Post by Ink in Unity developers, what are your plans after the last annoucement?

Viewing post in Unity developers, what are your plans after the last annoucement?

Why are INSTALLS being charged fair?

1) Unity, as far as I know, doesnt contribute to server costs of devolopers or storefronts. So downloading game is not costing them. Nor is installing it. "phoning home" is cost they are making themselves, so that doesnt count either.

2) they are trying to put the fees on gamepass game installs to Microsoft instead of devs with their latest "clarification". Good luck with that. Guess who is gonna "suffer" from that? Either we get another price hike or devs get less money from gamepass deals. And for what? shareholders gettin more money?

3) Game prices are just gonna trickle upwards. Remember that 0.20c is still 1% out of 20 dollar game. Which is per machine they install it to. So potentially 2% with steamdeck and 3% if steam library share counts for example, 4% if person has laptop too etc.

With 5 dollar game, that itch is full of, thats 4% one install, 8% two, 12% three installs. If it breaks the 200k downloads/revenue ofc.

4) Also saw tweet earlier that went basically that "imagine your game being freemium, you get to the 200k revenue. BUT your game has been downloaded something like 3 million times. We now owe Unity 20c per 2.8M installs, $560K".

Would that happen? Would Unity forgive the bill despite agreeing to the terms? I doubt it. Either start to be more agressive with freemium games or have it free forever and dont make dime (which is totally fine)

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Evolutionary Games248 days ago

The reason I'm pro Unity is because I get a lot of resources for free - not only from Unity, but also from an awesome community. Because of the size of the community, you can generally get help. I struggle with software that have small communities to get (a) the developers to take my bug reports seriously (b) help, when I don't know how to do something.

If you're making a lot of money from your game i.e. $200,000 you'd likely upgrade to Unity Pro or Enterprise. At that point the cost per install in your scenario becomes 1c or 2c.

In the meantime, those of us earning a few cents per game can create games in robust software for free.

I agree their argument is weak, but I'm ignoring that, and looking at the bigger picture. They need to make money to stay in business. And they increased the minimum earnings before you need to start paying from $100,000 to $200,000 per year. They have to make up that shortfall somehow.

From my perspective, if my game was making that kind of money, I wouldn't begrudge Unity the money because they take the risk. They say: "okay, you use the software for free and we'll carry the costs of your game development - which is considerable when you start looking at the analytics, UDP, etc. they give me for free. If you're successful, we want to share in that success, so pay us a fee then, but we'll cap our fee or reduce our rate as you grow and use more of our services."

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Maidelen247 days ago(+4)

Let's see if I can tell some things correctly: You have visual and audio resources outside of Unity as well. GDevelop has its own asset download center, with RPG Maker you have all the plugins/scripts and with Godot you have templates for a lot of things. Maybe they don't have the same community as Unity, but between veteran forums and active discord servers there's someone who has written tutorials or fixes, or people that you can talk about the engine.

... Wa,waht, what? 200.000$? In my opinion, at that point you aren't a novice if you get that by game sells. 200.000$ by sells of a indie game means to me that you are doing very well, more than the majority of the people who uses itch.io, or even Itch.io itself. (This is not an insult to Itch.io or its users. I would be insulting myself).

I don't know how to put in precise words, but, do wathever you want, I'm not someone to tell you what to do in game engines but I don't recomend you call yourself a "Pro Unity" or defend the a-lot-of-money company who doesn't know you and if it could, it would make your experience more difficult with the service if it means making more money.

Regarding Godot, you don't lose anything by giving it a try, or Gdevelop, both engines are free and open source. Note that my main engine is a paid one and is closed source, but I admire Godot and Gdevelop, both the people behind those engines and their developers. And if I stopped using a software because it suffered a crash that caused it to lose data, I wouldn't be using a computer.

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redonihunter247 days ago (1 edit) (+7)

I believe many people are not enraged for Unity trying to make money, but that they try to change their method to charge per install.

It currently to my understanding is this: if you are under 100k revenue in past 12 months, you can use Unity personal for free. If you are above, you have to use one of the subscriptions that start at roughly 2k a year. So very roughly, they are now charging like 2% ish of yearly revenue. Or less, if your game is popular.

As someone pointed out, if you have a low cost game, maybe free with ad revenue, you might clock in with millions of downloads. A hit like angry birds has 100 + million downloads. So even with the highest tier of only 1-2 cent per install we look at over a million $ in cost what previously was a couple thousand.

Oh, and from what I could dig up on their faq, the subscription fee for Unity pro + is still to be paid...

So, assuming a subscription of 10k a year and being "eglible" for that runtime fee. Having a tremendous amount of success and managing to have 1000000 downloads of your game is doubling your cost. It costs at least 1 cent, that is 10k. Oh, and if you manage to garner 2 million downloads, now your costs are not 10k for your subscription, but 10k subscription and 20k runtime fee. But 2 million are likely to get 10 million, making the yearly subscription only 10% of your costs, and having 90% of the cost being that runtime installation fee.

Small but successful devs might want to switch to an engine with more calulateable financial risks. As it is now, if you are not very careful, you might end up in a paradox situation, where success can spell out financial ruin for your gaming company.

There will be consequences. And there already are, judging from various news articles about this.

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Maidelen247 days ago(+1)

Yeah, I don't saying that the person/team/company behind a service software can't make money with it, the thing is the methods that they are gonna do to get profit.

These are cool calculations, although I'm not someone who does that kind of accounting (yet).

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redonihunter247 days ago(+3)

It is just rough estimates based on the table Unity has on their site.

The cheapest is like 1 cent per install. But it starts at 20 cent. Granted, there is a threshold, but what aspiring dev would not want to have success in the future. So even amateurs will be wary what engine to learn for future success - even if that success might not come.

The pricing model they plan to have is especially detrimental to the pay-what-you-want model popular on itch.

So if you had a very popular pwyw game and had the gigantic success of making the threshold, what would that boil down to? You used Unity personal of course, because you are one of those indie devs that have no money. And that one stays at 20 cent. So you have 1 000 000 downloads a year of your Unity personal game. 20 000 of the players tossed you a 10er for the game. Bringing you above the threshold. Your payment due to Unity? 200k. And if you have a single download more, now you lost money by having a popular game. Maths is fun.

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redonihunter247 days ago(+1)

They should change it to a percentage of sales. That would benefit them quite the same, while also not exposing some devs to financial risks.

If the only games you offer for download are making money per download, there is not much argument. They get their cent for the game, the player pays whatever the game did cost, and so on. (Plus additional costs for keeping track, that are unneccsary if they would just have kept it at sales income.)

But charging for installs is disconnecting the money the game makes from the costs. Sure, they have that threshold, but imagine a company that barely breaks even, but with 200k revenue per year. Maybe free to play with premium version. The premium gets the money. But Unity will charge for the installs of the ftp, not for the amount of money the company made.

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