Hacker News Reader

Comment by xmodem | Hacker News Reader

Take a game like vampire survivors - not a unity game, but one that I have installed 10+ times at this point. They have put the price up slightly since launch - I paid €2.39 for it.

The most objectionable thing about Unity's new pricing is it hits hardest the smaller indies with the lowest budgets. The AAA studios will barely notice it and are probably negotiating better terms anyway.

View on HN

Not really. Look the pricing and the AND condition:

"Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:

Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs."

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat...

So if you sold in the last year more than 200k AND have more than 200k game installs and have the unity personal version, then you have to pay for install...

The asinine part is per install, instead of something like revenue share. Regardless of the bar they set (200k x2) for additional installs to charge is terrible simply due to the install metric.

From what I can tell, if you were to sell a $5 game made with Unity and made $200,000 per year, the total charge would be $8,000. But that charge would be $40k if your game was only $1 and $800 if your game sold for $50. For Unity Pro if you made $10 million selling 1 million copies you would be charged $60,000. That same studio making $10 million on a game written with Unreal Engine would be charged $500,000 in royalties. That is far more than $60k for Unity. It still appears that Unity is the budget option, it just isn't quite as cheap as it used to be... So I couldn't find a situation where is cheaper to go with unreal (5% revenue share) than with Unity...

You are counting revenue share for unity, not per install. Say in the first instance, each user installed the game twice, your new charge is 16k$. That’s why people were reasonably upset. It’s the install metric. Glad they walked it back but just shows how disconnected the whole announcement was.

Sure, if you are under the threshold you pay nothing. But once you are successful enough to have to pay, my point still stands. You are paying a much larger % of revenue the smaller you are and the cheaper your game is.

Not really.. affected by the new pricing are the "free for play" games, which are full with ads, own currency.. addictive mobile games.. and no, they won't move to Godot because they need the ads, in-game market, etc offered by Unity.

Maybe we're reading different announcements, but I can't find the part where a low-cast one-time-purchase game like Vampire Survivors wouldn't have to pay a 20c fee for every device I install the game on if it were made with Unity personal.

from their announcement was "Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs." but looks like they are backpaddling after some "leaked document" saying that they would use similar rule as Unreal, but ask for 4% instead of 5% as Unreal does.. Unreal is the only real solution against Unity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com