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The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal. Let's look at fictional scenario for Vampire Survivors,

The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal. Let's look at fictional scenario for Vampire Survivors, and model 5M units sold in the first 12 months at $4.99 per sale. We'll also assume a Unity Enterprise plan. Units Sold: 5,000,000 Gross Sales: $24,950,000 Steam Fees: $0-10M (30%): $3,000,000 $10M+ (25%): $3,737,500 Total: $6,737,500 Unity Fees: 0-100,000: $12,500 100-500k: $24,000 500k-1MM: $10,000 1MM-4MM: $30,000 Total: $76,500 Net Sales: $18,136,000 I can't be certain exactly how Unity is planning to accrue installs when determining installs over threshold, so treating it like brackets. So in this fictional scenario, the Unity fee is 0.3% of gross or 0.47% after Steam takes its cut. Even if we assume the average consumer downloads the game 1.2 times, that's still only $20k more. The bigger issue is how thresholds accrue, since that could push more installs into costlier lower threshold brackets. I'm not sure I see the outrage.

matt3210 3y ago
Especially since the extra cost will certainly be passed onto the customer anyway. That’s a small bump for a 4.99 game, but a 20% bump for a 1$ mobile game
adocomplete 3y ago
Yup. Unity I believe is very fairly priced and even with these changes the fees are very reasonable for what you get. And at the end of the day, if you think it's too expensive, you're free to build your own cross platform game engine from scratch.
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starburst 3y ago
Don't forget Mobile or f2p gaming, Unity has a huge market share there and the margin are really low, adding ~0.20$ per user when most will makes you 0$ doesn't make sense at all. Going with % of profit does. Also it is quite unfair to cheaper games, indie 5$ games pay a much bigger share than a 40$ / 70$ game
- tomnipotent 3y ago
  Unity isn't responsible for a bad business model. If you can't turn a profit after the fee structure, then don't choose Unity.
  - MissingAFew 3y ago
    >don't choose Unity Sounds good to me!
  - NotGMan 3y ago
    The problem with that logic is that all mobile devs will leave Unity -> even less money for Unity. You cannot be onsided in business: both parties have to profit. If one parties is screwing the other party one party will say "goodbye, we will take our money elsewhere".
  - starburst 3y ago
    Easy to say to mobile games studios that have ben using Unity for the last 10 years (or where in the process of releasing a game after multiple years of development) and didn't have to pay that tax before. Also this will apply to every games made on Unity, so if you have a hugely popular game just above the threshold but make less than 0.20$ per user you effectively need to shutdown it down. It isn't "bad business model" either, there is definitely a market for games where the revenue per user is less than 0.20$ (or whatever number). Going with % of revenue is the sensible decision, just like Unreal does...
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > Unity isn't responsible for a bad business model. If you can't turn a profit after the fee structure, then don't choose Unity. What? Unity is in fact responsible for the fee structure, they made it. It's not a force of nature, you don't get to change the business model under people's feet and then say, "huh, real irresponsible of you to choose a business model that doesn't work because we broke it; not our fault, you should have planned for us changing your revenue structure." Especially since as far as I can tell, Unity is retroactively applying this change onto existing games already on the marketplace. God didn't make the business model bad, Unity did. And when those games launched, they launched under a different business model than what Unity is proposing. It is in fact not their fault that they didn't have the psychic ability to consider, "what if Unity randomly decides in the future to charge us every time a user installs one of our free games even if they only play it for 30 seconds?"
NotGMan 3y ago
The problem is mobile. What if you get 5M installs and fail to monetize it or if the game isn't well suited to monetization? And assume that you, beforehand, breached 200k, then monetization drops for some reason. Then you own unity ~85k$ and you so you go in net negative. That is the real problem here.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  I’d suspect if you’re doing those numbers that it’d be a company that’d need to be on Pro licences anyway so the thresholds would be much higher.
  - gs17 3y ago
    What if you're just an indie who makes some random app game that gets popular suddenly? Maybe you made the next Flappy Bird but didn't monetize it quite well enough? >a company that’d need to be on Pro licences anyway They also got rid of the income threshold for Personal licenses.
    - meheleventyone 3y ago
      I’d choose an engine without this silly install based scheme. Which is what I expect most hobbyists and small developers to do now. The other route if the game was F2P or ad supported would be to use a similar process to the big guys and soft-launch to judge the product and monetization on a smaller scale.
- ncr100 3y ago
  Unless my math is wrong it seems like a pretty onerous fee for the case that your monetization starts failing. Start with 5 million installs, and then your new installs are another 5 million copies, which incurs a worst case ($0.20/install) $1 million fee from Unity. You would still have to have earned $200,000 (worst case you're personal user) in the last 12 months. So with this, you would gross -$800,000. And this is before app store fees, taxes, payroll, and no accommodation for pirate installs in the new plan. I don't see the benefit to the developer. Mark Whitten CFO of Unity, says the developers are excited about this. The 6 Plus pages of 99%- comments on the unity forum shows a lot of excitement, a lot of negative excitement from developers. I don't see the value to many developers. It seems like a huge mistake.
Quot 3y ago
It seems disingenuous to pick one of the most popular games of this year as an example when the pricing goes down with more sales. I would like to see that same breakdown for the much smaller games that barely pass the sales threshold. That is the main Unity audience. Vampire Survivors is a huge outlier that didn't even start using Unity until after it became a massive hit. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/vampire-survivors-makes-its-full-leap-to-a-new-engine-next-month-bringing-better-performance-and-stability https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/vampire-survivors-makes-its...
- tomnipotent 3y ago
  Ok so the fees jump up to 1-3%, that's still reasonable.
  - tapland 3y ago
    No need to guess, worst case scenario is 10%.
    - tomnipotent 3y ago
      > worst case scenario is 10% You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true. Let's pretend you sell 300,000 units at $0.99 with the Unity Personal Plan. Units: 300,000 Gross: $297,000 Unity Fee: $20,000 That puts unity at 6.7%. The issue isn't Unity, it's the developers bad business model for charging $0.99 while opting to use Unity.
      - tapland 3y ago
