Unity announced a new fee structure today, and developers are none too happy. “We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the change.
This only makes sense. Unity is a very big part of what makes a game work and building and maintaining the Unity engine costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the money made on a game. That share should ideally be proportional to how much money is made by the developer, which should be proportional to the amount of times the game is downloaded. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don’t want to pay any money?
Unity already charges money once you hit a certain revenue from your game, it’s only free if you don’t get a lot of sales.
More importantly, according to the article, when questioned it seems Unity hasn’t given any proper thought into this model.
If a user installs the game and then uninstalls and reinstalls, it counts as 2 installs that must be paid for. Not only is that unfair, it can lead to abuse. Angry with a change the developer made? Uninstall and reinstall 30 times (automate it) and you will actually cost the Dev money.
What about pirated copies? Unity will still “phone home” and the result will be a developer paying for 1mil installs that he earned nothing from.
What if your game is free to play?
There were some other issues like that mentioned too (in the twitter post in the article).
I have a 500GB SSD and >300 games. Do you have any idea how often I uninstall and reinstall games? Even smaller Indy games?
This comment section has you covered: to bankrupt a small game company, let’s reinstall the games numerous times!
Also, their previous monetization methods are already proportional AFAIK.
“This only makes sense. Ovens are a very big part of what makes food and designing and building the ovens costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the food made in the oven. That food should ideally be proportional to how many edibles items are made by the chef, which should be proportional to the amount of times the food is baked. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don’t want to give away my baked food?”
It’s clearly not an oven, but an ingredient.
Holy fucking shit… The game concepts and mechanics are the ingredients!
Does a pizza contain an oven? No. Does a pizza contain tomatoes? Yes. Therefore tomatoes are an ingredient and an oven is not.
Does a game contain Unity? Yes. Therefore Unity is an ingredient.
The game ships with Unity which handles the rendering, physics, sound and a whole bunch more. Basically Unity is a pizza base, but it gives you a bunch of toppings too. The developer combines the base with the toppings and voila you’ve got a game. Not saying that last part isn’t hard, but a business model where Unity, or any game engine for that matter, is charged proportionally to the amount of installs isn’t a totally unreasonable business model.
Yes, and that is what they already do, as does Unreal.
Eh, no. How many unique times a game is uninstalled, perhaps, but not how many over all. That’s clearly stupid.
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I agree with the essence of your post, but the part about Unity already charging devs proportionally based on sales is not true. The editor is currently licensed per-seats and there is currently no cap to how much money you can make if you run the enterprise license, which is 5k/year per employee.
By that logic Microsoft should also be able to charge for any software installation that happens on windows. That also means any and all installations for the customer should be single use, because now all installations cost money.
Would you be willing to pay a certain amount of money any time you want to install some software, doesn’t even matter if you’ve already paid for it? Because that’s the business plan you call “sound”.
I call that stupid.