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>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per inst

>Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. Not only that, but with this predatory practice of taking any percent (steam, apple) or fix dollar value, makes just having a game up a potential liability. If you need to refund anyone you are refunding the full $0.99 from your account, despite you only made $0.46 (steam and unity are going to keep theirs, its on you as the publisher to make up the difference). If you had a disastrous launch and had a majority of people seeking a refund, well not only did you hard work and effort not pay off, you owe $$$$ on top of that. In theory this liability is like shorting a stock and the loss potential is virtually limitless, you could end up owing millions.

byyoung3 3y ago
[flagged]
- kevingadd 3y ago
  In no universe is Unity responsible for 90% of the game. Their tech simply does not do that much for you.
- samtho 3y ago
  If I bought a nail gun, a saw, a pile of wood, and proceeded to build a house, did DeWalt actually build that structure? Any reasonable person would say no. You seem to have the same thought process that people had about computer animation. For some reason, many people were under the impression that just because it happens on the computer, you can simply ask Maya to create a full-length animated feature. The platform the game was made on cannot take credit for the story, level design, character design, world design, game mechanics, game balance, art direction, vocal talent, cut scenes, and myriad of other assets and elements belonging to the game.
  - autokad 3y ago
    that's a good point
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    We still call Sears Homes, Sears Homes. I don't agree with their conclusion, but I don't think this is a good corollary either: Unity and co are providing an immense amount of value, a hell of a lot more than giving people a nail gun. At the end of the day what I don't get is all the hypotheticals based on if you release a paid game that does insanely well on the personal plan. If you have 2 million installs and make 2 million dollars, Unity is taking 50k + 185 and Unreal is taking 60k. Considering the mobile scene and what Unity offers for monetization realistically they're positioned to offer a lot more than 10k in value to you.
- all2 3y ago
  > charging 30pct for being sold through the store is less justifiable This has been standard practice in retail for a long time. If you want to sell your wares in a brick-n-mortar store, the store takes a sizable slice of the money the customer pays.
kevingadd 3y ago
It's also catastrophic for services like Game Pass where the developer gets a flat fee regardless of how many people install the game. You can take a flat fee that seems reasonable based on an expectation of 100k installs, but then your game turns out to be a smash hit and it gets a million installs. Now you're on the hook for a massive amount of money to Unity but the money you got is barely enough to cover it, if it covers it at all.
- 9dev 3y ago
  That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? What kind of protest do you expect to see? The change was announced just now.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    The standard models are a % of revenue (i.e. Unreal Engine - fine for flat advance services like Game Pass), a flat licensing fee (old Unity, old Fmod, etc), or an ongoing fee per-title/per-seat (current Unity, stuff like Wwise). This new fee-per-install model Unity is adopting is relatively rare. Game giveaways like Game Pass and Epic Games Store's free games are generally based on a flat advance. I think PlayStation Plus's free games are also a flat advance, but I can't personally attest to it. There are tables out there of how much money Epic handed specific developers for their games and how many copies were installed that I think leaked during the Apple lawsuit, and in some cases developers earned much less than Unity's 20 cents per copy due to the number of installs. Ideally this flat advance model would have been widely protested by the industry, but there is a huge audience of struggling indie game devs for whom a flat advance is a desperately needed lifeline, so it's been successful.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? they always have and always will. But revshare and ESPECIALLY residuals (tangential to this topic) are costs that the elite will fight to the grave to not give out. Indie devs are simply taking that gamble and unironically working for exposure. profits are razor thin in games and the market is fickle, so it's much preferable to have a guaranteed minium than to negotiation revenue/profit shares. if they become "too successful" they simply need to use that newfound exposure to negotiate a better deal next time.
garblegarble 3y ago
Do you have evidence for that claim? My understanding is that Apple takes their cut after any refunds have been settled[1], and the same appears to be true for Steam[2]. 1: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/does-apple-keep-its-commission/ https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/does-apple-keep-its-c... 2: https://www.techradar.com/news/how-steam-refunds-are-a-blessing-and-a-curse https://www.techradar.com/news/how-steam-refunds-are-a-bless...
- __loam 3y ago
  Also worth noting that the unity fee only takes effect once you're making a pretty large amount of revenue, so most devs will be unaffected. Still shitty and I'm glad I made the switch to Godot a few months ago, but not as bad as people are making it out to be.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Revenue isn’t profit. So if you build a toy game and it takes off without a solid business and pricing plan you could be stuck and have to shut it down. Seems like that makes Unity is a very bad place to start.
    - __loam 3y ago
      Yeah I mean, there's a reason I'm not using it.
      - moron4hire 3y ago