        > You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true. Why? Could you explain why 300k units w/ $200k gross would be impossible? Is it not legal to sell unity games below $0.99 each, maybe not even in other currencies? I'd rather be enlightened than shit upon if there's a reason I'm missing why the worst case scenario is 6.7% and not the apparent 10%. You could also add to that why 6.7% is now possible which is more than 2x the 1-3% from earlier? Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers and accuse me of pulling numbers out of thin air with the technical worst case scenario?
danjoredd 3y ago
The outrage is that this pretty much kills hobbyist game devs in Unity. Unity was great because it allowed small devs who aren't seeking to make a profit to put stuff out there relatively quickly. I used it myself all the time in college. Now imagine a game you made...for free...goes viral and you pass your threshold. Now you owe Unity a bunch of money. Not every project needs to seek to make money. Sometimes you want to put something out there for the sake of putting something out there without worrying that you are going to need to pay up for it. While we are at it, I want to shill my personal favorite engine...Godot. I know its fairly well known in the HN scene, but I think that this should be a push to use more free and open-source technology in game dev, rather than relying on a bunch of corporate black boxes that can turn predatory at any minute.
- tomnipotent 3y ago
  > hobbyist game devs in Unity Is it a hobby if you're making more than $200k in a 12-month period? Most hobbyists will likely be unaffected by this, and those that are will see very small fees less than what Visa charges to process a credit card transaction.
- yesimahuman 3y ago
  Doesn’t this only kick in if you’ve hit a revenue threshold, which won’t happen for a free game?
  - danjoredd 3y ago
    I must have misread it
  - gs17 3y ago
    Correct, and it seems to be per game, which is better than before, since it seems to allow Unity Personal for making free/small things in any setting.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    Free games generally have ads. The revenue calculation isn't for sales revenue, it's for all revenue.
babypuncher 3y ago
> Even if we assume the average consumer downloads the game 1.2 times, that's still only $20k more. Charging the developer when a customer re-downloads a game they already bought sounds incredibly asinine to me, no matter how small the fee actually is. No download store charges for this privilege, and they're the ones actually footing the bill for the bandwidth and infrastructure to make that possible. Unity is adding accounting complexity and fees for something they do none of the legwork to provide.
- danjoredd 3y ago
  Oh, but don't you know it's so small it can't POSSIBLY be a predatory practice! Give the corporation all of your money and be quiet, peon!/s
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anonymousab 3y ago
The number of downloads or installs is not equal to the number of purchases, and can be quite a lot larger, particularly for a game with a free demo, steam refund "trial" shenanigans, pirated copies, etc.
- _cenw 3y ago
  and depending on how unity does track an install, hardware changes
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Or possibly reinstalls, or even something like the user hitting the "generate new ad ID" button. Do they clarify such situations?
    - anonymousab 3y ago
      On mobile, theoretically each new APK - every new update to the game - could count as a new install. I don't think they're that crazy, but I wouldn't be surprised if JRR didn't even think that far.
berkle4455 3y ago
> The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal. Get fucked dude, you have no idea what any of our backgrounds are.
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fzeroracer 3y ago
It seems like to me you're the one with little to no game development experience given your repeated comments about mobile games. As an example where their new pricing scheme especially breaks down: You actively lose money (beyond just lost sales) for including your game in things like charity bundles because Unity will still ship you a bill for every install. This means if you had a modest success the incentive is to never give away your game even temporarily. They also removed pricing levels that hobbyist developers used, which means they also have to pay more in subscription fees (up to $1k+ more) in addition to the fees above.
gamblor956 3y ago
Vampire Survivor wasn't developed with a Unity Enterprise subscription, so it's irrelevant what their hypothetical cost structure would have been if they had done something completely different than what they actually did. 5 million x $0.20 = $980,000 in Unity fees under 2023 pricing vs. $2040 annual pro subscription under 2022 pricing (for exceeding $100k in sales). In other words, this is an instantaneous 480x fee increase, without any corresponding increase in the value of the services provided. Do you understand why people are outraged now?
- deleted 3y ago
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- tomnipotent 3y ago
  > Vampire Survivors developer would have been using the Unity Personal plan So you think they would have left money on the table rather than spend $4k to upgrade to Enterprise?
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    Do you even know the history of Vampire Survivors? The game's sales blew past the Unity threshold in hours when it first became a hit. Yes, they would have switched to Enterprise after that. And you know what? It would have still been too late to prevent them from owing several multiples of what the Unity fee used to be.
ouraf 3y ago
redo the math for an indie with Unity Personal and a sudden hit with 250k sales Units Sold: 250000 Gross Sales: $1 247 500 Steam Fees: $0-10M (30%): $374 250 Unity Fees (personal or plus): 250 000 : $50 000 Net Sales: 823 250 Now it's more or less 6%, and that's before development costs and taxes. It's a big bite for something that's impossible to code out of the project. Imagine if Oracle charged a dollar every time someone ran your software the first time on the JRE in that machine. installation on a new machine? pay again. Old customer reinstalls the JRE? pay again. main executable or JRE update? pay again. Not so funny anymore.
- tomnipotent 3y ago
  Except there's no fee for the first 200k installs, so the Unity fee is only $10k for the 50k after the threshold. You could also have saved $8k by upgrading to Unity Pro for $2040, though of course you run the risk of paying for that plan and not selling 250k units.
  - hallgrim 3y ago
    Unfortunately the blog post is so poorly worded that I'm not sure after that. My reading, too, is that once you reach the threshold, you pay for those first 200k installs, too! The table says 'per install', not 'per additional install' or anything like it. Not sure though.
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titanc13 3y ago
This is such a uneducated and specific take, like literally leaving out a huge percentage of the real projects that use Unity, not the succesfull paid games. If we go cherry picking the succesful games that are banking a lot of revenue, it's obvious this crap won't affect them that much. People here need a bit of a common sense.

