this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Wait im out of the loop, what did unity do?
Everytime someone install a Unity game. Dev have to pay the Unity.
Didnt unity already take a bit of the sales? This sounds fucking stupid. Guess im learning Godot now
Yeah, Godot is best alternative to unity.
Unity used to take a royalty if you earned over a certain amount, I think it was 100k USD/yr. I couldn't tell you the exact percentage, but I seem to recall it was significant, similar to your platform fees which on Steam is like 30%
They discontinued that years ago though. Now it's free if you're under the $100k threshold, but once you go over you have to upgrade your license at a cost of a couple grand per seat per year.
The per-install fee is taking effect Jan 1, 2024, but I believe you're still going to have to get an upgraded license after you hit the threshold. This is a fee on top of fees.
Unity don't take royalties, this is their piss-poor attempt at doing that.
Only occurs after the game reaches a certain amount of revenue within the last year. Not defending it this is a terrible change but there is still a degree of wiggle room for free games or VERY small indie games.
In practice it mostly affect studio making over 1M in sales per year. The download fee only occur on pro users past that threshold. The fee is so ridiculous that they're basically forcing devs to get pro, but that was kinda already a thing anyway. For studios malong over 1M a year, well they gotta pay up unfortunately. Unfortunately 1M per year ins't that much for a middle-sized studio, but small studio are barely affected by this change.
Free (Personal) and Plus users also have to pay, and their threshold is lower than for Pro/Enterprise users: 200k lifetime downloads and 200k dollars earned in the past year, vs 1million for the pro.