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Comment by ZeWaka | Hacker News Reader

True, but it does hurt the indie darlings that 'get noticed,' who showcase the Unity engine as a platform for small developers to make their game.

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.

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How much does it hurts them? What's the cut?

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.

That's the thing: it's not possible to answer this question, since the cut Unity gets is not tied to the revenue of the developer anymore. You pay per user install. In the absolute worst case of people trying to abuse this structure, it would be possible for the developer to owe more than their revenue!

That only applies to F2P games essentially thought, right?

No, it applies to all games. Say you publish an iOS game for 1$, and a user installs it on two devices which he replaces after a couple of years - you'll owe Unity more money than you took in from the sale.

Initially, this applied to every single update, every single reinstall, and anything that changed your IP. Every load of a unity web game.

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.

If it's 50k for 500k revenue then you think it's reasonable for Unity to charge twice the price of Unreal engine's royalties, plus additional liabilities for any future installs of the game that customers previously purchased and will no longer be paying for.

The cut is 500% of revenue, as stated in this and several articles. Read before posting.

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