The Unity Situation (Patreon)

Sorry, everyone. There is still no new Alpha release because these last few days have been a little crazy in the game development community. If you haven't heard yet, Unity plans to radically change its pricing model from a predictable monthly fee to a system where they additionally charge the developer "per-install".

There's a lot of confusion on how that will work or what even counts. Some thresholds need to be met at around 200k gross revenue (so before any deductions) and 200k Installs.

So... our Patreon and Subscribestar accounts are fairly successful, which means that just a few days ago, the Femdemic launch made us cross this threshold. But then... that's not a "per-game" revenue, but a company-wide one, but that's what Unity did count before this change. They aren't clarifying this here.

And what about Installs? While the Patreon versions of my games aren't downloaded more than several thousand times, the free version gets tens of thousands of downloads each patch. Unfortunately, I don't know the exact number on this because I can't see direct download numbers on Mega, but I had some estimated data a while ago, so I'm getting to the idea that it's several thousand units per patch. Those are new installs.

But does the free release count? Seems that way. They made up an arbitrary reason like "if you can continue your save progress", which you obviously can. But it's also not entirely clear, which makes this whole thing even more frustrating. Nobbody knows.

So potentially, with this plan, I'd owe Unity more than what is left after taxes and platform fees because I have more units being installed than I make money.

There are so many problems with this, so if you want to know more I recommend following the tweets from Rami Ismail on Twitter/X. He does an excellent job at updating and disussing the issues with all of it.

Now... Personally, I can just upgrade my Unity plan to the Pro license, where I have to pay like 2k per developer a year to push that income threshold to 1 million dollars per year, which is not something that I'll ever reach, but then if any of my future releases ever get successful overnight, e.g. a BMO TV full release on Steam, and for some arbitrary reason it suddenly sells 50 thousand times on release? (Femdemic sold a little under 5k times in the first two months.) Then suddenly, I'm back in their clutches. I'm not saying it'll sell that much, but the question here is, why would anyone want to make a game when you're afraid of it selling well? The TF Community is way bigger than we think, so that these numbers may seem like a lot, but they can happen.

It's scary because Installs are not something developers can control. If I sell you a game like Femdemic once, and I have to pay 20 cents that's still a weird precedent for low-price games like Vampire Survivors, but I might have to pay the 20 cents more times whenever the buyer installs the game on a new device, which means selling a game for any amount is possible to be a loss if the buyer installs it often enough. There are also batch scripts that can just create virtual devices and install software a million times. Unity is just after that sweet Genshin Impact money, but they are pushing away all developers, especially indies. They are making the engines only viable to big AAA studios where you can sell your game for $60, but guess what? Only a few of the AAA studios are using it. And will those continue making games with these terms?

It's been three days since they announced this, and the development community is going wild. I'm surprised that they haven't rolled this back yet, and at this point, they might just not. Their stock hasn't suffered a lot, and it looks like it's even going up today. What a messy world.

The worst thing about this is that they just changed the terms of service so that Unity can change them whenever they want to and apply the new terms to all previously released games, even though the original terms said they couldn't do that.

So... please believe me. I've tried to be efficient these past few days, but I get demotivated so much whenever I realize that I'm using a tool that can bankrupt me or anyone who uses it soon without the person having any ability to stop it. Of course, at this point, it's impossible to port BMO TV away from Unity, but I'll have to try for future projects. However, I have only gotten as good as I am at the engine's usage by using it for ten years. This knowledge will all evaporate because I'll have to use another engine. Even if they roll back these changes, the trust is so broken that this is already going to have to happen. I've been stressed about this these past few days, so I hope you understand I'll take a few more days for the new release.

Best,
Rel