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AFAIK, UE is completely free until you make your first $1,000,000 revenue? (then a 5% royalty rate beyond that). These new Unity per-install fees could hit dev

AFAIK, UE is completely free until you make your first $1,000,000 revenue? (then a 5% royalty rate beyond that). These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money - for example F2P games, free demos, very cheap games (e.g. charity bundles), potentially even pirated copies (if Unity intend to track installs via analytics sent from the runtime?) In reality, most indies fail and won't hit the 100,000 download threshold or the $100k revenue threshold. But it's a new fee to worry about, and one that gives Unity a lot of 'monetization levers' to pull more aggressively further down the road (tweaking the fees/thresholds) It's also worth considering that Epic could change the UE pricing model significantly if their sole serious competitor starts to fade into irrelevance...

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
There are also lower limits of revenue and installs your games have to break through before Unity starts charging you $$.
KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago
Unity's install fees don't start until you hit 200k installs AND $200k revenue. If you buy the $1800/yr PRO then it doesn't start until $1 million just like UE. There isn't any concern for the hobbyists.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  Ah, wasn't obvious whether it was an || or an && with those thresholds. Not so bad in most cases if it's an or. There were also people who'd read it as a 'per install per month' (e.g. monthly active users) charge, as the pricing table refered to 'Standard monthly rate', which made it look pretty awful...
- gcr 3y ago
  The bump is huge though! If your per-install fee costs $0.20 but you have 199,999 installs, you owe Unity $0. But the second a new user downloads your game, you suddenly owe Unity $40,000. If they made the price increase continuous and charged for max(0, #installs - 200,000), then that would be something else, but the way they wrote it implies a bomb waiting to explode if your game gets too successful
nitrix 3y ago
> These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money There's a revenue threshold to meet to pay the fee.

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

There are also lower limits of revenue and installs your games have to break through before Unity starts charging you $$.

KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago

Unity's install fees don't start until you hit 200k installs AND $200k revenue. If you buy the $1800/yr PRO then it doesn't start until $1 million just like UE. There isn't any concern for the hobbyists.

bluescrn 3y ago
Ah, wasn't obvious whether it was an || or an && with those thresholds. Not so bad in most cases if it's an or. There were also people who'd read it as a 'per install per month' (e.g. monthly active users) charge, as the pricing table refered to 'Standard monthly rate', which made it look pretty awful...
gcr 3y ago
The bump is huge though! If your per-install fee costs $0.20 but you have 199,999 installs, you owe Unity $0. But the second a new user downloads your game, you suddenly owe Unity $40,000. If they made the price increase continuous and charged for max(0, #installs - 200,000), then that would be something else, but the way they wrote it implies a bomb waiting to explode if your game gets too successful

nitrix 3y ago

> These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money There's a revenue threshold to meet to pay the fee.