181–185 of 185 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While $340 million is nothing to sneeze at it would only make up 18% of Unity’s revenue if that’s what they’d make off of ads. Which makes me wonder where the rest of their revenue comes from, but I’m too lazy right now to go through their financial statements to find out.
The $340 million is from the last quarter, you were probably looking at yearly revenue.
I don't find this particularly surprising. This wasn't much of an extrapolation. I stopped playing many computer/video games years ago because I had a sense that monetization was going to suck the delight out of them.
Capitalism as it works right now demands continuous, ever-increasing growth. When you saturate one source of income, you have to create an entirely new one. We went from games that were complete at shipping to games with DLC. Then we got microtransactions, lootboxes, invasive advertisements, platform revenue cuts, forcing always-online, and now this.
I suspect their next trick will be that play time of games that use their engine needs to be monitored and they'll demand some sort of royalty for every X minutes played. Some day companies will find a way to monitor every breath you make and every step you take, too. The money machine must be fed.
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Those thresholds are just the point when you'll be net negative. There's still a large range above that ARPU where you're making less money than before or with a different engine. Cult of The Lamb has already announced they will delist their game, and the Slay The Spire dev team have announced they're halting development on their new game to port it to a new engine.
Those are exactly the types of games that would be much worse off under an Unreal style royalty. Cult of the Lamb is $24.99 on Steam Unreal royalty is 5%, so $1.25 per sale Unity is $0.20 So royalty is ~6x more If there was a reasonable way to count installs (I don't think it is technically possible), install fee is much better than royalty for most devs who are not F2P apps.
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/cultoflamb/info/
For Slay The Spire I paid $8.49
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/slayspire/info/
This also ignores regional pricing differences. Games tend to be cheaper in the India/Brazil/etc regions on Steam
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The problem with install fees is that it's a potentially unlimited financial risk.
Not unless you are giving away your game for free. Otherwise your limit is some small multiple of sales. They have said demos don't count, webgl doesn't count, piracy doesn't count, etc.. It would be easier if Unity just said they won't charge for installs past the number of sales. But most of the nightmare scenarios people are coming up with are not real.
Ultimately the main issue is that people made business decisions about using Unity under the assumption that the license and payment structure they were using could not change. That is no longer true by demonstration. I'm sure there's a lot of devs who are simply unwilling to deal with a vendor who changes the terms like this.
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$0.20 is the minimum, you pay for every device they install on every time. Anytime they offload and reinstall, you pay again. Every additional device, upgrade, or replacement, you pay again. You’ll also pay then current rates, whatever Unity decides those are. No abuse needed to lose money with this, I’ve probably installed the same games 20+ times over the years.
That's not what Unity is saying - they are saying reinstalls do not count. From their faq: Does a reinstall of an app on the same device count towards the Unity Runtime Fee? No, we are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. https://unity.com/pricing-updates
This is the issue.