4 ms·

If you have a free game with upsells or paid DLC - not an uncommon model now as a way to get people in the door - the new pricing model is toxic because every u

If you have a free game with upsells or paid DLC - not an uncommon model now as a way to get people in the door - the new pricing model is toxic because every user in the door costs you money. If before you were okay with only 5% of your players giving you money, that's not okay anymore - now you have to aggressively upsell, shove ads in there, do ANYTHING you can to get average revenue per user to far above 20 cents so you can afford to pay the Unity Tax in addition to the other taxes you already have to pay (Valve/Apple/Google's 30%, your actual taxes, etc.) With the model I described you could easily bring in 200k worth of revenue off DLC but then owe a significant % of that in install fees if you're only managing to sell DLC to say 10% of your players. Unreal-style revshare where you just give them a small % is super reasonable in comparison. It just works and you decide whether the percentage is acceptable.

wwtrv 3y ago
> Unreal-style revshare where you just give them a small % is super reasonable in comparison The per install fee is still going to be significantly lower for everyone making > $2 per user than what Unreal charges. And I assume Unity's best paying customers are doing that. A rev share model would have been much more likely to scare them off. It almost feels that killing the low revenue per user F2P developer user-base might have been a conscious calculated choice (I'm probably giving too much credit to their upper management though).
- mjan22640 3y ago
  So the royalties are going to be negligible for large succesfull projects, while potentially an unbreakable barrier for small projects (ie growing free installs first and monetizing later is not viable). This is going to harm their ecosystem, from which the large succesfull projects grow. Why dont they use same principle license as Unreal?
  - wwtrv 3y ago
    > Why dont they use same principle license as Unreal? Their largest customers will probably push back against that more than the install fees. You're losing most of you revenue from China (and some other countries). Companies there will cheat and underreport their revenue (Unity historically had issues even having them to pay for licenses, studios would just buy 1 license per 10-20 developers etc.)

wwtrv 3y ago

> Unreal-style revshare where you just give them a small % is super reasonable in comparison The per install fee is still going to be significantly lower for everyone making > $2 per user than what Unreal charges. And I assume Unity's best paying customers are doing that. A rev share model would have been much more likely to scare them off. It almost feels that killing the low revenue per user F2P developer user-base might have been a conscious calculated choice (I'm probably giving too much credit to their upper management though).

mjan22640 3y ago
So the royalties are going to be negligible for large succesfull projects, while potentially an unbreakable barrier for small projects (ie growing free installs first and monetizing later is not viable). This is going to harm their ecosystem, from which the large succesfull projects grow. Why dont they use same principle license as Unreal?
- wwtrv 3y ago
  > Why dont they use same principle license as Unreal? Their largest customers will probably push back against that more than the install fees. You're losing most of you revenue from China (and some other countries). Companies there will cheat and underreport their revenue (Unity historically had issues even having them to pay for licenses, studios would just buy 1 license per 10-20 developers etc.)