        Several reasons. I've been "game development adjacent" for most of my career. By that, I mean I'm not a game developer, I'm mostly a web developer, but I've done a lot of game development-like things in my projects over the years, including a 4 year stint where I built a VR app for foreign language training. My impression during the last 20 years of my career is that game development lacks a lot to be desired in the "professionalism" side of software development. At least, on the indie side. I obviously don't know anything about what large studios do. But large studios aren't using Unity, either. In the non-game development world, almost all of the best tools for development are free and open source. There are several different packages to choose from for any task, and they all pretty much integrate together. They support well-defined, open standards. Their developers work hard to make the software be stable across minor versions. And the tools--and thus the pipeline of developers--between small and large projects, small and large teams, are largely the same (caveat some scale-managing orchestration tools that one can get by without perfectly fine without users ever noticing on the small scale). Before you might scoff-in-JavaScript at that statement, just spend some time trying to do indie game development. I've yet to encounter even a major version upgrade in a web dev tool that was as painful as even some patch upgrades were with Unity. Alternatives are vastly different. There's very little code one can share between even two .NET-oriented game engines. Thus picking one of those alternatives effectively shuts you out of the larger job market. I used Unity heavily for about 5 years, after already having extensive, other software development experience. I very quickly grew a reputation with my peers for being very effective. Most of that effectiveness was just me writing tools to fix all the technical project management deficiencies in running a Unity project. Developing in Unity felt like the 6 months that I'll never get back of my early developer life doing FoxPro development. Unity is like Crystal Reports. Unity is like Dreamweaver. All those things in enterprise dev were also shitty, take-it-or-leave-it siloed tools. Yet I only ever encountered them in large corporations being ran by pointy-haired managers. And one would certainly never start a personal project using one of them.
Tommstein 3y ago
> >Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. Out of curiosity, how does 0.99 * 0.7 - 0.2 = 0.493 come out to 46 cents?
gmerc 3y ago
This is factually incorrect. Steam (And I suspect Apple too) handles these challenges pretty transparently and fairly and don’t leave you on the hook. Frankly speaking - there’s a lot of comments similar to this in tech, especially when espousing the solutions that crypto may offer for these “problems” that are built on ignorance or misunderstanding of how the industry actually operates. Having been in more discussions about “disrupting games” than I can count, almost every one of them was driven by outsiders with zero appreciation. While Steam’s fees are on the higher side, the depth of publisher features offered by steamworks is incredible and are likely saving average developers the fees many times over Facebook famously had the illusion that if you made distribution free, you could dislodge game developers from Steam (see FB Gameroom). Educating people on the 999 other reasons why developers choose steam , was painful.
- yesbutnopdf 3y ago
  Worked with selling games on steam. Op’s scenario would happen in the current model.
ffhhttt 3y ago
You’d only pay $0.2 for a subset of your users above 200k (installs in outside of the top ~15 richest countries are $0.02) Not that I’m a fan of those changes, but I’d bet the $0.2 fee is only there to encourage anyone affected to upgrade to Pro. The fact that most people will only see a single number and ignore the rest of the quite complicated pricing model says a lot about their marketing department… I mean what did they expect?
jbverschoor 3y ago
You're forgot to first subtract VAT ;-)
lenkite 3y ago
What I am confused about is WHY is the CEO taking such a brain-dead executive decision on a stable, profit earning cash-cow. I mean - this is something that all high-level executives should have pointed out to Riccitiello as a very dumb idea. This isn't rocket science or some financial black-magic wizkid deduction. This is basically committing hara-kiri on the product and looks to be effectively a company killing decision, unless there is something we are missing ?
- danaris 3y ago
  The obvious answer is Wall Street brainrot: Stable profits are worthless. (Forget the fact that, y'know, they keep the company alive, everyone paid, and everything that actually matters to 95% of people working fine.) All that matters is growth. Growth is what gets CEOs praise from shareholders, bonuses from boards, and even-higher-paying CEO jobs elsewhere.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > Stable profits are worthless Unity never had those though or any profits for that matter (they have been burning cash for almost two decades..) > All that matters is growth Yeah, but in this case they have been more focused on growing their costs rather than revenue (which is not exactly ideal even from the "Wall Street" perspective).
    - danaris 3y ago
      Now, that's a different matter—the post I was replying to posited that they were stably profitable (and I have no outside information either way). If what you say is the case, then this is still a dumb move, because it's still acting as if the choices existing Unity developers have are "pay Unity whatever they want, or get out of the business", but it's at least not quite as directly related to Wall Street brainrot.
      - qwytw 3y ago
        > pay Unity whatever they want, or get out of the business I guess it's down to how the video game/engine market works. A tiny proportion of their users make massive amounts of money while essentially paying peanuts to Unity (well.. I guess at least in relation to what value it provides compared to storefronts/ad companies/platform owners etc.), while the bulk makes barely anything. They don't want to go with a rev. share model due to various (pretty valid reasons) and therefore they seem to be really struggling with monetization. So they came up with this Frankensteinian compromise/abomination which hardly solves anything: - most of their biggest customer will continue paying pennies (as % of revenue). - most users are under the 200k/1000k limit so these changed don't even affect them in short term (of course it might make them reconsider whether they really want to continue using Unity) - the not that large but very vocal (their corporate won't go around complaining on twitter/reddit/etc.) group of mainly indie developers in between is kind of screwed (at least if they make F2P or cheap mobile games). However it's not like they pay Unity that much money currently, so their executives who obsessed with maximizing short-term revenue growth don't have any reason to care about what happens to them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

