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Comment by popmatrix | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to misunderstand the new pricing model (as did many others; this is Unity's fault) [1]

The $0.20 is not retroactive, nor do you need to hope your users see 10 and impressions to cover a cost to the game developer -- you need to earn $200,000 _and_ have 200,000 installs. A free game would not be charged, and if you don't believe you can muster 10 ad impressions per user (to cover the unity install cost of $0.20), the base cost of the game can be increased by < $0.01 across your 200,000+ sales starting next year when the policy takes effect on new installs.

[1] https://twitter.com/unity/status/1702077049425596900

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It is retroactive, games that are already made today and already exist today on the various app-stores will be impacted.

10 ad impressions per user might not sound like much, but you're going to get a lot of people installing your app, not liking it, and uninstalling it. The way the mobile game business works the "install count" means almost nothing, you need many, many, many installs to start making any money at all because so few people 'stick around' to actually make you any money.

Regardless of how they spin it, this model is very bad for the FtP games, which is the vast majority of games now.

Looks like you know a lot about F2P games, can you help me understand this fee in the context of other variables such as cost of customer acquisition? Is that usually a much lower amount than 20 cents? What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro license, which most successful F2P devs would assuredly be able to afford?

I’m hoping you can answer these with concrete data. If that’s not possible, could you share your references?

> What about 2 cents, which would be the cost on a pro license,

2 cents with the pro-license only applies after the first 1M installs, tallied per month. If a game is under 100K installs per month, a pro license only lowers the install fee from 20 cents to 15.

I see. And this error explains why I’m being downvoted and don’t deserve any other answers?

Basing the fee on number of installs instead of number of buyers is a problem, it's an unpredictable cost that developers have no control over as it also counts repeated installing of the game. Their FAQ suggests that malicious "install bombing" is something they cannot prevent automatically but instead have to resolve via their support. In other words you depend on them having good support while they profit from bad support, all while their CEO is the kind of manager who wanted Battlefield players to pay for each weapon reload.

If Unity just counted number of buyers they wouldn't have to deal with malicious installs and users of their engine would have more predictable costs. But for some reason they don't want that, and that alone is suspicious.

Install bombing sounds like a way to smother out this install fee policy. Especially if installing could be automated.

No, it is different - and it crosses line. There is DRM built into the Unity engine that informs Unity (the company) of an install, and companies pay via this Unity derived number. Not reported game sales, or even self reported game installs.

I think when most people are, in this context, talking about the "retroactive" part, it's about if it will affect existing games. The pricing structure will be applicable to everyone starting next year.

The other issue is how they measure "installs", as it has been a constant problem in the mobile community for years on end (a problem especially affecting the ad industry as you may imagine). I personally don't see how they will accurately measure the cases mentioned in the tweet without forcing everyone to have some authentication.

Unity is saying they can send developers a bill for whatever they want, and if it's not paid their game can't be installed.

Unity has published what "whatever they want" currently is. It doesn't matter if people get the details wrong on that because Unity can change its mind.

That being said, you're still more wrong than the author on the details. The change is retroactive in that it applies to existing applications. The author was very clear what they meant by "retroactive":

> this change will be done retroactively on existing applications as well.

This is true.

They'd get one ad impression from me before I closed the application and uninstalled it from my computer.

This sales model will ruin indie devs who aren't so eager to swallow adtech's shaft that they're content with rolling out malware to their users.

If I got 3 ads impression the moment I install and open and app. I can promise you that I will never know if the app has 3, 4, 10 or 100 ads impressions.

No matter what is the app.

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