Also, there are cases where a developer might squeeze $100k out of sales and then get a game pass deal where they get another $100k that would result in them getting 5 million downloads. That would result in the fee being $1 million because they’re on the lower tier subscription.
They are doing this for two reasons from what I can tell: a) they want a cut of game pass volume b) they want to worse high volume micro transaction games onto their own ad network (if you sign up to their ad network you don’t pay the fee)
The biggest problem is them attempting to bill people who have already released games and might still get the odd download. It’s crazy cause these developers never agreed to the new license AND it’s highly doubtful this would be legal anyway because contracts need consideration. “We just want more money” probably won’t cut the mustard.
It's like if I owned an old version of Photoshop and Adobe contacted me to say that because the jpg I produced blew up on Twitter I owe them $1000. I can't retroactively take the picture down and recreate it in gimp and I shouldn't have to. Most alternative products to unity simply do a hand wave to old products. "If your game was made in engine 2.0 you have this pricing structure, but engine 3.0 users have a different one"
Bad analogy. If you remove your game from any store, and you are not making more than 200k (free license) or 1M (for pro/enterprise license) last year, then you are fine. Nothing will be charged from you. If you released the game, did't update it, no bug fixes, nothing, but still profiting from it, and people still downloading it, then you will pay the 0.20 cents per install... It is just like that. People are jumping in a drama, that affect only huge mobile games, which are full with ads, addictive, that through Gamification try to earn screen time from the users.. Unity is greedy, but mostly the devs being affected by that, aren't those writing indie games.
It's like if I took an old version of photoshop and sold the pictures on patreon, but my patreon blew up and adobe decided they wanted a piece of the pie and changed their TOS, and made me take the jpg I made when I was under a DIFFERENT TOS down,remake the jpg in GIMP, or pay them for the privilege of keeping that picture up on the internet, and also any time that picture appears on imageboard I could also maybe be charged for it, but they totally have a way to tell if it was gotten from the imageboard or patreon trust them but they won't tell us how.
Unity has trapped game developers and held them hostage. Those devs made the game under one set of rules and pricing model, and now that the game is out they have a choice of destroying their product by removing it from availability, or pay money they had no way of predicting they would need? Just because you don't like the game devs doesn't mean Unity didn't fuck them over, and it sets a dangerous precedent.
Unity has clearly stated that they will charge for reinstalling, installing on multiple machines, and implied that pirated copies also count.
If you get unlucky and your game is popular with pirates, you're suddenly paying for a ton of licenses on copies of the game you never even sold.
You can quite literally script a process to repeatedly reinstall a single copy of the game to rack up unity charges for a developer you don't like.
That's not really very reasonable.
Also, retroactively applying the new model to already exiting games was also a bit of a bad move. You make a game and decide the business model based on what you know at the time and what you can predict will happen in the future, predicting that unity would change their pricing model like this is near impossible, so the business model you picked for your old games is now unfit.
Honestly, this is mostly going to hurt indie devs who make it, but aren't quite in the same successes bracket as a game like Cities: Skylines, Hearthstone, Rimworld. And also F2P games, especially mobile ones, where Whales can easily spend $200k or $1mil, but you have millions of installs of people just trying the free game and deleting it, or installing it on multiple devices.
The Runtime fee can easily exceed Unreal Engine's own 5% flat Royalty Fee by a fair margin (easily 10%) depending on the money you ask for and method of distribution, for example, you won't want to give out copies or discount the game as much after meeting the requirements.
The most objectionable thing about Unity's new pricing is it hits hardest the smaller indies with the lowest budgets. The AAA studios will barely notice it and are probably negotiating better terms anyway.
"Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs."
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...
So if you sold in the last year more than 200k AND have more than 200k game installs and have the unity personal version, then you have to pay for install...