Also worth noting that the unity fee only takes effect once you're making a pretty large amount of revenue, so most devs will be unaffected. Still shitty and I'm glad I made the switch to Godot a few months ago, but not as bad as people are making it out to be.
Revenue isn’t profit. So if you build a toy game and it takes off without a solid business and pricing plan you could be stuck and have to shut it down. Seems like that makes Unity is a very bad place to start.
At the least it will essentially kill Unity as an option for F2P games (where only a low percentage of users are "pay users"), which (on the mobile platforms) is where Unity so far rules supreme. No wonder they want a cut of that sweet F2P money, but at the same time F2P games have such a high "churn" that Unity could very quickly become irrelevant in that sector as old games (or at least game clients) are replaced with new ones, and most of those games are not so complex that they would be chained to a specific engine forever.
Will it though? That $0.20 fee seems like a red herring (and not such a big deal unless most of your users are in US, Western Europe etc.) and hardly anyone will pay that much. Why would they?
Anyone who makes over $200k is already using Pro and your per install fee is unlikely to be above $0.05 or so, maybe you van even get it down to $0.03 or $0.02. Which still might be a significant hit for some but that alone is unlikely to kill Unity in the F2P mobile market.
Also considering how much some of these game developers are willing pay for Ads $0.05 can’t be a very significant amount for them.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really like this whole pay per install thing or where Unity has been heading over the past 4-5 years in general but I don’t think these new fees will be such a huge hit for 90%+ or all their clients.
I've been "game development adjacent" for most of my career. By that, I mean I'm not a game developer, I'm mostly a web developer, but I've done a lot of game development-like things in my projects over the years, including a 4 year stint where I built a VR app for foreign language training.
My impression during the last 20 years of my career is that game development lacks a lot to be desired in the "professionalism" side of software development. At least, on the indie side. I obviously don't know anything about what large studios do. But large studios aren't using Unity, either.
In the non-game development world, almost all of the best tools for development are free and open source. There are several different packages to choose from for any task, and they all pretty much integrate together. They support well-defined, open standards. Their developers work hard to make the software be stable across minor versions. And the tools--and thus the pipeline of developers--between small and large projects, small and large teams, are largely the same (caveat some scale-managing orchestration tools that one can get by without perfectly fine without users ever noticing on the small scale).
Before you might scoff-in-JavaScript at that statement, just spend some time trying to do indie game development. I've yet to encounter even a major version upgrade in a web dev tool that was as painful as even some patch upgrades were with Unity. Alternatives are vastly different. There's very little code one can share between even two .NET-oriented game engines. Thus picking one of those alternatives effectively shuts you out of the larger job market.
I used Unity heavily for about 5 years, after already having extensive, other software development experience. I very quickly grew a reputation with my peers for being very effective. Most of that effectiveness was just me writing tools to fix all the technical project management deficiencies in running a Unity project. Developing in Unity felt like the 6 months that I'll never get back of my early developer life doing FoxPro development. Unity is like Crystal Reports. Unity is like Dreamweaver. All those things in enterprise dev were also shitty, take-it-or-leave-it siloed tools. Yet I only ever encountered them in large corporations being ran by pointy-haired managers. And one would certainly never start a personal project using one of them.
"In the non-game development world, almost all of the best tools for development are free and open source."
I think part of the equation is that in that space most of the hard problems have been solved for the past 50 years - so while computing at whole is young, some common expectations have started to crystallize and this is apparent in the expected quality of open source tools.
However, in general IMO the software engineering -quality of an open source offering is inverse proportional to it's innovation and novelty. The more niche the domain, the likelier it is the open source there is sub-par per expectations - and not to fault the open source enthusiasts there! It just seems high quality open source either needs some diamond-level craftmanship from few contributors, OR a massive, massive userbase with professional interest aligned with the project.
In open source, another way to view this, is that in popular domains there are hundreds of competing teams creating similarish solutions to similarish well understood problem-solution domains, and then word-of-mouth quickly drives community to contribute those perceived as "highest standard".
From another point of view.
You still need fairly esoteric skillset to contribute to game tech. There are lots of things that simply are not taught that well together, and everyone needs to do lots of hard work to enmesh these concepts in their head to a whole. The work is not magical or rocket-science-hard, just something esoteric that manages to combine stuff from super hard or poorly defined domains like numerical computing and art into what is basically a frivolity. The implied hard work means you need same competence basically to contribute to game tech meaningfully where you could be curing cancer, doing actual rocket science or something of actual impact. As a field, games have an abysmal reputation of abusing talent and naivety. Anyone in their right mind absolutely not driven to develop games will choose any other field. Hence it's no wonder game tech is kind of ... random often.
based on revenue and installs. But any slightly decent mobile launch is going to have 200k installs (especially since Unity is STILL counting this per device, not per account).
200k revenue is a higher mark, but far from a high mark. Especially for mobile games. those mobile packs can go up to $100 a pop, so if you got 2000 purchases, every free customer is costing you.
The fees don't kick in until you get to a certain number of lifetime installs. Once you start paying the install fees the price per install drops quite rapidly too.
The fees are also PER-GAME so one popular game wont cause your new game to cost a bunch immediately.
It sounds way less bad than what people are making out to be (still not free, but should anything be?)
...but it's not really very clear is it? They've done their best to make it simple, with multiple examples in the FAQ, but fundamentally, what they're introducing is a very very complicated scheme.
Multiple rates, multiple tiers.
> All determinations, calculations of installs, and revenue related to the Unity Runtime Fee will be made by Unity in its sole discretion.
Ouch, expensive. Don't worry:
> Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits on the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay.
How much?
> please contact your account manager for ad monetization
Got a problem with that? Not what you were expecting?
> Unity may also waive all or any part of the Unity Runtime Fee in its sole discretion. As we implement this program, customers may see an invoice for an amount less than the full number of installs (or for $0) to help with the transition.
> We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.
Some amount. With some discounts. Based on your subscription, maybe? Or maybe you just get credits?
...
I mean, trivially, yeah, sure. Did you make more than $200000 in the last year? Probably not. So, you probably don't care, and this doesn't have anything to do with you.
However, it's really a bit shit to go from a predictable fee to an arbitrary rolling fee which you can't easily predict; and you can't, because despite all their examples, they've really failed hard at two things:
1) How much will it cost?
Not, you tell me later how much it will cost. Not, I get a surprise bill I can't afford in a month. Me, without you input, calculate how much it will cost. How much will it cost? It's pretty clear to me that the answer to this is who the heck knows?
They decide what an install is.
They decide how many installs you had.
They decide how much of a discount to give you.
They decide how much to charge you.
They decide how to deal with any disputes.
Does that sound cool to you? It doesn't really seem cool to me.
2) When will the rates / terms / values change?
There's no rules. They decide that too.
Published a game today? Well, in a year maybe it'll cost more than it costs now per install. Maybe not. Who knows?
...
It's easy to say, 'its no big deal'; but unpredictable pricing is very very bad. They've totally messed this up by making it too complicated and too bespoke.
