What? Unity is in fact responsible for the fee structure, they made it. It's not a force of nature, you don't get to change the business model under people's feet and then say, "huh, real irresponsible of you to choose a business model that doesn't work because we broke it; not our fault, you should have planned for us changing your revenue structure." Especially since as far as I can tell, Unity is retroactively applying this change onto existing games already on the marketplace.
God didn't make the business model bad, Unity did. And when those games launched, they launched under a different business model than what Unity is proposing. It is in fact not their fault that they didn't have the psychic ability to consider, "what if Unity randomly decides in the future to charge us every time a user installs one of our free games even if they only play it for 30 seconds?"
No, the developer that chose Unity made the bad business model.
If I buy a Porsche in order to do Uber, it's not Uber's fault that I'm going to lose money.
This is absolutely Unity's fault. If you buy a car to use Uber, and then half a year later Uber decides that your brand of car is no longer eligible to drive or that it needs to use a different fee structure, then it is Uber's fault that you are losing money.
If you launch an ad-supported game in 2020 under a revenue share and in 2023 Unity decides that it's bored of revenue shares and it wants you to start paying per install, it is Unity's fault that you are losing money. There just is no way to spin it otherwise. Are you seriously trying to blame developers right now for not being psychic?
I guarantee 100% that if we were having a conversation about Unity a year ago and someone said "I don't know if I should use Unity because what if they charge for installs in the future" you would have been making fun of that developer for having that concern. I promise you that a year ago you would not have predicted this change and you would have dismissed concerns about a theoretical structural change away from revenue shares as fearmongering.
> If I buy a Porsche in order to do Uber, it's not Uber's fault that I'm going to lose money.
Also once again, Unity's pricing model is not a natural consequence of the laws of physics. It's made up, Unity made it. The reason you'll lose money driving a porche for Uber is because the car will physically degrade, not because a bunch of board members at Uber got together and thought, "how can we extract more revenue from porsche owners?" Unity's revenue model is not the natural result of entropy, they decided to make it what it is.
Along the lines of CEO John Riccitiello infamously saying developers who don't monetize are effing idiots: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-r...
"If you are six hours into playing Battlefield, you run out of ammo on your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that time".[1]
Also this will apply to every games made on Unity, so if you have a hugely popular game just above the threshold but make less than 0.20$ per user you effectively need to shutdown it down.
It isn't "bad business model" either, there is definitely a market for games where the revenue per user is less than 0.20$ (or whatever number).
Going with % of revenue is the sensible decision, just like Unreal does...
Sounds good to me!
You've got the order wrong. This is about people who already chose Unity, and then they changed the fee structure. Changing engines is beyond nontrivial for a project in flight.
You cannot be onsided in business: both parties have to profit.
If one parties is screwing the other party one party will say "goodbye, we will take our money elsewhere".
