It's not about the money... | Unity New Pricing Controversy Explained
🚨 Wishlist Revolocity on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/27... 🚨 For those who don’t know, Unity just announced that from January 2024, developers will have to start paying them every time someone installs their Unity game, but not until the game has sold made more than 200,000 dollars in revenue AND has had 200,000 installs.
Once that threshold has been met, the developer is liable for a one-time fee of 20 cents per install.
So if a game makes more than 200,000 dollars, and has 200,015 installs, the developer will be liable for 15 x 20 cents.
On the surface the numbers, when compared to Unreal Engine, are still very favourable.
Up to now the way the two engines have worked is this:
With Unity, there was never any royalty, you just had to pay for a yearly fee to use the engine once your game made more than $100,000, which was around 1800 euro. Depending on the size of your team this yearly fee is either really reasonable or really bad depending on how well your game is selling.
Unreal Engine’s most recent pricing structure is that for every dollar you make above $1,000,000 dollars you owe them 5% in a royalty, and there is no per year seat fee to use the engine.
Someone on Twitter put this chart together, and as you can see, even with the new Unity pricing, it’s still cheaper to use Unity if you have a successful game.
So you may not think this is a bad deal, after all Unity is a business providing a service and they want to make money, and that is their right.
But that’s not the point.
So what is all the fuss about?
Back in 2019, Tim Sweeney, Epic Games CEO pointed out on Twitter that each time you use a new version of Unreal Engine and you agree to their EULA, that’s the EULA that governs your entire project going forward. So if you’re on 5.1 and they want 5% after 1,000,000, but then 5.3 came out and they said, hey we’ve added all these cool features, we now want 10% after 1,000,000 - you as a developer would have the choice, stay with your current terms and carry on, then once your project is done in 4 years time, make a new choice based on the current EULA at that time or upgrade engine, get the new features, and factor in the new royalty terms.
Further reading:
https://unity.com/runtime-fee
/ unity_announces_new_business_model_will_start
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/ 1701691036832309260
/ devolverdigital
https://twitter.com/kalobrien/status/...
/ 1701885098876912112
https://unity.com/compare-plans?curre...
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eu...
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/li...
https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/dis....
/ 1701839173580185659
https://www.theguardian.com/games/202....
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity...
/ 1701767079697740115
/ 1701766344692351017
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/li...
https://unity.com/pricing-updates
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