$36.55 (down 6.21%)
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Unfortunately your view is not based on the numbers among games industry professionals. Indie studios making few millions a year are not rich, they’re barely getting by. Please do keep in mind that revenue is the metric used by Unity, not profit. For freemium games, this model eats majority of their revenue. Many indie studio owners have used their own company’s numbers to show how this model would bring them from profit to debt. I recommend doing a quick research about mobile games industry numbers (common CPI, ARPU values etc.) to see how this is problematic. Please stop spreading misinformation when people are concerned about their livehoods. Have a nice day.
3 Likes
$36.33(down 6.83%)
2 Likes
Thank you! Turns out my calculations were a little wrong. I had to do a monthly breakdown so it kind of is doing now also what you wanted it to do. Just add more months in the columns if you want to do forecasts.
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Basically this is true for devs who sell games for an upfront cost like myself. Even if you gross over a million, the install fee is relatively negligable (and even if multiple installs count, comes to less than Unreal’s 5% rev cut), but free to play mobile games are fuuuuuuucked because their businesses are based around getting millions and millions of installs and only making a few cents off of them, and making large advertising expenses.
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Ah, the stocks are now in freefall.
Alexa, play ‘Komm, Susser Tod’ from the End of Evangelion soundtrack.
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It’s not that I think my games will make that much, it’s the fact unity is clearly going to try and add spyware/malware to our games to track installs, they have to add it to every game built on unity to track lifetime installs.
not only that they have said here pages back that they can according to their TOS change whatever they want whenever do long as they give 3 months warning and even the 3 month warning can be changed. They’re over stepping.
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People understand all that. It is just that “runtime install fee” is unacceptable in any form, and in current form the pricing can bankrupt you if you make something cheap that goes viral.
Another problem is that Unity wants to retroactively charge for already released games, and tracking installs amounts to “our secret algorithms are perfect, trust us”. There’s no reason to trust those algorithms and expectation is that the data will be incorrect or skewed in unity favors. This crap will be cracked, and then weaponized to take down studios. And “secret algorithms” are blank cheque you’re giving to unity.
Effectively changes indicate that “Free/Plus” tiers are only usable for non-commercial purposes, but due to the way unity tiers work, you can’t use t hem in non-commercial organization that receives any funding. For commercial tiers, engine is unusable for videogames, because a widely used product can result in massive fees.
If you check the table on blogpost, and run the numbers, it becomes obvious that unity wants ability to charge you up to $20k per month, if you’re already paying, and in case you become successful using Plus/Free tier, they want you to die and your studio to disappear. “Free(?)” tier has $0.2 cost per install, and that’s actually a very significant amount.
The pricing is simply unacceptable and the idea is insane. Whoever thought it up should be fired and then put into mental health facility.
Also, keep in mind that cost of installation of “unity runtime”, for unity is zero. It is digital goods. Copying costs it nothing. The company is literally trying to create money out of air, based in activity that does not bring you any revenue.
8 Likes
Hmm. This feels very toxic to certain types of games.
- WebGL and streaming. This effectively means the devs have to pay for every PLAY.
- Free-to-play games, games monetized by ads, and games that only requires payment after installing (free install to get a demo, unlock full game later). Not all players pay or otherwise generate enough income, but all players cause this thing to tick. This effectively means once the dev passes the threshold for paying the per-install fee, it is entirely possible to lose money because of this fee. (N.B. Not every game is like those Steam games where you pay first.)
The business model is seemingly more friendly to, and only more friendly to, those games that have an upfront fee, like Steam games or console games. This badly hurts mobile game developers.
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-6.80% for the day.
That’s harsh. Let’s see if we can make it to -10%… 
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WTF? I think after this, you need to shut up, with all due respect.
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What if the automaker that made your car charged you a fee every time you turned it on?
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“What was actually happening when they came up with this lol”
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I never expected to feel happy about the engine I used for 10 years going down. I don’t know why, I don’t know what to do. Should I take published games down? Should I learn Godot or Unreal? I was mid-development of my next project and now I am lost.
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Unity please… I do not wanna learn Godot.
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Also on the detailed FAQ inferes that the check is going to be done monthl:
So in Personal License when both conditions are meant ($200k revenue and 200K Unity Runtime instances installed) there will be a one time big fee of $40K at the end of the month the game achieved those thresholds; however, since then, every new install of the game will be charged $0.20 at the end of that month of installation, and not added continuously through the next months.
Again, the information both in the table and FAQ is very unclear, do some clarification would definitely help us decide how to approach this change
$36.24 (down 7.01%)
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Why don’t they just charge $10 per month per seat for personal?
It’s cheaper than a Netflix subscription, and almost everyone would happily pay for that.
4 Likes