byyoung3 3y ago

[flagged]

kevingadd 3y ago
In no universe is Unity responsible for 90% of the game. Their tech simply does not do that much for you.
samtho 3y ago
If I bought a nail gun, a saw, a pile of wood, and proceeded to build a house, did DeWalt actually build that structure? Any reasonable person would say no. You seem to have the same thought process that people had about computer animation. For some reason, many people were under the impression that just because it happens on the computer, you can simply ask Maya to create a full-length animated feature. The platform the game was made on cannot take credit for the story, level design, character design, world design, game mechanics, game balance, art direction, vocal talent, cut scenes, and myriad of other assets and elements belonging to the game.
- autokad 3y ago
  that's a good point
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  We still call Sears Homes, Sears Homes. I don't agree with their conclusion, but I don't think this is a good corollary either: Unity and co are providing an immense amount of value, a hell of a lot more than giving people a nail gun. At the end of the day what I don't get is all the hypotheticals based on if you release a paid game that does insanely well on the personal plan. If you have 2 million installs and make 2 million dollars, Unity is taking 50k + 185 and Unreal is taking 60k. Considering the mobile scene and what Unity offers for monetization realistically they're positioned to offer a lot more than 10k in value to you.
all2 3y ago
> charging 30pct for being sold through the store is less justifiable This has been standard practice in retail for a long time. If you want to sell your wares in a brick-n-mortar store, the store takes a sizable slice of the money the customer pays.

kevingadd 3y ago

It's also catastrophic for services like Game Pass where the developer gets a flat fee regardless of how many people install the game. You can take a flat fee that seems reasonable based on an expectation of 100k installs, but then your game turns out to be a smash hit and it gets a million installs. Now you're on the hook for a massive amount of money to Unity but the money you got is barely enough to cover it, if it covers it at all.

