Unity Runtime Fee

[ZeeWanderer]

Your thoughts? How much do you think this will impact the devs?

[AK]

Thanks for worrying :) I shared some calculations with our freelancer earlier today:

I think the yearly cost to us in 2024 for Book of Hours for runtimes will be about $0. For Cultist, which obviously has a bigger install base, however, it'll be $0. Bearing in mind Steam Deck installs - let's say at double the usual levels - I think by 2025 or 2026 we could be paying as much as $0.

tl:dr; it's just not an issue at the sort of scale we operate at ('moderately successful studio with a team of two people'). If there were to be another pricing change down the line, or if we suddenly did outrageously well, it might affect us, but if we did outrageously well, then we'd be doing outrageously well and I wouldn't much mind!

[JohnnyCiocca]

I keep forgetting which studios/games use Unity, so it never crossed my mind. I'm really glad to hear from you folks that it won't affect you, especially since I've seen quite a few devs on my social networks worrying about it...

[thursday64]

What about the other thing they're doing, removing a license tier or whatever? I don't really know much about Unity, but from what I've heard they're basically planning to remove an "indie dev"-level subscription and bump everyone up to something more expensive, or something like that, but the whole "pay per installation" thing was so wacky that it drew everyone's attention away, so most people didn't even notice.

[AK]

Unity Personal (free, staying)
Unity Plus (going away)
Unity Pro (paid tier, staying)

We're on Pro - most stable indie studios would be - it's £1800 a year so it's not _cheap_ but it's cost of doing business. At Pro, you don't pay for installs unless you're >1m installs AND >$1m revenue in the last 12 months, We won't need to pay for installs unless we have a number of really good years in the future.

My 0.02c. The change was aimed at big mobile studios, and at things like GamePass (MS will pay the install fee) and has got a lot of people more worried than they need to be. BUT it's such a weird model and such short notice that I can see why they _are_ worried, and there are at least some legitimate edge cases that will suffer. I suspect Unity will do some face-saving and then make some changes so it's less alarming.

[FarSet]

But if they change the license in full, then what can we say about changes in tariffs in the future...

[ZeeWanderer]

So the mobile games will have the burnt of it.
Btw their entire new approach feels very spontaneous and ill architectured. They didn't even consider what is now referred to as install bombing and had to amend that later. Fun Fact: the Unity fun times started after their company hired a battlefield guy who once proposed to make reloads cost money (he likely did it a joke, but it's funny nevertheless).

On a sidenote, godot probably will have an uptick in games