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(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.

(+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).

(+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.