emphasize Delphi ( Pascal ) as its first primary cross platform updates for Android and iOS, and C++Builder is just like second grade citizen, receiving the updates late and buggy. Worst still, all my feedback with facts posted in the community forum were removed due to database crashed, can you believe that.
I have been suffering such treatment for 2-3 years then Embarcadero abandoned the Android platform just like that, without considering its C++Builder subscribers ( me ), I am extremely angry about what Embarcadero had done to C++Builder developers, no way I am going back to any product from that company, Embarcadero.
Therefore, I made a decision to switch to Unity.
Honestly, I really wish Microsoft will purchase Unity, to my experience of using cross platform software development tools, only a huge software giant able to maintain a cross platform tool chain safely and last long.
For this, after seeing Unity still active and alive while loosing money yearly, I will continue to support Unity in this case for the moment as promotional or demo game merely until runtime install situation is clearly defined and mature.
Thank you for reading, have a nice day.
Thinking about it some more, itâs actually not that bad. While there are some definite problems, the basis is in some ways an improvement over the previous plans. Previously a developer needed to buy a Pro license if passing $200K sales. With the new plan the developer can choose to buy Pro (and thereby up the minimum to $1M and 1M installs and pay lower fees) or can choose to use the personal license and at some point pay per-install, which for high priced games (say, $20) could save the devs quite a bit.
Thanks for sharing this, Iâm interested to see their updated policy.
I canât imagine theyâre doing it to get less profit. Something canât be right there. No business would go down on profit on purpose. Thatâs not what a business does. Theyâd have to be charging others more at the very least. Still, I seriously doubt theyâre thinking about charging x amount of projects less here unless they reaped more profit out of it.
Personally, I wouldnât stick around Unity if thereâs a choice. To consider charging for installs with games is nuts whatever way one looks at it.
If you stick with it then I hope the boat keeps floating fine for you. Its not looking like a boat worth taking anymore. The captain of that ship is not in the greatest mind. Even its crew is going crazy.
Actually, today the news arrived that Unity will be turning around. They apologized to the developers and said that an official announcement will come in the next few days.
@rickygai Please remove the first image from this post. It is highly offensive.
Edit: Now has been removed
@beegeedee, thanks for informing, just a notice that due to different time zone, I woke up in the mid of sleeping at 3am morning from my phone email tone to respond this post, do give some time for me to edit the post in this case.
As you can see, I am not against Unity, and Rick from GameDev.tv also mentioned, the more he talks about Unity now, the more he felt something is not right.
I have invested total of USD751 Unity Assets purchase in this case, and the efforts, time, money on GameDev.tv courses invested as well, this is the reason that I created this channel, and put the baby face on it, is careful enough for me to consider not to put bad words in this forum.
Take a look at Unity Assets I documented for every single purchase of Unity Asset purchased below, the total amount is in MYR currency.
I am not investing time and money for fun, in fact I am on retirement to plan ahead my personal future career and business using Unity, and to be honest, the runtime fees per game install definitely will prohibit me from using Unity if in the next couple of days, the new policy comes up bad, is a real serious decision to make.
If you read Twitter comments, there are developers with family and children have to stop using Unity and cannot afford the runtime fees policy, this is how serious this runtime fees charging can cause.
Thanks again.
QueueButton, of course theyâre doing it to get more money, but you have to try to understand the details and what they mean if you want to understand where that money will come from.
According to the plan, that money would have come from people who have earned more than $1M and have more than 1M installs. For people with less, the plan could have been better than before.
I donât think that the intent was to screw all developers. I think itâs reasonable to charge developers money if they earn quite a bit from their game ($1M a year and up).
I think that Unity just didnât think this through. There are enough problems with the idea of charging per install, how to understand how many installs, how to get that money, how to make sure the installs are real, that Unity had obviously not thought through. This still makes this a bad plan. However, as I said, just looking at what Unity wanted, for developers over $100K in sales but significantly under $1M this could have actually been better, in terms of how much theyâd have to pay and the features they got.
There are teams out there who could easily have invested 10 to 100x that amount developing their ideas, and possibly more. Iâve probably spent as much on unity and I stopped using it a long time ago.
The runtime fees could be expensive, butâŠif you charge just 10usd for your game, thatâs 2m usd before you have to pay fees, more if you invest in a pro license which would be 10m usd.
It is not ideal and I am not justifying the way theyâve approached this but until now, Unity has been royalty free which is amazing. They need capital and the model theyâve chosen is awful but they could easily expect developers to pay 10% of everything they make.
20c on a 10 usd title is about 2%.
So, given that 200k installs (assume each is a sale) at 10usd nets you 2m usd, then you sell another 200k netting another 2m usd, suddenly having to pay 2% of 2m or in fact, 1% of your total sales is a tiny amount, around 40k usd leaving you with a profit of 3.96m usd.
The unreal model is easier to understand but you actually pay more. It is 5% of everything above 1m, paid if you exceed 20k sales in a month. So, for the same 4m in sales youâd end up paying 150k usd.
So, is unity all that bad? Not really. Did the approach it badly? Yes. Is their model stupid? Absolutely.
It hurts free to play, reinstalls and potentially cause issues with piracy and abuse from malicious actors (something Unity claims they have a solution for) so from that respect, UE or Godot for 2D might be a better solution.
It is up to each person to decide what is best for them. The other option is Unity ceases to exist and then 1000s of jobs would actually vanish. Most teams will be impacted by having to pay a small share of their profits but it is up to them how to deal with it.
What is largely happening is a knee jerk reaction to a crap announcement. Itâll settle down over the coming weeks. Be patient and wait it out.
Its going to be interesting whatever happens in the near future. We shall see.
