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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

Okay I was talking about this with a few friends because it’s now a “debacle” and actually did the math. Unity is cheaper than Unreal across the board whether you release a $70 AAA or a $5 indie experiment. And that’s with worst case numbers. It’s even cheaper if you’re a pro or enterprise user.

On my napkin: for a $30 indie title at the 200k install threshold it washes out to be a 0.67% “revenue share”. Unreal charges 5%.

So can someone show me the math where indie devs are getting screwed? How is this possibly so bad that people are sending “credible death threats” to the CEO?

Or is the issue just the attempt to apply the terms retroactively? That I understand. If Unity said “going forward this is pricing, we aren’t going to retroactively apply the runtime fee to installs prior to Jan 1, 2024”, would the fuss die down?

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My understanding is that a large number of Unity installs are mobile games, and a lot of those are free to play with microtransactions. So we're not talking $30 earned per user. We're not even talking $1 earned per user. We're talking, in some cases, less than $0.01 earned per user (on average), since some users have paid nothing to play the game.

There's also the fact that Unity charging "per install" also includes things like game demos (which are free), or games given to subscribers of things like PlayStation Plus, where the creator is paid a fixed amount upfront based on an estimate of how many people will download the game--but, if more people download the game than originally estimated, then you could end up losing money thanks to Unity.

> There's also the fact that Unity charging "per install" also includes things like game demos (which are free), or games given to subscribers of things like PlayStation Plus,

I've read that Unity clarified that this doesn't apply to Demos (but mistakes happen) and they would charge the platform MSFT/ Sony/ etc. for subscriber stuff -- which, oh yeah, pick that fight with MSFT & Sony, so smart.

> My understanding is that a large number of Unity installs are mobile games, and a lot of those are free to play with microtransactions

So an horrible market is dying. Good.

There is no reason to assume it will die. It might shift a bit but you are very optimistic to think it will go away

I don't think just saying "hey it is still cheaper than unreal so what is the problem?"

There are now new fees that people didn't have to pay previously. I.e. devs used to use unity and now they still use unity but have to pay more than they did before. Unreal might not even factor in for them.

Indie devs potentially make negative profits at the best of times. That doesn't make death threats (even "credible" ones...) ok though. Just use Godot and move on.

When McDonalds increases the price of a McDouble the messes don’t send death threats to the CEO. Something that used to cost X increasing in price and now costing 1.2X is not unethical. I’m just trying to understand what it is in this case that has people up in arms. I think the answer is the attempt by Unity to apply retroactive pricing.

I think more than anything it is the nickle-and-dime frustration of being charged multiple times along the way. It would be more like if McDonalds charged per bite instead of per sandwich. Even if the final bill isn't much different, it changes one's eating habits and likely makes the whole experience less enjoyable in the end.

With Unity, users don't like the new labrynthian TOS. It doesn't help that multiple times people have said "I need to pay if I release a free to play game?" And Unity has clarified "no, that isn't what we meant, you won't need to pay for those." It is either on the Unity legal team for writing the terms so poorly or the marketing team for translating them poorly. Either way, trust has been lost. If Unity builds in a legal back door to charge later for phantom installs or retroactive usage or whatever, that makes an operational risk that devs might want to avoid.

Also, separately, the masses will send idle death threats for nearly anything. Given a large enough consumer base, idle death threats will be sent for any change (even a positive one) or no change at all. I'm guessing that McDonalds' CEO doesn't make noise about it when it happens.

I uninstall/delete and then at some point in the future redownload/reinstall games all of the time on both iOS and Steam. In fact Apple does the delete for me with some games automatically. Why should the developer of the game be charged a fee each time I do this?

Yeah i definitely see both sides of this issue. In the end i'd bet 95% or more of the revenue changes from this big model is going to come from large game studios anyway.

What i think people aren't getting is Unity probably implemented the per install fee in anticipation of the Apple vision pro. An extremely large amount of vision pro apps are going to be using Unity because of the new partnership with apple.

The problem is that installs are not sales.

To give an example:

user installs the game on their pc? unity wants the fee paid for that

same user installs it on their laptop? pay again

same user upgrades their pc and has to install the game again? unity wants their install fee

I believe they also initially said that deinstall + install would incur another charge, but backpeddalled there (weird)

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