[nugget]

Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.

As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.

They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.

Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an opening to eventually rival them).

[KronisLV]

> Unity seems to be attempting this in the most deceptive and deceitful way possible, establishing the new Runtime Fee and then offering a temporary 100% "waiver" of the fee if you use their other (presumably inferior) products.

I looked into it a bit more and unless I did some bad maths or misread their terms, the whole Runtime Fee looks like a badly disguised sales funnel to me: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/unity-runtime-fee-a-look-at...

The Personal and Plus tiers in particular now need to basically find additional 50 or so cents per install (factoring in platform fees and publisher fees), whereas for Pro and Enterprise tiers that figure is closer to under 10 cents).

In other words, once you start having to pay the Platform Fee on the Personal or Plus tier, it very quickly becomes cheaper to just get a Pro subscription and have the Platform Fee go away for 800'000 more installs on Pro (on top of the 200'000 you get without the platform fee on Personal/Plus).

[WillPostForFood]

How are you calculating .50 cents personal vs .10 cents pro?

[KronisLV]

Closest to 50 cents and 10 cents was at around 1'600'000 installs I think (some graphs at the bottom of this comment).

Let's see how I got there, let's take their Runtime Fee rates: https://unity.com/runtime-fee

For Personal tier you start paying after 200'000 installs (threshold), whereas with the Pro tier you start paying after 1'000'000 installs (threshold).

That gives us 1'400'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Personal tier and 600'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Pro tier, for which the runtime fee will be calculated and which are above the corresponding thresholds.

For the Personal tier, which has a fixed rate, the platform costs are then:

  1'400'000 * 0.20 = 280'000 USD

For the Pro tier, with the volume discounts, the platform costs are then:

  100'000 * 0.15 = 15'000 USD
  400'000 * 0.075 = 30'000 USD
  100'000 * 0.03 = 3'000 USD
  TOTAL: 15'000 + 30'000 + 3'000 = 48'000 USD

(they're lower for emerging markets, but using the main prices here)

With 1'600'000 units sold, the overhead per a single unit then becomes:

  Personal: 280'000 / 1'600'000 = 0.175 USD
  Pro: 48'000 / 1'600'000 = 0.03 USD

If we assume that a publisher might take around 50% (just an example value in the spreadsheet I used; though in practice can be as low as 20%), then that figure becomes:

  Personal: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.175 = 0.35 USD
  Pro: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.03 = 0.06 USD

On top of that, there are also the platform fees (like Steam might take 30% of your revenue straight off the bat, other platforms might take less), so the figure then becomes:

  Personal: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.35 = 0.5 USD
  Pro: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.06 = 0.085 USD

Sanity check (doing the same in reverse):

  Personal full cost (overhead): 0.5 USD
  Personal after 30% platform cut: 0.5 - (0.3 * 0.5) = 0.5 - 0.15 = 0.35 USD
  Personal after 50% publisher cut: 0.35 - (0.5 * 0.35) = 0.35 - 0.175 = 0.175 USD
  
  Pro full cost (overhead): 0.085 USD
  Pro after 30% platform cut: 0.085 - (0.3 * 0.085) = 0.085 - 0.0255 = 0.0595 USD
  Pro after 50% publisher cut: 0.0595 - (0.5 * 0.0595) = 0.0595 - 0.02975 = 0.02975 USD (close enough to 0.03 USD)

While the exact percentages might change, Unity asking for say 0.20 USD per copy (or effectively 0.175 USD in the example, because the first 200'000 don't have the runtime fee) means that you'll need to make more gross revenue per copy than that, because your publisher and the platform will both take some of that for themselves.

Here's the graphs that I came up with, first how the total runtime fee changes based on the tier: https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/4/-/u/n/14-unity-pricing-gr...

Also, approximately how the runtime fee overhead changes with publisher/platform fees included (with the example percentages above): https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/6/-/f/e/16-fee-per-install-...

[maccard]

> As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.

I think you've got this wrong. Unity is (multiple really, but for the purposes of this) two products - the engine and unity ads. Unity ads is the money maker, this is an attempt at bridging that gap. Ultimately unity don't care how they pay you, they just want to know that if you're building a successful game off their products, they're going to get paid. They can't do a revshare (because for some insane reason they talked themselves out of that a few years back), so they're left with something that quacks like a revshare, but won't negatively impact their most profitable customers and force them to reconsider.

Ultimately, I think that's as far as they got with the analysis and failed to consider well... everything else.

[kibwen]

> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.

Any game whose monetization strategy is "ads" is uniformly trash-quality shovelware. They're not here for the long haul, they're here to optimize short-term profit and dump as much garbage on the app store as they can.

[Gareth321]

> They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.

Well if the reports are to be believed, developers were signing agreements with Unity which allowed them to make unilateral changes to fees. If so, devs really do have no business sense.

[JuanPosadas]

IANAL. In US contract law, a contract that includes a clause allowing one party to unilaterally change the terms at any time may still be enforceable, but there are limitations. Such clauses are often subject to scrutiny and may be challenged if they are deemed unfair, unconscionable, or against public policy. Courts may consider factors like the balance of power between the parties, the clarity of the clause, and whether there was mutual assent to the changes.

I'm not familiar with the specifics of Unity's usual contracts, but this is the kind of thing that a court might not take Unity's side on.

[tremon]

How much leverage do you think those developers had to negotiate the terms of the agreement?

[Gareth321]

Probably very little. Are you implying that they were right to have signed agreements with Unity which effectively gives them controlling rights to the developers’ companies?