matt3210 3y ago

Especially since the extra cost will certainly be passed onto the customer anyway. That’s a small bump for a 4.99 game, but a 20% bump for a 1$ mobile game

adocomplete 3y ago

Yup. Unity I believe is very fairly priced and even with these changes the fees are very reasonable for what you get. And at the end of the day, if you think it's too expensive, you're free to build your own cross platform game engine from scratch.

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starburst 3y ago

Don't forget Mobile or f2p gaming, Unity has a huge market share there and the margin are really low, adding ~0.20$ per user when most will makes you 0$ doesn't make sense at all. Going with % of profit does. Also it is quite unfair to cheaper games, indie 5$ games pay a much bigger share than a 40$ / 70$ game

tomnipotent 3y ago
Unity isn't responsible for a bad business model. If you can't turn a profit after the fee structure, then don't choose Unity.
- MissingAFew 3y ago
  >don't choose Unity Sounds good to me!
- NotGMan 3y ago
  The problem with that logic is that all mobile devs will leave Unity -> even less money for Unity. You cannot be onsided in business: both parties have to profit. If one parties is screwing the other party one party will say "goodbye, we will take our money elsewhere".
- starburst 3y ago
  Easy to say to mobile games studios that have ben using Unity for the last 10 years (or where in the process of releasing a game after multiple years of development) and didn't have to pay that tax before. Also this will apply to every games made on Unity, so if you have a hugely popular game just above the threshold but make less than 0.20$ per user you effectively need to shutdown it down. It isn't "bad business model" either, there is definitely a market for games where the revenue per user is less than 0.20$ (or whatever number). Going with % of revenue is the sensible decision, just like Unreal does...
- danShumway 3y ago
  > Unity isn't responsible for a bad business model. If you can't turn a profit after the fee structure, then don't choose Unity. What? Unity is in fact responsible for the fee structure, they made it. It's not a force of nature, you don't get to change the business model under people's feet and then say, "huh, real irresponsible of you to choose a business model that doesn't work because we broke it; not our fault, you should have planned for us changing your revenue structure." Especially since as far as I can tell, Unity is retroactively applying this change onto existing games already on the marketplace. God didn't make the business model bad, Unity did. And when those games launched, they launched under a different business model than what Unity is proposing. It is in fact not their fault that they didn't have the psychic ability to consider, "what if Unity randomly decides in the future to charge us every time a user installs one of our free games even if they only play it for 30 seconds?"

