Wondering how the latest news about Unity Engine are going to affect Cities: Skylines 2

[SeriousSimon]

For those of you who missed it: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/sep/13/unity-seeks-to-clarify-new-game-engine-charges-amid-outrage-from-developers

I hope that link is okay to post, the gist of it: If your game has generated more than 200.000 $ of revenue and has been installed a certain amount of times, developers need to pay a fee to Unity. We can definitely expect CS2 to sell more than 200k units.

Have Paradox been left in the dark about this as well? Have arrangements been made? I find the timing for this news quite interesting, too.. just barely a month before the release...


Main issues about this:

- This change is (seemingly) coming out of the blue and the sudden breakway from the previous revenue sharing model seems awfully sudden and seems to have caught many developers off-guard, resulting in them losing all trust in Unity as a company

- The amount of installs and who (!) and how (!) that would be monitored are two crucial questions here, Unity has been vague and generally bad at communicating these changes.

[Rialm]

Was asking me the same thing, I was checking which are the most famous game that could make a headline. I'm pretty sure Paradox won't take this easily, or at least they will have to make a decision fast.

[danko9696]

I don't think this is going to have any effect on Paradox and CS2, zero. The threshold is $200k for the free version, $1,000,000 for a Pro/Enterprise version. And for these, past the two thresholds of installs and money the fee can radically decrease the more they sell while with the free version remains the same.

Let's say they get more than $1M with 3M installs. The fee would be 3M-1M (the threshold) = 2M billable installs. The total fee would be 2M × 0.01 if they're using the enterprise version = $20k. Not a big deal. It would be if they were using the free version but I guess they aren't.

[pete1051]

20 cents per install. Boycott all Unity based games til they go back to old licence. They are hurting all.

[Ghostrider]

Considering that the CEO of Unity Technologies is a ex EA employee, should give more than enough reason to speculate.

[Dale Kent]

Originally posted by pete1051:

20 cents per install. Boycott all Unity based games til they go back to old licence. They are hurting all.

That's dumb as all you're doing is hurting the developers, not Unity.

[pete1051]

Originally posted by Dale Kent:

Originally posted by pete1051:

20 cents per install. Boycott all Unity based games til they go back to old licence. They are hurting all.

That's dumb as all you're doing is hurting the developers, not Unity.

There are other engines, they must switch.

f. o.

[Rialm]

Originally posted by danko9696:

I don't think this is going to have any effect on Paradox and CS2, zero. The threshold is $200k for the free version, $1,000,000 for a Pro/Enterprise version. And for these, past the two thresholds of installs and money the fee can radically decrease the more they sell while with the free version remains the same.

Let's say they get more than $1M with 3M installs. The fee would be 3M-1M (the threshold) = 2M billable installs. The total fee would be 2M × 0.01 if they're using the enterprise version = $20k. Not a big deal. It would be if they were using the free version but I guess they aren't.

You are not understanding how Paradox's policy works, their game try to survive as much time as possible. So how it's going to affect dlcs, expansions? there are so many question.

I believe that some people see big numbers and don't know how to articulate the meaning of this in their head, just cut some 0 and try to imagine how it's starting to add up. Because they are assuming that a lot fix a little. And it's not like this.

[OldyButCrafty]

Originally posted by Dale Kent:

Originally posted by pete1051:

20 cents per install. Boycott all Unity based games til they go back to old licence. They are hurting all.

That's dumb as all you're doing is hurting the developers, not Unity.

Yes Dale, everyone business has to have a healthy bottom line in order to employ more people. It's the way the world works. Boycotts if businesses for reasons like this are not productive overall.

[Major Kudos™]

I can't wait for the game to release so the topics here can start to be more about the game and less angry.

[danko9696]

Originally posted by Rialm:

You are not understanding how Paradox's policy works, their game try to survive as much time as possible. So how it's going to affect dlcs, expansions? there are so many question.

I think it is you who don't get it at all. DLCs don't require a new runtime and that's what it counts. It's clearly not a new installation.

And even if it was (which it isn't) now only the first installation counts. And even if it didn't, them being in the cheapest price bracket would make them able to take that cost without any issue.

[danko9696]

Originally posted by danko9696:

I don't think this is going to have any effect on Paradox and CS2, zero. The threshold is $200k for the free version, $1,000,000 for a Pro/Enterprise version. And for these, past the two thresholds of installs and money the fee can radically decrease the more they sell while with the free version remains the same.

Let's say they get more than $1M with 3M installs. The fee would be 3M-1M (the threshold) = 2M billable installs. The total fee would be 2M × 0.01 if they're using the enterprise version = $20k. Not a big deal. It would be if they were using the free version but I guess they aren't.

One more thing I just noticed and it is a pretty dumb and big mistake I've made!. It changes the economics quite a lot for medium/big companies. The tier bracket for the fees is calculated MONTHLY. Even if you have sold millions of games before you'd need at least 1,000,001 installs in any given month for the remaining installs (in that month) to qualify for Tier 4, so we shouldn't take for granted 1 cent per install with Enterprise, even if the game has sold millions and has many millions of installs.

That makes it a lot worse for medium/big companies, because the first installs each month (with Enterprise) won't be billed at 1 cent but 12.5 cents.

[SeriousSimon]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. If anything, it is obvious that this new model is unclear, unprecise and does not sound fair to anyone.
Even if we assume Paradox themselves are largely unaffected, the taint of using Unity is real. You don't just change game engines on a whim, especially one month before a big release, but this is all very unfortunate.

[Bart]

Does valve own Unity?

[dev]

The install fee thing confirmed that unity games have built in spyware. I am not going to buy unity games anymore and I just uninstalled CS 1 as it probably has it too. I recommend that you delay publishing this game and change the engine if you have been making this with unity.

[dev]

Originally posted by Dale Kent:

Originally posted by pete1051:

20 cents per install. Boycott all Unity based games til they go back to old licence. They are hurting all.

That's dumb as all you're doing is hurting the developers, not Unity.

I am never going to buy a unity game again.