Yesterday Unity Engine announced a new questionable pricing model charging game developers a flat rate each time their game is installed.
Here's a few concerns people are having:
- How do you accurately count how many times my game has been installed?
- How do I know your estimates are accurate, am I supposed to just trust you?
- Are you tracking my players and their data?
- Are you charging me when somebody installs my game on their 2nd or 3rd devices?
- Are you charging me when somebody hates me and spins up a million AWS instances and installs my game on each of them?
- Are you charging me when somebody refunds my game?
- Can Unity legally enforce this new retroactive contract?
- The list goes on...
Surely concerns were raised internally but nobody listened. Management is detached from their own teams, and remarkably detached from the game development community as a whole.
I don't mind if Unity wants to make more profit. The pricing before was incredibly fair, and the pricing now isn't that bad... until you consider the flaws.
Check this example:
You're a mobile game developer. Your app is free but monetized with ads, it has been installed on 10 million devices. Your app earned $300,000 from advertisements. You owe Unity $666,668.
I don't think Unity wants to bend their developers over backwards. This idea was announced with little effort or planning. They don't even know how they're going to accurately track installs, or handle edge cases like the example above.
Trust in their brand is at an all-time-low and alternative engines are having the greatest marketing campaigns of their lives without even trying.
Conclusion:
