Post by Maidelen in Unity developers, what are your plans after the last annoucement?

Viewing post in Unity developers, what are your plans after the last annoucement?

Let's see if I can tell some things correctly: You have visual and audio resources outside of Unity as well. GDevelop has its own asset download center, with RPG Maker you have all the plugins/scripts and with Godot you have templates for a lot of things. Maybe they don't have the same community as Unity, but between veteran forums and active discord servers there's someone who has written tutorials or fixes, or people that you can talk about the engine.

... Wa,waht, what? 200.000$? In my opinion, at that point you aren't a novice if you get that by game sells. 200.000$ by sells of a indie game means to me that you are doing very well, more than the majority of the people who uses itch.io, or even Itch.io itself. (This is not an insult to Itch.io or its users. I would be insulting myself).

I don't know how to put in precise words, but, do wathever you want, I'm not someone to tell you what to do in game engines but I don't recomend you call yourself a "Pro Unity" or defend the a-lot-of-money company who doesn't know you and if it could, it would make your experience more difficult with the service if it means making more money.

Regarding Godot, you don't lose anything by giving it a try, or Gdevelop, both engines are free and open source. Note that my main engine is a paid one and is closed source, but I admire Godot and Gdevelop, both the people behind those engines and their developers. And if I stopped using a software because it suffered a crash that caused it to lose data, I wouldn't be using a computer.

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redonihunter1 year ago (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.

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Maidelen1 year ago(+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).

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redonihunter1 year ago(+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.

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