Unity will charge developers every time a game is installed, and it hasn’t sat well with them

2023-09-13 11:55:00

Unity is one of the two most advanced non-proprietary graphics engines, but lately it hasn’t been keeping pace with Epic Games’ Unreal engine. The solution? Well, a change in the business model that has not sat well with the developers. In fact, more than one has asked that people buy their games but not install them, in a round of sarcasm and attacks on Unity.

The company has chosen to add a new way to charge for using its graphics engine and that affects the Unity execution environment, which is installed with each game. If before it charged per development license, now it will also charge per installed game, which affects the indies more and makes it impossible to sell the games cheap. Unreal charges a percentage per game sold, so in this case there is no problem.

Starting January 1, 2024, Unity will charge $0.20 per install of a game as long as the developer has exceeded $200,000 in revenue in the last year, and has at least 200,000 installs. In the Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise plans, the figure increases to 1 million dollars and those who have more than one million installations, which will also access volume discounts.

For example, it can go down to a single cent if you install the game more than a million times a month. For emerging markets the commission drops to 2 cents per installation. There is a table which is included in the Unity announcementalong with some feature changes that the plans have, and the withdrawal of the Unity Plus plan.

As I said before, this affects the indis developed under the Personal plans more, especially if it has some success. We all install a game several times, so it will be an inexhaustible source of income for Unity, and therefore greed is taking its toll. But at the same time, every time a game is installed it is deducted from the original sales price to the developer, which will prevent them from selling them on sale for one or two euros as often happens during sales periods, or between the commission of Steam, the taxes it has to pay and the revolutionary Unity tax can lose a lot of money in a short period of time for each game it sells. It’s a stupid commission model.

Hence what I said before that Indian developers are asking that their games be purchased but not installed. Others, who are in very advanced projects with Unity, can no longer change the graphics engine. However, many have already said that they are going to stop using Unity in their projects… unless Unity backs down. Which will have to be done, because charging for each time a game is installed instead of per game sold is absolute stupidity.

Via:
EnGadget.