NotGMan 3y ago

The problem is mobile. What if you get 5M installs and fail to monetize it or if the game isn't well suited to monetization? And assume that you, beforehand, breached 200k, then monetization drops for some reason. Then you own unity ~85k$ and you so you go in net negative. That is the real problem here.

meheleventyone 3y ago
I’d suspect if you’re doing those numbers that it’d be a company that’d need to be on Pro licences anyway so the thresholds would be much higher.
- gs17 3y ago
  What if you're just an indie who makes some random app game that gets popular suddenly? Maybe you made the next Flappy Bird but didn't monetize it quite well enough? >a company that’d need to be on Pro licences anyway They also got rid of the income threshold for Personal licenses.
  - meheleventyone 3y ago
    I’d choose an engine without this silly install based scheme. Which is what I expect most hobbyists and small developers to do now. The other route if the game was F2P or ad supported would be to use a similar process to the big guys and soft-launch to judge the product and monetization on a smaller scale.
ncr100 3y ago
Unless my math is wrong it seems like a pretty onerous fee for the case that your monetization starts failing. Start with 5 million installs, and then your new installs are another 5 million copies, which incurs a worst case ($0.20/install) $1 million fee from Unity. You would still have to have earned $200,000 (worst case you're personal user) in the last 12 months. So with this, you would gross -$800,000. And this is before app store fees, taxes, payroll, and no accommodation for pirate installs in the new plan. I don't see the benefit to the developer. Mark Whitten CFO of Unity, says the developers are excited about this. The 6 Plus pages of 99%- comments on the unity forum shows a lot of excitement, a lot of negative excitement from developers. I don't see the value to many developers. It seems like a huge mistake.

Quot 3y ago

It seems disingenuous to pick one of the most popular games of this year as an example when the pricing goes down with more sales. I would like to see that same breakdown for the much smaller games that barely pass the sales threshold. That is the main Unity audience. Vampire Survivors is a huge outlier that didn't even start using Unity until after it became a massive hit. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/vampire-survivors-makes-its-full-leap-to-a-new-engine-next-month-bringing-better-performance-and-stability https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/vampire-survivors-makes-its...

tomnipotent 3y ago
Ok so the fees jump up to 1-3%, that's still reasonable.
- tapland 3y ago
  No need to guess, worst case scenario is 10%.
  - tomnipotent 3y ago
    > worst case scenario is 10% You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true. Let's pretend you sell 300,000 units at $0.99 with the Unity Personal Plan. Units: 300,000 Gross: $297,000 Unity Fee: $20,000 That puts unity at 6.7%. The issue isn't Unity, it's the developers bad business model for charging $0.99 while opting to use Unity.
    - tapland 3y ago
      > You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true. Why? Could you explain why 300k units w/ $200k gross would be impossible? Is it not legal to sell unity games below $0.99 each, maybe not even in other currencies? I'd rather be enlightened than shit upon if there's a reason I'm missing why the worst case scenario is 6.7% and not the apparent 10%. You could also add to that why 6.7% is now possible which is more than 2x the 1-3% from earlier? Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers and accuse me of pulling numbers out of thin air with the technical worst case scenario?

danjoredd 3y ago

The outrage is that this pretty much kills hobbyist game devs in Unity. Unity was great because it allowed small devs who aren't seeking to make a profit to put stuff out there relatively quickly. I used it myself all the time in college. Now imagine a game you made...for free...goes viral and you pass your threshold. Now you owe Unity a bunch of money. Not every project needs to seek to make money. Sometimes you want to put something out there for the sake of putting something out there without worrying that you are going to need to pay up for it. While we are at it, I want to shill my personal favorite engine...Godot. I know its fairly well known in the HN scene, but I think that this should be a push to use more free and open-source technology in game dev, rather than relying on a bunch of corporate black boxes that can turn predatory at any minute.

