Comment by qwytw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwytw | Hacker News Reader

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> I just made those number up to give you an example, be it realistic or not hardly matters

That's pretty much the only thing that matters. there is a huge difference whether they make $0.5, $1 or $2 etc (and especially how much more do they make per user in a "rich" country since Unity seems to think that they are worth up to 10x more than everyone else.

> Plenty of games are profitable at scale with only a few pennies per user.

Beyond a certain point (over 1 mill users) it will only cost $0.01 per install. So this will affect 1-5 dev/worker studios with very low revenue per user. They could still probably just pay ~2k for Unity Pro per seat and stay under the 1 million revenue threshold.

To me it almost seems that the '$0.20 per install' is only there to encourage developers to upgrade to pro if they have more than a few hundred k. users.

> If it was instead a %

True, I'm not arguing that wouldn't be more fair. It would be quite expensive to enforce and close to impossible in certain cases. So I understand why Unity chose to do this instead.

> That's pretty much the only thing that matters. there is a huge difference whether they make $0.5, $1 or $2 etc

My point is those numbers can vary GREATLY from games to games, and not only the revenue per user but the cost of user acquisition as well. There isn't one truth, the numbers I gave up could very well fit a real project.

Of course you would be pretty stupid to not subscribe to Pro once you notice your game going to 200k. And let's be real, at 1M$ threshold, if the Unity tax is what kill your game, maybe there wasn't a market fit. But it just feel such a bad and unfair way to generate revenue on free to play games.

> So I understand why Unity chose to do this instead.

Other engines does it just fine, tracking installs (without any false positive) seems a much bigger hassle especially legal wise

> Other engines does it just fine,

I'm not sure that's comparable or even true. No other proprietary engine has as even remotely comparable market share in the freemium/Ad/IAP-funded/shovelware mobile game market.

Also Epic isn't trying to pay for 8000 employees (especially not just with their engine revenue) or service billion in debt accrued from (possibly unnecessary) acquisitions. It feels to me that Unity pushed themselves into a corner by increasing and don't really have any choices but to try and maximize their revenue any way they can.

e.g. Epic seems to have about 4000 employees and compared to Fortnite Unreal seems to almost be just a side gig for them.

Also let's be fair a 5% royalty would be much more likely to scare off their best paying customers. And looking at their current leadership and overall philosophy I find it easy to understand why they might not care that much what will happen to some indy/small developers who can't afford/don't want to pay for Pro or have more than 1 million users but can't generate more than ~$0.2 - 0.5 in profit per install.

I get that, but I feel like there must've been a much better way to do so than with this proposal that seems to have burn the last remaining goodwill that developers had left in Unity and making sure most future projects won't get done on Unity.

A lot of people have been thinking about switching for years, Unity is becoming slower and slower with time, more buggier, etc. I feel like this is the tipping point where the number of developpers is going to go down, so was it worth it? Maybe, maybe it was the correct decision, time will tell.

I'll still continue to use it for on-going projects I have and pay the tax no problem, but I won't pick it for any project in the future personnaly because of how out of touch and ridiculous I personaly feel this business decision is (and other decisions they've made).

I get why would people be opposed to these changes on a more "philosophical" level (and I think I am) but I'm not sure that much changes financially for most developers who make less than 1 million in revenue per game (and they overall seem to be somewhat fair(ish) in relation to what Unity provides and compared to 30% storefront fees or what ad companies skim):

- If your company was making over $200k you already couldn't be on Personal/Plus and would have had to upgrade to Pro, so the $0.2 fee seems irrelevant.

- The current limit is based on company's entire revenue, it seems they changed it to per game? If so you're actually now better off if you have many games which make about $100k or so.

- The only issues I see is that if there is huge unexpected surge in downloads/sales which might leave with a large bill (which you could've mostly avoided by upgrading to Pro in advance). Which is not the most unlikely scenario.

You sold you game for a fixed fee to Apple/MS/etc. (Gamepass, Arcade..). I doubt many games there cost less than 200k (thought I don't really know)? So you're probably on Pro. But if your overall revenue for the game is over $1 million you'd still be on the the hook to pay for additional downloads (above 1 mil) with zero increase in revenue..

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