Gary Newman (GMod/Rust) pressured by Unity to spend 500k on services
twitter.com
twitter.com
Because our game is popular and we use their engine, we now have to spend $500k a year using their other services. Is this okay?”
Just when I thought Unity learned lessons from last time… still speedrunning their reputation into the ground.
If you are Unity, you have to do charity, and offer your products for free, and never try to sell anything else :^^)
Let's put things into perspective shall we:
Facepunch sold 16 millions copies of Rust in 2023 [1]
At $40, it's ~448 millions USD after the 30% cut from Valve (30% flat tax lol), $500k a year is not even 1%
But wait a minute, what even is Rust? Rust is an online open world PvP survival multiplayer game, so it relies on a cloud infrastructure with beafy servers to handle all the physics and proc gen, if they sold 16m copies just in 2023, they then have to handle a lot of concurrent players[2], whether it is from Unity or not it doesn't matter, so the 500k is relative, it's a successful game, the invoice will be sweet regardless of the cloud provider
Without knowing more details, the email probably goes: "We now bundle the product X, and you meet the criteria"
Remember, less than 1%, and is relative to the type of game and its success, shy of the 30% cut from Valve
I don't particularly like Unity, but people are free to use the engine of their choice, or roll their own
For steam however, it's where the users are, therefore you have no other choice but to get taxed 30%
So make sure you fight the right battle, nobody forced you to pick Unity, you had choice
The point here is that they started out with a certain set of terms: Unity wasn't a significant cost, nor was it ever expected to be, but now they've switched up the terms of the deal more or less unilaterally. This is not good business. No one wants an essential supplier or vendor to go out of business if they can't be easily replaced, and this can be leveraged in negotiations for terms that satisfy both parties, but dictating terms like this leaves a sour taste.
You also assume that every copy has sold for 40 dollars, but a huge chunk of sales will be from early on when pricing was low or during promotional pricing events. You also don't know how fat or thin the margins are, and using percentages of overall revenue doesn't reflect how much a change like this could be affecting their bottom line. If their margin is 10%, a rise in cost of 1% of overall revenue eats a tenth of their profits. If we use less liberal assumptions about their revenue, we might go as high as half their bottom line being taken out by a mandatory spend figure such as this.