tomnipotent 3y ago
> hobbyist game devs in Unity Is it a hobby if you're making more than $200k in a 12-month period? Most hobbyists will likely be unaffected by this, and those that are will see very small fees less than what Visa charges to process a credit card transaction.
yesimahuman 3y ago
Doesn’t this only kick in if you’ve hit a revenue threshold, which won’t happen for a free game?
- danjoredd 3y ago
  I must have misread it
- gs17 3y ago
  Correct, and it seems to be per game, which is better than before, since it seems to allow Unity Personal for making free/small things in any setting.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  Free games generally have ads. The revenue calculation isn't for sales revenue, it's for all revenue.

babypuncher 3y ago

> Even if we assume the average consumer downloads the game 1.2 times, that's still only $20k more. Charging the developer when a customer re-downloads a game they already bought sounds incredibly asinine to me, no matter how small the fee actually is. No download store charges for this privilege, and they're the ones actually footing the bill for the bandwidth and infrastructure to make that possible. Unity is adding accounting complexity and fees for something they do none of the legwork to provide.

danjoredd 3y ago
Oh, but don't you know it's so small it can't POSSIBLY be a predatory practice! Give the corporation all of your money and be quiet, peon!/s

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anonymousab 3y ago

The number of downloads or installs is not equal to the number of purchases, and can be quite a lot larger, particularly for a game with a free demo, steam refund "trial" shenanigans, pirated copies, etc.

_cenw 3y ago
and depending on how unity does track an install, hardware changes
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Or possibly reinstalls, or even something like the user hitting the "generate new ad ID" button. Do they clarify such situations?
  - anonymousab 3y ago
    On mobile, theoretically each new APK - every new update to the game - could count as a new install. I don't think they're that crazy, but I wouldn't be surprised if JRR didn't even think that far.

berkle4455 3y ago

> The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal. Get fucked dude, you have no idea what any of our backgrounds are.

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fzeroracer 3y ago

It seems like to me you're the one with little to no game development experience given your repeated comments about mobile games. As an example where their new pricing scheme especially breaks down: You actively lose money (beyond just lost sales) for including your game in things like charity bundles because Unity will still ship you a bill for every install. This means if you had a modest success the incentive is to never give away your game even temporarily. They also removed pricing levels that hobbyist developers used, which means they also have to pay more in subscription fees (up to $1k+ more) in addition to the fees above.

gamblor956 3y ago

Vampire Survivor wasn't developed with a Unity Enterprise subscription, so it's irrelevant what their hypothetical cost structure would have been if they had done something completely different than what they actually did. 5 million x $0.20 = $980,000 in Unity fees under 2023 pricing vs. $2040 annual pro subscription under 2022 pricing (for exceeding $100k in sales). In other words, this is an instantaneous 480x fee increase, without any corresponding increase in the value of the services provided. Do you understand why people are outraged now?

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tomnipotent 3y ago
> Vampire Survivors developer would have been using the Unity Personal plan So you think they would have left money on the table rather than spend $4k to upgrade to Enterprise?
- gamblor956 3y ago
  Do you even know the history of Vampire Survivors? The game's sales blew past the Unity threshold in hours when it first became a hit. Yes, they would have switched to Enterprise after that. And you know what? It would have still been too late to prevent them from owing several multiples of what the Unity fee used to be.

ouraf 3y ago

redo the math for an indie with Unity Personal and a sudden hit with 250k sales Units Sold: 250000 Gross Sales: $1 247 500 Steam Fees: $0-10M (30%): $374 250 Unity Fees (personal or plus): 250 000 : $50 000 Net Sales: 823 250 Now it's more or less 6%, and that's before development costs and taxes. It's a big bite for something that's impossible to code out of the project. Imagine if Oracle charged a dollar every time someone ran your software the first time on the JRE in that machine. installation on a new machine? pay again. Old customer reinstalls the JRE? pay again. main executable or JRE update? pay again. Not so funny anymore.

tomnipotent 3y ago
Except there's no fee for the first 200k installs, so the Unity fee is only $10k for the 50k after the threshold. You could also have saved $8k by upgrading to Unity Pro for $2040, though of course you run the risk of paying for that plan and not selling 250k units.
- hallgrim 3y ago
  Unfortunately the blog post is so poorly worded that I'm not sure after that. My reading, too, is that once you reach the threshold, you pay for those first 200k installs, too! The table says 'per install', not 'per additional install' or anything like it. Not sure though.

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titanc13 3y ago

This is such a uneducated and specific take, like literally leaving out a huge percentage of the real projects that use Unity, not the succesfull paid games. If we go cherry picking the succesful games that are banking a lot of revenue, it's obvious this crap won't affect them that much. People here need a bit of a common sense.