Why not charge $1 for your game? Problem solved. If you're making a game with a fancy commercial engine I would hope what you're offering is worth a buck. Let's get some quality in this world.
The difference in conversions between free and $1 is not a matter of price. The hard part is getting someone to pay in the first place.
That's why a model of free game with paid addons/extras/pay-to-win/etc. works so well – once someone already tried your game and gets invested in it, they're more likely to spend anything.
And in mobile gaming there's also the matter of looking for "whales". Basically, while majority of people will never spend anything, there's a minority willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars. Then, the difficulty comes from showing your game to enough people to find whales.
(Whether that model is ethical in the first place is a whole different matter. I don't think it is, so maybe eliminating it will be a net positive in the world.)
With $1 paid to the developer the player only needs to (re)install the game 6 times on their computer to cost the developer more than they earned.
This pricing is per install, not per player. Installations are an unrestricted functionality which can be abused. If you care about quality games: this pricing causes the opposite.
> We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices.
This allows malicious actors to fake the device identity, which leads to the exact same problem.
> We are not going to charge a fee for fraudulent installs or “install bombing.” We will work directly with you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of malicious intent.
This roughly says "trust us bro". They will "work directly with you" in cases of fraud? How nice, but that could just mean an automated response email with generic advice, followed by radio silence. No promise that they will resolve the issue, no promise they will work on it before your dev studio is bankrupt, this is just a collection of words built on trust they don't have right now.
Because mobile games that aren't free do not sell (except Minecraft). In mobile F2P space you can end up with tons of downloads, with less than 20 cents per download, because majority of the players are free casual ones, who play few hours or even minutes, and 99% of your revenue comes from the so called 'whales' (players who spend a LOT of money). If you hate this business model - good for you, I do too and I don't do mobile gamedev, but it's a reality there and Unity knows it.
Unity also doesn't give a crap about quality unless by quality you mean microtransactions, milking players and ads/adware. The engine is associated (partly unfairly) with lagginess, low performance, high ram usage, and crappy games and assets flips. Unity is famous for how slowly new features come and how buggy it is in parts. They also scrapped their own game on Unity that was supposed to show how to use Unity right, it's an engine company that never made games (unlike Epic or id Software, who made games first, engine seconds, and even when being in engine business they kept making games). Unity users who just slapped few assets together basically created the asset flip genre, the opposite of quality. As CEO of EA Riccotello supported always online online DRM that shut down singleplayer games on release day due to servers dying, as CEO of Unity he said you are a "fucking idiot" (direct words) if you don't want to maximize your monetary return from your players. Unity bought an adware company, Unity has an ad network (and if you use it to put ads in your game, they waive the install fee, curious..).
