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Unity is introducing a new per-install fee. According to my calculations (see chart) it's a bankruptcy death-trap?
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Shockingly, the owed percentage is unbounded and can exceed gross revenue, since the owed amount depends on installs, not sales.
For games that are in bundles, subscription services, are free-to-play, or just highly pirated, the install count can be very high while the revenue per install is very low, which is where this fee structure is super dangerous.
@runevision On a very simple level I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a marginal cost per user, and this is standard business practice in most sectors. It’s scalable, easy to account for, and marginal prices cover it.
But this is from a product that is the market leader specifically in the “give the product away free, monetize separately” domain. That’s what makes this so jarring. It’s like nobody thought about who the current big customers are.
@kylotan It's NOT easy to account for number of installs. Do you know for your games how many devices each customer installed it on, and how often someone uninstalled it only to later reinstall? Do you know the ratio of legit sales to cracked pirated copies?
Apart from that, for certain business models the fee is prohibitively high. Even for premium games, putting it on 90% discount on Steam is now super dangerous, as is Steam Fest demos where a full game is made free to try for a limited time.
@runevision Sorry, I wasn’t clear - I meant ‘account for’ in the financial sense (i.e. accounting). One cost per use is straightforward.
Right now I’m laughing at how this announcement has been pushed out when there apparently isn’t an agreed method for counting installs - at least not that Unity are revealing. They made their own FUD.
I’m not concerned about low price business models going away though. I don’t think they are a good thing for gaming.
@kylotan Ah ok. Well I don't know how it helps us that this won't be an accounting issue if it's a huge budgeting and risk assessment issue. :) And yes, agreed it's mind-boggling how they've announced this without knowing how to implement it.