Unity has amended the terms of its rental service following users’ protests over licensing and pricing changes. The recent announcement of upcoming licensing changes in Unity that introduce a rental system and bring changes in pricing, had been met with strong negative reactions from users.
The original blog post unveiling the plans received comments such as “This is not democratising game development!? It’s daylight robbery!”, “Right now you guys are the best sales team Epic ever had”, “renting software is barely a step above a scam and all of us know it”, “This is a bad move, I hate subscriptions. Time to move on to some other game engine, godotengine???…”, “Guess what. Just downloaded Unreal!”. In response Unity Technologies initially published a blog post called “Subscription Why?” outlining their reasons for moving to rental but also saying that they are “very carefully listening to everything”.
Following this Unity has now released an updated version of its rental plan with a few key changes aimed at addressing reservations about the initial scheme and making paid versions of Unity more affordable for developers of all sizes, these include:
- The Unity splash screen is Unity Plus is now optional
- The revenue cap for Unity Plus is raised from $100k to $200k
- A new splash screen that reads “Made with Unity” in all editions with no more mention of “Personal Edition”. It is also customizable with a (blurred) background image and company logo in addition to the Unity logo.
- Transition offer for existing Unity 5 Pro perpetual license customers with reduced subscription rates.
- A Pay to Own scheme whereby if you pay for 24 or more consecutive months you can keep the version at which you stop renting.
You can read more and see users’ reactions on Unity’s blog
I’d like to switch this around, ask the complainers to work for free at their daily jobs. Unity and Epic are such awesome companies to let us use their tools at such low prices.
Hey Nossgrr I’m a complainer and I’m not asking anyone to work for free… but I’m asking to not to be forced to a subscription system for a lot more of money, each job (I mean each person you hire) is becoming more and more expensive with this subscription madness… now If I want to hire an artist I have to pay an Autodesk Subscription, an Adobe Subscription, a Unity Subscription, and all the subscribed plugins I have to pay also… do you want your salary to be lower? then don’t love the subscription systems because what is going to affect the salary of every hired artist, for sure…
The price they propose for the PayToOwn option for the current owners is not bad, 1800€ I think, but is limited in time as long as they don’t force me to pay them monthly, and after that the software is mine and I can keep maintaining what I already did or do new things, that is cool, the price they propose in general is more or less the same price I paid for the full new pro license, 3000€, and that is not cool, why should I pay the price of a completely full new license for an update?
I don’t want them to work for free, but I don’t want to work for them either…
Now, in the end the situation is not SO bad because they still give you the ability to OWN your license, and that is good, but I don’t want a monthly payment, I want to pay for my upgrade and BOOM done…
“…to let us use their tools at such low prices”
did you start using Unity at it’s early stage?, because I did, and I think it is a great piece of software, but the price it had was the fair price, if you want to pick up small shops and freelancers and indie studios… is they price they should put, the ugly thing is that they are “abandoning” a lot of us that made Unity possible, they are raising prices and getting away the permanent license (in some way, that is why I said it’s not SO bad like other situations where the prices are OBSCENES like Autodesk or Cebas situation)… Unity was possible because of many people that paid that fair price and now what… “hey you can keep your permanent licenses… without any updates or fixes of course…”
Now Unreal is a different situation, I think THAT IS A GOOD DEAL, they win if you win, that is cool and is great, we may maintain our PRO Unity license or not… I’m not sure, but in any case this provoqued us to go an start using Unreal Engine, pretty good and sustainable licensing system IMHO because in the end you ahve to pay them 5% of the revenue of the product for as long as the product is generating revenue so pretty sustainable, but if you don’t win money you don’t have to pay… good
Cheers.
I agree with Juang3d, this new system is crazy – they are showing their true colours even more than boldly than Adobe.
As an existing paid Unity customer, I now have to wait before I can sign up to their new subscription system! That is just crazy – remove support but prevent customers from moving to new system until they “get around to it”. See here: http://unity3d.com/migration-roadmap
Basically they are attempting to force people to forgo this “most generous” discounted rate. That is indicative of the monopoly strong-arming that we can continue to expect.