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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Let's say you have a free game, that's pretty popular. You offer some cosmetic stuff players can buy, and/or a few ads. The game gets really popular, and you exceed $200000 income. You also have millions of downloads of the game.
In that case you could end up owing unity money, because a download/install is not the same as a sale.
Now imagine you published this game a month ago and it's popularity is climbing, and your income is slowly climbing too.
Do you gamble that the game will be profitable, or do you delist the game because you risk bankrupting yourself if you don't?
Edit: also, what's stopping them from changing it to $2 per install, or $20? You have no guarantee. Not something you'd feel comfortable building your business on, and sink years of development into.
Edit2:
If they'd be made in unity, they would each have owed unity millions just from downloads. I'm not sure they're that profitable..
If it's a free game then you shouldn't be using a commercial engine. If you do use a commercial engine in a commercial setting then you need to make sure that you make a profit after you've payed your costs. This is not different from any other type of commercial enterprise.
If you are going to go with an ad based model for your game, like you suggest, then you should be able to make a profit if enough people use your game, which should be somewhat proportional to the amount of installs. People aren't just going to install your product and never use it. What could happen of course is that they use it once or twice and determine it's total crap and then don't spend any time actually playing it, so not enough ads can be displayed. In that case you should indeed delist the game, because it isn't viable. This should be easy to track based on the number of downloads and ads revenue. But of course if your game is crap then you can also expect people to not download it in the first place, so it isn't a very realistic scenario. If your game is slowly becoming more popular, like you suggest, then you should be able to make enough of of it to pay your dues.
Perhaps what could happen is that you manage to stir up an incredible amount of hype around your game. A ton of people download it and then simultaneously determine it is crap without listening to game reviews and such. However, in this case I can hardly imagine that the business model was ad based revenue when you've got the marketing budget to stir up such a hype.
Nevertheless I wouldn't say it is completely out of the realm of possibility to get cornered by Unity's business model, or any third party business model as of fact, but it's unlikely if you think it through. And that is actually part of the risk of entrepreneurship that you need manage. A friend of mine also had a clothing store and bought a bunch of clothes that in the end she couldn't sell and needed to default on her payments. It happens. The clothing store industry is much harder than the game industry: you need to buy everything up front and then hope that you're going to be able to sell it.
Unless you're dealing with a liberal open-source license, you can't just expect to go out into the world and use somebody else's work without having to deal with these types of issues. And that is just fair, if you'd ask me.
A few points:
Finally, someone who actually makes arguments! :)
I can fully imagine that some people who counted on the old business model are really fucking bummed out by this change, need to rethink their business strategy and feel forced with their back against the wall. That has got to be a major pain in the ass and disappointment.
I am unsure why Unity is making this change. Perhaps they are just greedy bastards, perhaps they need it to survive or perhaps something in between. Regardless, if you would be in Unity's position and would want to do this change then I don't see a way an easy way around it. Even if they'd decide that older versions are licensed in the old way, then that would potentially mean you'd get a whole bunch of people sticking to an old version, which of course opens up a whole new can of worms that they might have good reasons for not wanting to open up.
While everyone is up in arms and hating on Unity my entire point was only to say that the business model that they are proposing isn't unreasonable. Paying per installation. People are acting like it is totally unreasonable to charge for the number of installs, as if Unity isn't a core ingredient of all those shipped products. It seems like people lose critical thinking skills when they get emotional.
This is not to say that it doesn't suck monkeyballs for those affected. I use a free ferry service quite often where I live. It's great and it would suck ass if the municipality would start charging for it, but I wouldn't pretend that it is totally unfair that they decided to ask money for it.
PS some person accused me of using ChatGPT while directing their Unity hate onto me, but I truly don't, so I am keeping my wall of text because I think it gets my point across more effectively.