It's also catastrophic for services like Game Pass where the developer gets a flat fee regardless of how many people install the game. You can take a flat fee that seems reasonable based on an expectation of 100k installs, but then your game turns out to be a smash hit and it gets a million installs. Now you're on the hook for a massive amount of money to Unity but the money you got is barely enough to cover it, if it covers it at all.
The standard models are a % of revenue (i.e. Unreal Engine - fine for flat advance services like Game Pass), a flat licensing fee (old Unity, old Fmod, etc), or an ongoing fee per-title/per-seat (current Unity, stuff like Wwise). This new fee-per-install model Unity is adopting is relatively rare.
Game giveaways like Game Pass and Epic Games Store's free games are generally based on a flat advance. I think PlayStation Plus's free games are also a flat advance, but I can't personally attest to it. There are tables out there of how much money Epic handed specific developers for their games and how many copies were installed that I think leaked during the Apple lawsuit, and in some cases developers earned much less than Unity's 20 cents per copy due to the number of installs.
Ideally this flat advance model would have been widely protested by the industry, but there is a huge audience of struggling indie game devs for whom a flat advance is a desperately needed lifeline, so it's been successful.
>Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?
they always have and always will. But revshare and ESPECIALLY residuals (tangential to this topic) are costs that the elite will fight to the grave to not give out.
Indie devs are simply taking that gamble and unironically working for exposure. profits are razor thin in games and the market is fickle, so it's much preferable to have a guaranteed minium than to negotiation revenue/profit shares. if they become "too successful" they simply need to use that newfound exposure to negotiate a better deal next time.
I’m sure Unity would prefer a revshare it’s just that it would be much harder and more expensive for them to enforce it (and even impossible at all outside of the developed countries and especially in China).
And yeah, of course there would be much bigger backlash for their largest clients who probably prefer this new model. Which IMHO doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable if you’re on Pro (which you current have to be anyway if your company has over 200k revenue)
Probably not, I’m not a fan of these changes but most people seem to really over exaggerating because they don’t understand how the new (very convoluted) pricing model works.
The $.2 install fee (only for users living in “rich” countries) seems to be there just to incentive developers to upgrade their subscriptions to Pro which offers much higher revenue/install limits and lower fees above them.
I highly doubt many/any(?) games os Gamepass or Apple Arcade were created using the personal edition (after all they already have a 100/200k per COMPANY revenue limit. would MS really pay less than that for any game and you have zero sales every else?)
On Pro you’d only have to worry if your downloads went significantly over a limit. Which is concern in this case, just relatively a much smaller one. In any cases it seems to create some false incentives for fixed fee developers (unless the publisher agrees to pay the fee which would be pretty reasonable)
IMHO so far the biggest issue with these pricing changes seems to be that they are way too complicated. It was unreasonable for them to expect that most people commenting online would bother looking at more than a single number (or would understand their current pricing model for that matter)
It's apparently even worse. An update or patch counts as an install from Unity's perspective. So does an instantiation in a browser of their web player.
