You only start paying if you have 200k installs AND $200k in revenue. Most indie devs never reach anything like those numbers.
Examples of recent indie games like this: Among Us, Valheim, Phasmophobia, Rimworld, Hollow Knight,...
Here's a whole list: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/39750107-Games-Made-W...
Other than the 'extremely' popular games, you'd be surprised who surpasses those numbers. A small game studio by me was showing their financials at a talk (unheard of!), and the 'long tail' of their games definitely went past those numbers - and more costs coming in after a certain point just make the game less likely to be supported and discounted/sold.
I see this being repeated over and over, but I'm not really understanding, say an indie Dev makes 500k in revenue in one year, how much is it going to unity? If it is anything below 50k it seems to me like a sweet deal for all the things Unity offers to devs.
There's no shortage of free and good game engines out there, but I guess Unity does offer a lot that those free options don't.
All of those counted as a new install, and this was stated to be intentional by unity to all the journalists who reached out and by their internal developers on the support forum.
So the long tail of things like your customers buying a new phone == old apps get transferred == that counts as a new install and you get charged. Reinstall a game from steam or change the install drive or directory? Same thing.
Beyond devs and game types that are affected by legitimate usage, there is the clear problem of malicious installs (what a phrase) and abuse. Unity's answer to that was that proprietary secret internal models would solve abuse, but also that developers would have to reach out with proof of being falsely billed after it happened. And just kinda hope that unity would have the support and billing staff to ever actually deal with that problem.
Unity, for all its "clarifications," keeps promising it won't be a problem and then refusing to be transparent about any of the ways it could possibly be less of a problem.
Either they backtrack on this whole lifetime install count scheme or this blows up even more spectacularly when January rolls around.
With the examples you listed doesn't it require an account to authenticate first before achieving this?
Furthermore, is this not easy enough to spoof? Without account based authentication (which as far as I know Unity does not use/require?) what stops me from spinning up VMs or emulators repeatedly to attempt to install bomb?
Microsoft tells you if you install the game on too many devices.
>>With the examples you listed doesn't it require an account to authenticate first before achieving this?
Uhm, no, that's how it's implemented but it isn't required.
>> what stops me from spinning up VMs or emulators repeatedly to attempt to install bomb?
Nothing, but it would be very time consuming and very easy to detect.
It is a solution that can be done more, or less, correctly or fairly. But the problem is that it is easy to get it wrong, it is easy to implement this incorrectly.
Given how slipshod and slapdash these announcements and responses and walkbacks have been, you can't really have any faith that they will fall into the "right" side of things.
>> I figured that the game is tied to my account, not some hardware ID
Because it is. These platforms still use hardware ID matching for account bans and other functionality.
This is vastly more difficult than you think. For example, if you try to use the standard method, which is hard drive serial numbers, it's incredibly easy to spoof AND all prebuilt computers from Walmart share the same serials. Non-starter.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47603786/where-do-window...
> if you pair it with some kind of online login system
Unity does not have that and there is no way in hell that they will be able to force all players of all games made in unity to sign up for one.
Because I help develop a game engine / platform that deals with this problem and therefore done extensive research?
All of those Microsoft device ID variants are trivial to spoof or collide. If you're talking about GetSystemIdForPublisher() and friends like 'Product ID', you get the Walmart collision problems.
https://github.com/topics/hwid-changer
Furthermore, if you rely on an easy-to-spoof hardware ID system, if someone gets ahold of someone else's HWID (see: database breach, phishing), you can trivially mess with the data.
Valve/Microsoft/Epic get around this by spending tons of developer time on this problem and using techniques like fingerprinting and behavior analysis.
I only know this because they specifically pointed it out when announcing the new pricing plan.
And they've also specifically said they will not charge twice for a reinstall on the same device. So I guess we'll have to see.
They're clearly flying by the seat of their pants with this. There is no reason to give them any rope, any benefit of the doubt. There is no reason to believe that they will be able to do this right.
It's a massive new change and requirement coming into force in only a few months, with basically every single report coming out of Unity internal engineering being that they don't have any systems in place to figure this out and have no idea how they will actually make it work while also still being GDPR compliant.
"Just trust us bro" and "you can file a support ticket if we get the numbers wrong" are not acceptable and are each reasons enough to worry about the potential for (or rather, guaranteed) abuse of this system.
One must assume the worst about any implementation with a system like this, in the same way that once must assume the worst about any implementation of telemetry or of DRM. You'll be right far more often than wrong.
The per-install fee instantly makes this model unviable.
This is an unforced error on Unity's part and while historical performance does not promise future performance; you really can expect Unity to make large blast-radius changes in the future without consulting you.
So, if you've paid $X profit after 200k copies, after 201k copies you've made $X plus a bit more, unless you're actually selling your game at less than $0.20 per copy and whatever your payment fees are on the platform you're using. If you consider the IOS app store, where the minimum price is $0.99 and they take a maximum of 30% (including all payment fees etc), that still leaves you with at least $0.49 per extra copy sold.
This is assuming that all users only install the app on one device. Say a user has both a tablet and a phone, they install the app on both, and after a couple of years they upgrade both and reinstall the app - suddenly you owe Unity more money than you took in from the sale!
I don't know, on one hand I get why devs are complaining, but on the other I really don't - if your product gets installed millions of times but doesn't make even 1 cent per install then you're doing something wrong.
Any relatively successful game is going to hit those numbers. $200k in revenue is barely enough to cover 3-4 months of development for a small studio.
Not to forgot it is from revenue not profit. So give Steam/Google/Apple their cut and remove any external asset or work bought and 200k isn't that much for any non-low income country.
>>Any relatively successful game is going to hit those numbers.
Sure - and any relatively successful game should have no trouble paying those fees. The only real edge case that's going to be affected negatively by this change are f2p games that rely on having millions of installed copies to make miniscule amount of money from few paying people. Those games should consider switching away from Unity.
Indie doesn't mean "small team" or "ugly game with interesting gameplay" or "game that makes less than 200k". All that means is that there aren't any external contractual obligations.
It does tend to carry connotations of small teams in video games, but that might just be because the margins in the industry make it super-hard for large studios to remain independent.
Note that I think Valve would count as an indie under a pure independence metric, thus making things like Half Life an indie game. Which feels a bit off.
This would then also include every public stock company and every company where the owner no longer works on the games in addition to having outside publishers. This would disqualify almost every bigger teams. There are still some big indie teams, but very few.
All the bad things that comes with a publisher also comes with having outside investors/owners in general, it means that now the game starts to be judges on ROI rather than the developers pride.
Having EA as a publisher, for example, comes with having to use their engine and tools and in some cases it makes no sense (see ME: Andromeda and Frost Bite). Having some equity firm X as an investor comes with "you gotta make $$$"
how? my first failed app had about 7 staff at one point: 2 programmers, 2 artists, a writer, sound designer, and the founder himself. the founder was paying all of us out of pocket. What makes that "not indie" compared to right now where if it was just the owner using his own time?
>and any relatively successful game should have no trouble paying those fees.
accounts I've read from devs suggest not. For some devs it ends up paying more revenue than they take in, despite qualifying.
>The only real edge case that's going to be affected negatively by this change are f2p games that rely on having millions of installed copies to make miniscule amount of money from few paying people.
nah, it works best for them because whales can purchase continuously and with huge amounts.