Posted September 16, 2023 by Incontinent Cell
You might or might not know that My Dystopian Robot Girlfriend was made in Unity. This is why the current events with Unity are very important to me. Let me run you through my theory as to why Unity did all this.
If you are not in the loop Unity announced that they are adding a runtime fee to their license. What that means is that developers will now have to pay a small amount of money for every install of their game. Why did they do this though? Simplest explanation is of course that they need money, but that's not the full story. If that's the case they could've gone for a simple revenue share system(Like unreal engine), why didn't they though? I think I've got the answer. First let's look at this graph that shows what % of revenue developers will have to pay to Unity. It's based on the brackets from Unity's blogpost.
First of all, this fee strongly punishes games with low revenue per download(Free to play games). In some cases the fee could even exceed 100% of the revenue. Why would they do that? It's simple, a big chunk of their revenue comes from ads. In data I found from 2022 they earned about half of their revenue from ads. They clearly want to expand on that and that's the reason for the merger with IronSource. A company specializing in app monetization.
Now for the really nasty part. There are reports Unity reps are telling people they won't have to pay the fee as long as they transition to IronSource as their ad provider. This is effectively blackmail. Paying a fee of 100% of your revenue is simply not an option.
It's is not a random dumb decision as it seemed before. It's a planned, malicious and targeted attack in order to gain more ad revenue by forcing games to not use their competitors' ad services. This is why they said "90% of you won't be affected" and this is also why they didn't go for a simple revenue share. Us, indie devs provide almost no revenue for Unity. Fricking us over is just a side effect of their plan and that's why they don't care. It's honestly even worse then I initially thought.
But hey, that's just a theory, game theory. Thanks for reading and frick Unity.
Also for fans of My Dystopian Robot Girlfriend. The game currently is below the thresholds, so we will survive. I got a bit scared at first though. If we ever reach the 1m$ yearly revenue threshold though we will be forced to switch to a paid model. Otherwise we'd have to pay thousands of dollars to unity and we'd go bankrupt.
Sources:
Source of the graph:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16jeox6/i_made_a_comprehensive_visual_chart_showing_how/
Data about revenue from ads from:
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NYSE-U/financials-revenue/
https://businessquant.com/unity-software-revenue-by-segment
Post about the fee removal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16j6cip/ironsource_is_the_reason/