9dev 3y ago
That situation sounds horrible, is that actually a thing? Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place?
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? What kind of protest do you expect to see? The change was announced just now.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  The standard models are a % of revenue (i.e. Unreal Engine - fine for flat advance services like Game Pass), a flat licensing fee (old Unity, old Fmod, etc), or an ongoing fee per-title/per-seat (current Unity, stuff like Wwise). This new fee-per-install model Unity is adopting is relatively rare. Game giveaways like Game Pass and Epic Games Store's free games are generally based on a flat advance. I think PlayStation Plus's free games are also a flat advance, but I can't personally attest to it. There are tables out there of how much money Epic handed specific developers for their games and how many copies were installed that I think leaked during the Apple lawsuit, and in some cases developers earned much less than Unity's 20 cents per copy due to the number of installs. Ideally this flat advance model would have been widely protested by the industry, but there is a huge audience of struggling indie game devs for whom a flat advance is a desperately needed lifeline, so it's been successful.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Why didn’t the industry protest these business models in the first place? they always have and always will. But revshare and ESPECIALLY residuals (tangential to this topic) are costs that the elite will fight to the grave to not give out. Indie devs are simply taking that gamble and unironically working for exposure. profits are razor thin in games and the market is fickle, so it's much preferable to have a guaranteed minium than to negotiation revenue/profit shares. if they become "too successful" they simply need to use that newfound exposure to negotiate a better deal next time.

garblegarble 3y ago

Do you have evidence for that claim? My understanding is that Apple takes their cut after any refunds have been settled[1], and the same appears to be true for Steam[2]. 1: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/does-apple-keep-its-commission/ https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/does-apple-keep-its-c... 2: https://www.techradar.com/news/how-steam-refunds-are-a-blessing-and-a-curse https://www.techradar.com/news/how-steam-refunds-are-a-bless...

__loam 3y ago
Also worth noting that the unity fee only takes effect once you're making a pretty large amount of revenue, so most devs will be unaffected. Still shitty and I'm glad I made the switch to Godot a few months ago, but not as bad as people are making it out to be.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Revenue isn’t profit. So if you build a toy game and it takes off without a solid business and pricing plan you could be stuck and have to shut it down. Seems like that makes Unity is a very bad place to start.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Yeah I mean, there's a reason I'm not using it.
    - moron4hire 3y ago
      Several reasons. I've been "game development adjacent" for most of my career. By that, I mean I'm not a game developer, I'm mostly a web developer, but I've done a lot of game development-like things in my projects over the years, including a 4 year stint where I built a VR app for foreign language training. My impression during the last 20 years of my career is that game development lacks a lot to be desired in the "professionalism" side of software development. At least, on the indie side. I obviously don't know anything about what large studios do. But large studios aren't using Unity, either. In the non-game development world, almost all of the best tools for development are free and open source. There are several different packages to choose from for any task, and they all pretty much integrate together. They support well-defined, open standards. Their developers work hard to make the software be stable across minor versions. And the tools--and thus the pipeline of developers--between small and large projects, small and large teams, are largely the same (caveat some scale-managing orchestration tools that one can get by without perfectly fine without users ever noticing on the small scale). Before you might scoff-in-JavaScript at that statement, just spend some time trying to do indie game development. I've yet to encounter even a major version upgrade in a web dev tool that was as painful as even some patch upgrades were with Unity. Alternatives are vastly different. There's very little code one can share between even two .NET-oriented game engines. Thus picking one of those alternatives effectively shuts you out of the larger job market. I used Unity heavily for about 5 years, after already having extensive, other software development experience. I very quickly grew a reputation with my peers for being very effective. Most of that effectiveness was just me writing tools to fix all the technical project management deficiencies in running a Unity project. Developing in Unity felt like the 6 months that I'll never get back of my early developer life doing FoxPro development. Unity is like Crystal Reports. Unity is like Dreamweaver. All those things in enterprise dev were also shitty, take-it-or-leave-it siloed tools. Yet I only ever encountered them in large corporations being ran by pointy-haired managers. And one would certainly never start a personal project using one of them.

