On a chill Tuesday, September 12, 2023 to be exact, Unity decided life was not interesting enough. They announced a new pricing scheme called Unity Runtime fees, which just means Unity will now charge developers 20 cents per download of any published game that is using the Unity game creation engine. This is after said game passes the threshold of $200,000 earned. For those that think a game selling $200,000 copies is a lot and the developers should "be so lucky", allow me to break down some math for you:
Three devs (A game designer, a programmer, and an artist) decide to get together and make one simple game and sell it.
Said game takes, let's say, one year to make (not bad for a indie game. Kinda rushed, but not bad).
The developers obviously want to eat and pay rent, so they opt to take a loan and pay themselves $60,000 a year and get on state provided health care, and then they pray nothing goes wrong because state-provided healthcare is "fine" but not the best. Why $60,000 a year, some may ask? Because that is the average salary of any small time, first job in the games industry salary.
Game ships, it sell enough copies to cross the $200,000 threshold, and now they are getting dinged the 20 cents on the download.
Again, let's say the game sells for $1 a pop on Steam (A fair price for most indie games) and they sell $2 million worth of games (Hooray, roaring success!)
EXCEPT, now Unity gets $40,000 of that $2 million in sales...for nothing. Literally nothing.
Pretend it's not a roaring success and they sell $200,001 worth of game.
The devs are now out $4,000. For a dev that was about to only see maybe $20,000 in profit, a $4,000 hit is a LOT OF MONEY.
You get it.
It's scummy. It hurts small devs, drastically. It is making the entire games development industry rethink how to approach game development with "free" software. This is combined with the fact that Unity themselves will have "proprietary software" to check how often the downloads will happen...without telling the devs how this software works?
All of this is being put out there and gladly, many people are abandoning the software and kit. No one trusts them anymore. How could they? Even if Unity walks this back how are they expected to be trusted?
At this stage, and I'll be honest...I cannot see myself in my personal projects ever using Unity again. It's sort of dead to me. I dabbled in it every now and again and I have it downloaded on all of my PC's to tinker in, but there is no point anymore.
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