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Comment by tomnipotent | Hacker News Reader

> worst case scenario is 10%

You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true.

Let's pretend you sell 300,000 units at $0.99 with the Unity Personal Plan.

    Units: 300,000
    Gross: $297,000
    Unity Fee: $20,000

That puts unity at 6.7%. The issue isn't Unity, it's the developers bad business model for charging $0.99 while opting to use Unity.

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> You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true.

Why? Could you explain why 300k units w/ $200k gross would be impossible?

Is it not legal to sell unity games below $0.99 each, maybe not even in other currencies?

I'd rather be enlightened than shit upon if there's a reason I'm missing why the worst case scenario is 6.7% and not the apparent 10%.

You could also add to that why 6.7% is now possible which is more than 2x the 1-3% from earlier?

Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers and accuse me of pulling numbers out of thin air with the technical worst case scenario?

Steam and Epic both have a minimum price of $0.99, not sure about Apple & Google App Stores. Credit card processors have a minimum charge that makes lower prices untenable.

> Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers

Where did you pull 10%, happy to go over your math/model.

> Where did you pull 10%, happy to go over your math/model.

The example numbers I posted would give 10%.

The pricing was easy enough that the 10% worst case could easily be pulled from it.

I wouldn't trust the numbers from someone who needed a model to go over to see that and I seriously thought you were joking about not getting where the 10% worst case was from.

I wasn't considering F2P or ad-supported games, so my mental model was seeing $0.99 as the pricing floor. If you want to arbitrarily choose an ARPU, we could get that percentage to any number we wanted to make a point.

> If you want to arbitrarily choose an ARPU

From https://www.statista.com/statistics/263797/number-of-applica...:

> As of July 2023, nearly 97 percent of apps in the Google Play app store were freely available

I don't think "arbitrarily" is the right word to use here. Your mental model might have been $0.99 as the pricing floor, but that mental model does not represent the reality of mobile app stores. Paid apps are a minority on both iOS and Android, the dominant revenue model for mobile games is to offer free downloads/installs with advertising and in-app purchases.

It blows my mind that you open with "The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal" and close with "I wasn't considering F2P or ad-supported games".

Your "mental model" didn't consider 80% of the market by revenue?

Worth noting you are ignoring the 30% that app stores take off that gross, which Unity still counts against you.

That's not relevant to Unity's cut in this example, since the percentage is based on gross.

My point is that 30% makes the situation worse, because it is not available to you to pay Unity's cut, so it's as if you made 30% less revenue. IE Unity pricing kicks in at $200k gross, but that's only $170k net, which is what is available you as a business to pay Unity.

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