Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't pay anything to Unity in that scenario - you need 100k installs and 200k in revenue for the game before the fee applies.

And the charge is incremental after the 100k and 200k in revenue, so if you had 101k installs and 200k in revenue, you'd only pay $15.

View on HN

I'm going to use the Personal / Plus pricing instead of Pro, on a f2p mobile game, but let's say you made 200k$ on the first 200k install, but only 20k$ on the next 200k installs (for whatever reason, different market, whale spending 10's of thousands $ skewing the data, etc.), you owe Unity 40k$ and are now in the negative for those new installs when you could've still turned a profit, albeit less.

Of course Unity deserve to be paid and receive revenue, I'm absolutely not against that and if you are on the Pro subscription, it is only a concerned once you reach 1M$ which at this point means the project should be profitable and manage to pay that tax (otherwise maybe that project isn't commercially viable).

But it just feel very harsh for the mega popular indie hit that have very low revenue per user you know... A % of revenue would be better or at the very least only count install that generated revenue or whatever...

> but let's say you made 200k$ on the first 200k install, but only 20k$ on the next 200k installs (for whatever reason, different market, whale spending 10's of thousands $ skewing the data, etc.), you owe Unity 40k$ and

And that point you should just switch to Pro and ust pay ~2k per seat each year without install fees.

Of course I guess you need to think about that in advance, but unless there is a massive spike in popularity and your daily installs spike by 10000% or something in a day (which is not that unthinkable) you should be fine.

yes, you are correct in that scenario. It would be nightmare. But the scenario seems like it would be rare. And it is $200k revenue in the previous 12 months, not lifetime. So the trailing 12 month revenue would start to drop, probably under the 200k threshold.

But there are definitely gotcha scenarios, and tracking installs is highly dubious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com