[ffgjgf1]

> aside

That’s a massive “aside” though?

Unreal’s royalty is 5%? With the pricing changes Unity’s is 2.5% or as low as 0.N% if you go with the instal fees.

If each of your developers cost 100-200k or more per year the $2000 yearly license fee is not such a big deal. So for commercial games with at least a few people working on the full-time (and especially if the team is much larger) Unity would still be considerably cheaper than Unreal..

The problem is how arbitrary and uneven their pricing model is. Some users might end up paying considerably more than 5% and some less than 0.5% (even when subscription fee is included).

Unreal also has $1,500 per seat/year subscription option if you want actual customer support (IDK how comparable this is what Unity is offering but that’s another matter).

[TheCleric]

It depends a lot on your pricing structure too. The lower price your game is, the better Unreal looks. Heck at free/open source you’re paying Unreal nothing and Unity a flat rate so then it’s infinite percent of your revenue.

[ffgjgf1]

The Unity is fee is capped at 2.5% though. For example is your game is $20 it’s between 0.35-0.55%.

> Heck at free/open source you’re paying Unreal nothing and Unity a flat rate so then it’s infinite percent of your revenue

Unless you’re making < $200k then Unity is entirely free (and the mandatory splash screen is not a thing anymore). So really this only applies if your revenue is between 200k and 1 million (which is certainly not an insignificant proportion of the market but yeah it’s really not that clear cut and depends on your situation, also there is a lot more uncertainty in Unity’s case..).

[jncfhnb]

If you make a million dollars with a “few people” then you should probably be happy to fork over 5% (50k). If you make less than that it’s free.

Sure, royalties can outweigh your per dev costs or cursed “install fees”. But that is contingent on achieving massive success. So shrug. It’s a very fair model imo. Not that per seat fees aren’t also fair.

The driving criteria is really not the fees here but the capabilities of the engine and the familiarity of the team. Or, perhaps, the concern that Unity appears to be an ever growing dumpster fire and possibly even malicious business partner.

Laughing a bit at your $200k game devs for an indie studio.

[ffgjgf1]

> a million dollars with a “few people

I’m mostly talking about larger studios with at least 15-20+ people (which isn’t even necessarily that many, the mobile freemium shovelware market is huge).

> massive success.

It’s not though. 1 million is really not a lot (I’m of course not talking about small indie/hobbyist developers that’s an entirely different segment).

Also as bizarre as that whole pricing model debacle was in certain cases they actually made the engine cheaper: - revenue limit is now per project and 200k instead of 200k (so it’s totally free bellow that/no install fees/no subscription) - no more mandatory splash screen

The royalty/install only kicks in after 1 mil revenue AND 1 mil users anyway. Also for non free games the install fee can be extremely low:

e.g. your game sells for $20 on average and you sell 12,500 per month you’ll only end up paying about $1350 or 0.54%. On a yearly basis that’s extremely cheap compared to Unreal.

> Unity appears to be an ever growing dumpster fire

Yeah, that’s another matter. I certainly am not a huge fun of many aspects of the engine and especially their overall approach constantly shipping new half finished/broken features abandoning them and then replacing with something eve more broken in a couple of years…

That said it’s still a relatively decent product for certain uses and still massively ahead of any alternatives (including Unreal and Godot) in some segments.

> Laughing a bit at your $200k game devs for an indie studio.

I was certainly not thinking about indie developers. Although while indie is a pretty broad term, $100-200k (overall cost per employee) is certainly not at all unreasonable even for more serious indie studios that are actually making money and are in the US (probably even on the low end, I really doubt you could get a fulltime developer for 100k (salary + taxes + overhead even in the current market..)

[jncfhnb]

> e.g. your game sells for $20 on average and you sell 12,500 per month you’ll only end up paying about $1350 or 0.54%. On a yearly basis that’s extremely cheap compared to Unreal.

Plus 40k per year for the 20 devs that you face even if you don’t ship.

But sure, unreal is a bad choice for shovelware and garbage mobile games.

[ffgjgf1]

> Plus 40k per year for the 20 devs that you face even if you don’t ship.

Sure, but that not a significant amount compared to all the other costs

> But sure, unreal is a bad choice for shovelware and garbage mobile games.

Well it’s a had choice for almost all mobile games (it just happens that most of them are shovelware regardless of the engine)