A major partner told John Riccitiello personally that it will not pay the Runtime Fee – and in the strongest possible terms.
of all the games released on Steam in 2022, only 70 have hit the million dollars threshold. I think it is misleading to bundle all “indies” in one big basket. Those 70 games can afford to pay or negociate. Don’t get me wrong, total dick and amateurish move from Unity, but the amount of people around social media who believe game devs can just hit the threshold by accident and become unprofitable is ridiculous. Current gamedev here and ex Unity employee. It is worth denouncing Unity and fighting for our indies, but understand that this affect the 0.01%, literally. 70 games out of 6000 released games on Steam in 2022. Sure most games are shit and w/e, but you get the point.
The “1 million dollar threshold” came out as a backpedal after the runtime fee backlash. Unity’s fee chnage was initially pitched as retroactive to all unity games, a per device install, and per reinstall for those devices. It did create a way to harrass and “install bomb” devs with insane fees, along with gouging smaller devs for money in perpetuity that could cost them more in fees long term then they made in profits because it was such a stupid structure.
The fact that they have backpedaled to a 1mil threshold and a “come on guys, this barely affects any of you” is purely because people did react to a very ugly, very tone deaf, and very damaging fee scheme that did affect everyone.
I couldn’t get past the article’s use of the word “mediation” as a business type/label for these companies.
I figured this was gonna come out. I figured Unity would bend the knee for anyone that made real money for the platform, so the change for their licensing fee would impact the hard working indie devs that need every penny to pursue their passion. This is such brazen rentseeking.
I remember a game developer calling this change a “tax on the rich” and I went on blast because nobody rich pays a tax. It’s handed down to the actual users as punitive. This just hurts those who want to make this a passion.
And the telling thing is a lot of Unity staff are abandoning ship. Which means the things that matter like DOTS or ARP are going to rot while metrics and ads remain stable. I got fed up with the state of DOTS and ProBuilder, and while it’s not as comparable, Godex is reaching some degree of partity with FLECS and Entitas.
Do not be fooled that with JR gone Unity will be back to its old self. If you have a project almost out the door finish it. If not, change engines.
So most of the indie devs will not need to pay if they are sub 1MM revenue, and the large players can just throw the weight around and negotiate the fees down? Then who is this fee meant to fleece, the “middle class” devs?
It is still unattractive for indie devs. You risk a huge hit in your revenue when you accidentally hit the the limit. You can’t stop selling games to not hit it.
The huge hit of a maximum of 2.5% of your future revenue. Unreal takes 5% in the same situation, for comparison.
The fee itself is perfectly reasonable, Unity just completely fucked up implementing it trying to force it on games already released or in development by altering the agreements solo and stirring up a well deserved shitshow for it, staining their reputation probably permanently.
It’s a cycle.
- Indie devs will find / build new platform
- The platform will gain traction
- It’ll grow exponentially
- It’ll reach a point where platform devs will be greedy or itll be taken over by big corps.
Rinse and repeat.
Some platforms reach stage 2 but never leave.
Gdot is FOSS engine. This means it will most probably never pull shit like that and even if everybody is allowed to fork it before a bad change and continue with that
I’ve yet to understand how that was even legal. “Hey you know those colors we sold you? Now that you used them to do a painting, we’ll take a % on how much you sold it for”
