My thoughts on Unity’s pricing announcement

My take on the shit going on @ Unity, and how it will relate to TFoUAD and beyond:

Basically-

If you have Unity Personal (the free version)
-if you have > 200k installs or higher for the lifecycle of the game AND you hit $200k income in a year, you pay 0.20¢/install (say you're exactly at 2x the install threshold, that’s 200k billable installs, it's $40k in fees -> Unity, so net will be $160k)

OR

you pay $2.2k/yr to license Pro, then:
-Lifetime install threshold goes to 1M, income threshold also goes to $1M/yr, install fee drops to 0.02¢/install (again, at these income thresholds at 2x the install threshold, that's $20k -> Unity, net will be $977,800 after fee and Pro license)

None of these figures account for App Store fees (Google/Apple/Steam take ~30%, Epic takes 5% in royalties for sales over $1M), or other sunk costs such as studio space, employee salaries,  equipment costs, payroll/business taxes, etc.

HERE IS THE PROBLEM:

The cost/install is actually fine. The charge is fine. It does incentivize one to pay for Pro, because the thresholds and fee are much lower, and by incentivize I mean ‘holds a gun to your head if you have any inkling of installs > 200k/$200k and are only making money on a portion of the installs’.

The issue is F2P (Free to Play) and LC (low cost) games. Specifically, ad revenue based F2P, but F2P in general, and games in the $1 market.
Consider that the business model of free to play games means that you're hoping to monetize each player, and the value of an ad is about 2/10 of a penny, so to monetize a single player for one dollar they would literally need to watch somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 ads.
With LC games, you’re taking in 0.66¢/sale after App Store fees/install.
These games rely on pure install numbers. Because the potential return for each player is so low, you just need tens or hundreds of millions of people to be playing this game to realize a profit, especially when you consider the vast majority of these games also have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 30% of their ad income gross depending on the App Store that they are available on.

So now you have the same fees but a much more complex payment calculation:

Let's say you have 50M installs, and assume average monetization/player is 0.10¢. So your gross income is $5M.

If using Unity Personal, you pay for each install over the threshold,  so 50M-200K = 49,800,000 installs subject to the 0.20¢/install fee.
Your fee would be $9,968,000.

Fee>income=net loss=close studio

This will kill a huge chunk of the F2P/LC market that relies on Unity Personal to reduce cost.

This can ofc be ameliorated with a Pro license. At those thresholds, you have 49M billable installs, at a rate of 0.02¢/install, so fee is now $980k.

$5M-$980k-license = $4,017,900 net = everybody happy.

Additionally, Unity will waive all install fees if you use LevelPlay, which is their ad solution. So you could still use the free version of Unity as long as you’re willing to pay for the service, which ultimately if you’re making F2P/LC and are > 200k installs and income, is likely significantly cheaper for you cost wise.

Morality of wether F2P should die in a fire and wether designing games to make the player get on a monetization treadmill aside, you can see how this will either force F2P/LC studios to close, or force them to use LevelPlay if they can’t pay for a Pro license yearly.

And that’s the big issue here. Forcing these developers onto a specific ad platform. Somehow tracking installs of your app (likely with some phone home on install on new device ID). Either of those is at best smelly and at worst outright illegal (see ‘bundling’ and GDPR etc).

Now, for me all this is moot.
I use an older version of Unity (2018). It does not have the technical capability built into it to do this installation tracking. It never will, because 2018 is an LTSC (long term stable condition) release; meaning, it no longer receives updates and is considered stable. The install tracking tech will not (and couldn’t be) back ported.

Additionally, I never have, and never will, use Unity Hub, which is an app for managing your projects, and your installations of various versions of Unity. I don’t use it because using it requires you to sign into an account, which ties your project to Unity Hub, and your Unity account.

The new version of Unity Personal will require you to use Unity Hub and connect to the Internet every three days in order to work on your project. That is how they are going to connect peoples projects to releases and track installations.

All of this smells.

And once the Vita release of TFoUAD is done, I will port it to PS4/XBOne/Switch/Steam, and, depending on how successful I am, I will either make enough money that I won’t care about possibly having to pay fees to Unity in the future, or I won’t and I will move to a different game engine, likely Godot.

That may mean having to drop the ability to build games for the Vita in the future. Although there is a functioning build chain for Godot->Vita- at the moment, it doesn’t fully support 3D as the open source implementation of VitaGL is not feature complete yet, so it’s not a viable option for me as of right now. Godot is also open source and I have the official Vita SDK from Sony (because I am a registered developer)- if it came down to it, I could probably take that source code, and the examples in the SDK, and port the graphics library over. It might take me a year because I would have to learn C++, but it isn’t too different from C#, syntactically speaking.

To anyone I know who uses Unity to make F2P/LC games- I’m sorry.
Not all (a lot, but not all) F2P/LC games are a dopamine treadmill built to squeeze out fractions of pennies from players. Some are games like mine, and are merely using ad revenue to earn income because game pricing in the mobile market is a race to the bottom.
I’m sorry this is going to disrupt that (not insignificant) market segment.
I’m sorry you’re having your hand forced.
I’m sorry that you are having to seriously consider retooling on a new engine, or throwing in the towel altogether.

I’ve been a Unity user since version 2 (2007); I’ve invested a ton of time and effort into learning the API and the idea of having to learn a different one (and hoping it doesn’t throw roadblocks in the way of doing what I want) and move a production pipeline over is scary as hell when your livelihood is on the line.

If you’re years into a project in Unity, making a F2P game, finish it, and move to Godot or Unreal or Defold. It may mean the survival of your business model.

If you’re a few months in, I’d jump ship if I was in the F2P business. Unless you are so big that you can guarantee greater than 1 million installs and 1 million in income every year, you really do run the risk of running your business into the ground if you can’t afford to buy Pro seats or LevelPlay for all your developers.

I love Unity as a tool, I love the developers that work on it, I love the Unity developer community, and I am very saddened by how much this is affecting the community- people I have learned from and taught; developers that have encouraged my efforts and celebrated my successes; and many others whom I have never met outside of the Internet at large but whom I call friends.