Tommstein 3y ago

> >Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. Out of curiosity, how does 0.99 * 0.7 - 0.2 = 0.493 come out to 46 cents?

gmerc 3y ago

This is factually incorrect. Steam (And I suspect Apple too) handles these challenges pretty transparently and fairly and don’t leave you on the hook. Frankly speaking - there’s a lot of comments similar to this in tech, especially when espousing the solutions that crypto may offer for these “problems” that are built on ignorance or misunderstanding of how the industry actually operates. Having been in more discussions about “disrupting games” than I can count, almost every one of them was driven by outsiders with zero appreciation. While Steam’s fees are on the higher side, the depth of publisher features offered by steamworks is incredible and are likely saving average developers the fees many times over Facebook famously had the illusion that if you made distribution free, you could dislodge game developers from Steam (see FB Gameroom). Educating people on the 999 other reasons why developers choose steam , was painful.

yesbutnopdf 3y ago
Worked with selling games on steam. Op’s scenario would happen in the current model.

ffhhttt 3y ago

You’d only pay $0.2 for a subset of your users above 200k (installs in outside of the top ~15 richest countries are $0.02) Not that I’m a fan of those changes, but I’d bet the $0.2 fee is only there to encourage anyone affected to upgrade to Pro. The fact that most people will only see a single number and ignore the rest of the quite complicated pricing model says a lot about their marketing department… I mean what did they expect?

jbverschoor 3y ago

You're forgot to first subtract VAT ;-)

lenkite 3y ago

What I am confused about is WHY is the CEO taking such a brain-dead executive decision on a stable, profit earning cash-cow. I mean - this is something that all high-level executives should have pointed out to Riccitiello as a very dumb idea. This isn't rocket science or some financial black-magic wizkid deduction. This is basically committing hara-kiri on the product and looks to be effectively a company killing decision, unless there is something we are missing ?

danaris 3y ago
The obvious answer is Wall Street brainrot: Stable profits are worthless. (Forget the fact that, y'know, they keep the company alive, everyone paid, and everything that actually matters to 95% of people working fine.) All that matters is growth. Growth is what gets CEOs praise from shareholders, bonuses from boards, and even-higher-paying CEO jobs elsewhere.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > Stable profits are worthless Unity never had those though or any profits for that matter (they have been burning cash for almost two decades..) > All that matters is growth Yeah, but in this case they have been more focused on growing their costs rather than revenue (which is not exactly ideal even from the "Wall Street" perspective).
  - danaris 3y ago
    Now, that's a different matter—the post I was replying to posited that they were stably profitable (and I have no outside information either way). If what you say is the case, then this is still a dumb move, because it's still acting as if the choices existing Unity developers have are "pay Unity whatever they want, or get out of the business", but it's at least not quite as directly related to Wall Street brainrot.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > pay Unity whatever they want, or get out of the business I guess it's down to how the video game/engine market works. A tiny proportion of their users make massive amounts of money while essentially paying peanuts to Unity (well.. I guess at least in relation to what value it provides compared to storefronts/ad companies/platform owners etc.), while the bulk makes barely anything. They don't want to go with a rev. share model due to various (pretty valid reasons) and therefore they seem to be really struggling with monetization. So they came up with this Frankensteinian compromise/abomination which hardly solves anything: - most of their biggest customer will continue paying pennies (as % of revenue). - most users are under the 200k/1000k limit so these changed don't even affect them in short term (of course it might make them reconsider whether they really want to continue using Unity) - the not that large but very vocal (their corporate won't go around complaining on twitter/reddit/etc.) group of mainly indie developers in between is kind of screwed (at least if they make F2P or cheap mobile games). However it's not like they pay Unity that much money currently, so their executives who obsessed with maximizing short-term revenue growth don't have any reason to care about what happens to them.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]