A few weeks back Unity announced new pricing that didn’t exactly make their community dance with joy. Part of the announcement was the addition of the “Plus” tier, which was basically the free tier with some cloud functionality thrown in. The general reaction to this new tier was a resounding meh. Well, it seems Unity have listened, as the features of that tier have just been altered. In this blog post entitled Evolution of our pricing and products, they announced two major and incredibly useful changes to the Plus tier of Unity pricing:
So with this goal in mind we are going to make these changes to what we announced previously:
- We’re making the Unity splash screen in Unity Plus optional, like it is in Unity Pro.
- We’re raising the revenue cap in Unity Plus from $100k to $200k so that more of you are able to take advantage of it.
In order to be able to do this, we removed the option to subscribe to Unity Plus without a one-year commitment. We also restricted Pay to Own to only apply to Unity Pro and not Unity Plus (see Pay to Own details further down). We let these things go from Unity Plus in order to be able to introduce the new advantages.
So basically you can now make twice as much money and most importantly, you no longer have to show the Made With Unity splashscreen, a huge caveat for manner developers. There is of course a downside, the Plus plan is not eligible for the Pay To Own plan and you have to commit to at least a year of subscription.
When Plus was announced I said it would be a great deal more popular if it removed the splashscreen. I guess I will find out if I was right or not. Either way, the Plus tier certainly sucks a great deal less now!
Another change for users of the free “Personal tier”, is now the splash screen is going to be more customizable.
The new splash screen will read “Made with Unity” in all editions of Unity – no more mention of “Personal Edition”. You will also be able to customize it with your own (blurred) background image and your own company logo in addition to the Unity logo. This feature is coming, but give us a bit of time to perfect the technical aspects of it before we release it. The customizable splash screen will be available in all versions of Unity, but can be completely turned off in Unity Plus and Unity Pro. We’ll have a blog post with further details later.
Finally for the people that outright purchased Unity in the past, and the hardest hit by the pricing changes, they have announced some changes there too:
- For up to five seats, you may subscribe to Unity Pro at the special price of $75 per month for a limited transition period, after which the price will revert to the normal subscription price of $125 per month:
- If Unity 5 Pro is your first version of Unity, your transition period is one year.
- If you owned Unity 4 Pro, your transition period is two years.
- If you make less than $200k per year, you may choose Unity Plus and pay $35 per month with an annual commitment.
We will start sending out these transition offers by email after the new products have launched in our store.
They also appended their policy on support for Pay to Own subscribers to include 3 additional patches past the end of the support period:
. At such point, you will stop receiving access to Pro tier services, new features and upgrades. You will receive the next 3 patchs.
All told some pretty good news all around.