Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really into this industry, but I've dabbled with Unity over the last month for some fun/expanding knowledge...

I've seen 2 articles in the last day about this topic with clickbait misinformation from sites I would expect to be more accurate... Including talking about how a "free game" was going to cost a developer millions... and how "independent developers" will be bankrupt...

But how? The fee page and FAQ [1] state "will apply to games made with Unity Personal and Unity Plus that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months".. If you are distributing a free game, by definition, you made no revenue for the game and you pay nothing to Unity. Key point: the metric is PER game... so it's not like your $5 game with 200k revenue and 200k installs will trigger your separate FREE game to cost 5 million in damages.

If you are an "independent" developer, or even a team of 5, then the $2k/seat-year Pro license means the threshold is now $1million... pay 2-10k/year upfront to pocket an extra 800k? These seem like a no-brainer...

Now, I can see this being an issue for studios that invested heavily in Unity with dozens or hundreds of developers.. and I appreciate discussion on this topic... I'd love to see more realistic reactions and discussions... and less "abandon ship" (like this article) and I-didn't-read-the-memo knee-jerk reaction stories for attention out there right now.

(And I know some of the early concern was download-bombing, but they have addressed that, and most of the articles I read didn't cover that explicitly)

[1] https://unity.com/pricing-updates

I think the concern is that Unity is failing. Charging royalties is not going to save them, and is going to drive more devs away from the platform (as this article shows), so they are going to have to do more drastic things to raise revenue, which will drive more devs away, and so on into the familiar death-spiral. If they can't cut costs enough to get profitable (and history shows this is very difficult) then they're doomed to go through a series of increasingly more disastrous acquisitions (see Yahoo for details).

Given this, then the details of this particular royalty structure don't matter. Yes, a freebie game may not have to pay any royalties now. But as Unity enters the death-spiral that will probably change. Or there will be mandatory malware shipped with the engine. Or some other craptastic revenue-generating idea will mess with the game. We can expect relatively frequent, drastic changes to Unity's licensing as it tries to escape its fate.

> And I know some of the early concern was download-bombing, but they have addressed that, and most of the articles I read didn't cover that explicitly

They addressed that in FAQ update. They have also previously committed to not retroactively change ToS for the version you downloaded (https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hjic6/unitys_sta...) but they changed their mind.

Given that history I would not put much trust in one vague answer in FAQ without at least consulting lawyer first (including asking how much it would cost to defend if Unity lawyers disagree with your lawyer's take).

And even in the current FAQ answer it's essentially fully up to them to determine what is fraudulent installation or if the install was part of install bombing.

I agree with all those points... It certainly concerns me as a new-to-unity developer... but most articles (like this one) are not talking about fraudulent installs.. they jump to "we're bankrupt" and "abandon ship" without much details, context, or supporting statements... and that's what bothers me...

I'd love to hear WHY.. not knee-jerk reactions...

Someone else mentioned that some people use "Free" to also mean ad-supported or micro-transaction... That wouldn't be my definition, but I suppose that is a fair concern at-a-glance for an article that says a "free" game can bankrupt them... That's a lot better than most of the comments I've seen on this topic.

Plenty of games are free to play, but come with micro-transactions and/or ad revenue. If anyone can pick up your game and play without spending money, it is generally accepted to be a free-to-play game.

Part of the change (unless it has since been walked back) was getting rid of Unity Plus licensing, leaving just Unity Personal and Unity Pro.

Also assuming the per-game stipulation was not something Unity made clear after out-cry (like the multi-installs on the same PC or game-update), they have previously gone to great lengths to prevent studios from spinning up a new company per game. It is reasonable to assume that there is nothing stopping them from later tightening the noose and applying this fee on a company basis instead of a game basis.

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.

> 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).

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?

> 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.)

"Free" games don't really exist any more on the mainstream platforms. "Ad supported" games though... and guess what? Unity is an ad company, not a tech company, at heart.

> Unity is an ad company, not a tech company

I'm not sure that's true, their Ads business(es) is made up of other companies which they acquired over the years and is/was somewhat isolated from the engine/tech part of the company.

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