The new Unity fee is all about ads and destroying lives of indie devs is just a side effect
You might or might not know that My Dystopian Robot Girlfriend was made in Unity. This is why the current events with Unity are very important to me. Let me run you through my theory as to why Unity did all this.
If you are not in the loop Unity announced that they are adding a runtime fee to their license. What that means is that developers will now have to pay a small amount of money for every install of their game. Why did they do this though? Simplest explanation is of course that they need money, but that's not the full story. If that's the case they could've gone for a simple revenue share system(Like unreal engine), why didn't they though? I think I've got the answer. First let's look at this graph that shows what % of revenue developers will have to pay to Unity. It's based on the brackets from Unity's blogpost.
First of all, this fee strongly punishes games with low revenue per download(Free to play games). In some cases the fee could even exceed 100% of the revenue. Why would they do that? It's simple, a big chunk of their revenue comes from ads. In data I found from 2022 they earned about half of their revenue from ads. They clearly want to expand on that and that's the reason for the merger with IronSource. A company specializing in app monetization.
Now for the really nasty part. There are reports Unity reps are telling people they won't have to pay the fee as long as they transition to IronSource as their ad provider. This is effectively blackmail. Paying a fee of 100% of your revenue is simply not an option.
It's is not a random dumb decision as it seemed before. It's a planned, malicious and targeted attack in order to gain more ad revenue by forcing games to not use their competitors' ad services. This is why they said "90% of you won't be affected" and this is also why they didn't go for a simple revenue share. Us, indie devs provide almost no revenue for Unity. Fricking us over is just a side effect of their plan and that's why they don't care. It's honestly even worse then I initially thought.
But hey, that's just a theory, game theory. Thanks for reading and frick Unity.
Also for fans of My Dystopian Robot Girlfriend. The game currently is below the thresholds, so we will survive. I got a bit scared at first though. If we ever reach the 1m$ yearly revenue threshold though we will be forced to switch to a paid model. Otherwise we'd have to pay thousands of dollars to unity and we'd go bankrupt.
Sources:
Source of the graph:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16jeox6/i_made_a_comprehensive_visual_chart_showing_how/
Data about revenue from ads from:
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NYSE-U/financials-revenue/
https://businessquant.com/unity-software-revenue-by-segment
Post about the fee removal:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16j6cip/ironsource_is_the_reason/
Comments
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are you sure your okay?
Bro, please don’t abandon the game and the project itself, this is really the coolest game I’ve played, I’m sorry that because of Unity’s innovation, now you have problems with the game, we will support you as best we can, in general Thank you for being with us and I wish you good luck with the project and don’t abandon it, I hope everything will work out)
You do realize this fee bullshit was resolved months ago
Not going to say much, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
haven't seen any new developer logs since this, hope things are going well. Unity backtracked pretty hard on this decision, not 100% reversal but switched to something far more manageable.
hi dude, I wanted to tell you that your game is just super, this game expressed wonderful emotions for me, such a huge amount of content, cool drawing and atmosphere, but for some reason I got tired of playing and now I'm depressed, but I think I can handle it, now I want to to live the same way as the main character, I hope you understand me. I'm lonely. Greetings from Russia, I wanted to wish you all the best. Keep up the good work.
Cuando sacan actualización?
If possible, would like to meet someone
Are there any Chinese people?
Of course, we can't help the author, which is a great pity
Of course, we can't help the author, which is a great pity
Not to sound like a bot but you can support the creator by donating money when you download or join their Patreon
我
me
+1
hey bro
You could use another engine?
That would requore basically remaking the game from scratch, i believe. And thats assuming the game is even *possible* to make, in a different game engine. I'm no expert, but I know making games is very complicated, and certain mechanics and features can often only be done using certain game engines.
So even if the developers *were willing* to switch game engines, and spend months and months trying to recreate their game, in a totally different method and programming language, there's no guarantee it would even be *possible*, unfortunately.
For the time being it seems they can survive and still use unity. So we will just have to hope things work out.
Okay, i thought they've more people to do this
Godot Engine would be a great option. And it won't be hard to rewrite the game on it, if we take into account what is in the game made on Unity.
So if you are ever approaching the 1m threshold I would be glad to help take some of the money off you so that you can-not go bankrupt
(this is satire just in case it wasnt clear)
can't really wrap my head around this graph
I'll take your word for it and assume it's bad
它适合成为一家中国企业，过度的热爱钱，压榨创作者和受众群体
This was really informative. I watched a few videos about it and talked about it on the Steam forum but I never heard Ironsource mentioned. I agree the way they went about it was blackmail.
You learning another engine just in case things get worse? I know learning a new engine will be difficult or take awhile to get things up and running but if they do it once they or others may make a worse deal.
surely this can't be legal. there has to be some sort of anti-trust law that nips this in the bud.
the punishment for those crimes is usually a fee, and as the saying goes: "if the punishment for a crime is a fee, than that means it is legal for a price." Sadly, the fee is almost always less than the violator made from the illegal practice and thus there is no incentive to stop.
Unity screwed themselves over. They'll get f****ed like WotC did that one time, with a big middle finger from the community.
Seeing a lot of developers switching to Godot and Unreal Engine, because you never know what bull***t move Unity will take out of his a** next time.
I love your creations man don't let that effect you :(
Seems like unity backed down, they release an open apology letter for the community on Twitter. Not a lot but a little process, but it still won't be able to recover the trust it once had.
If you want to read the blog post, here it is:
An open letter to our community | Unity Blog
The right thing to do now is for laws to be erected that prevents anyone from even trying what they tried to do.
"We're sowwy we got backlash for ouw scummy business choices. We pinky pwomise we'll nevew do something bad again!"
You are wrong. Unity itself is a great tool. Look up the list of games made in Unity. Until now it was pretty much the best choice for anyone without the budget to make their own engine. For three main reasons:
The leadership though, they have been making it shit because they are determined to start earning more money. They killed one the pillars that made Unity great. It was inevitable now that you think about about it, but it still hurts.
It's always corporate goblins.