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by jncfhnb
896 days ago
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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. |
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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..)