This is written based on my quite poor understanding of
the game business. I am sincerely wanting to learn more
about how it works and how the new license structure impact
developers.
My questions below might be idiotic.
(but not intentionally so)
I have no idea how many apps reach above 200.000 installs total
or $200.000 income per year.
How common is it for apps to meet the minimum requirements
when the fees kick in?
I would guess that if you base the application on a subscription
model that this will not be a major problem?
Also doesn't Apple App Store or Google Pay charge far more than this
on income?
Look at the millions of free to play games in the App-Stores.
Normally you have 98% of free playing users paying nothing, 2% pay.
Imagine now you have 1 million installs. 2% (20.000) pay you 200.000 / year.
980.000 players pay nothing. Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000, you made ZERO with your game... crazy. That is an uncalculatable risk for a small company.
You'd only pay above a million user and need to have above in 1 million revenue.
Previously you weren't even allowed to use Pro/Personal if you made over $200k (not just per game).
> Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000,
Not saying the whole price model is not stupid but only those developers who are very bad at basic math would pay this. Everyone else would upgrade to pro.
> Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000
Again, not really. Even in this case only a subset of user would pay 20 cent.
Another example demonstrating the incompetence of Unity's marketing department, they should've understood that most people can't really memorize more than a single number or be expected to spend over 30 seconds reading something (now I'm not saying that this change overall was not a terrible decision but even a significant proportion of people commenting here don't seem to understand how their per install pricing is going to work).
> For many developers it is now cheaper to switch the engine than to pay for Unity.
Only for a (possibly very) small minority.
I find the the fact that they had no qualms about retroactively applying this to already released game much more infuriating (if they did this, what can they do next?). The pricing itself seems fairly reasonable if make more $1.5-2 or so per user (compared to Unreal anyway).
The problem here is that most platform tax your income, not your userbase size. If you think of big free to play Unity games like Genshin Impact (or even smaller stuff like VRChat) the amount of paying user is probably in the single digit percentage, yet with Unity terms you are on the hook for everyone who installs your game.
> reach above 200.000 installs total or $200.000 income per year
No developers/companies who made more than $200k per year (overall revenue of the company, not per game) were even allowed to the use the Personal/Plus tiers and were required to upgrade to pro (which has 1 million install/revenue limits).
I don't think the itself cost would be unreasonable for at least 90-95% of all developers and if you average it out across everyone the proportion of revenue Unity get's would be still pretty low (not much more than 1% or so).
Most people seem to be upset because how they applied these changes retroactively on currently released games and because the whole model seems way to convoluted and not really thought trough.
One way way to put this into perspective is salaries. 200k usd means any game studio with at least 2-4 employees must earn that yearly to break even, so they are affected.
They would probably qualify under enterprise pricing of $0.01 or $0.02 on Pro. To release a game without Unity branding you also need at least 1 year of Pro subscription. They also would count more than 21M maybe e.g. multiple devices.
They also charge more at less scale and can't detect things like pirated installs, bypass Steam DRM, and you're still gonna hit the Unity servers. It's just checking device HWIDs.
But Marvel Snap is a card game and like many others has terrible monetisation, you can't keep up with card releases at all without paying. It's more like the pay to win games.
My questions below might be idiotic. (but not intentionally so)
I have no idea how many apps reach above 200.000 installs total or $200.000 income per year.
How common is it for apps to meet the minimum requirements when the fees kick in?
I would guess that if you base the application on a subscription model that this will not be a major problem?
Also doesn't Apple App Store or Google Pay charge far more than this on income?