Unity changed their pricing, leading me to unleash my inner excel nerd and dig deeper on what this actually means for my Unity F2P game.
Besides the obviously ridiculous concept of charging per install (and the questions surrounding fraudulent/malicious reinstalls), the rev share that Unity gets is not as large as I originally understood. This post is going to go over some important stats I found and logged on this (public to view) Google Sheet:
https://lnkd.in/gMErHJQM
For starters, the "Runtime Fee" (fee per install) only applies after you've had at least 200k lifetime installs (per game, not company!) AND have made $200k rev in the last 12 months (again, per game). These requirements jump up massively to 1M installs and $1M annual rev for Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise plans. The fees are also progressively smaller as your # installs rises, but only for Pro and Enterprise, which means it's extremely punishing to get more installs past those marks if you're using Unity Free.
To me, this means Unity is pushing aggressively for successful games to sign up for one of their monthly plans (Pro/Enterprise) to avoid outrageous Runtime Fees. These plans are priced per seat, with Pro being the cheapest at ~$185 a month. If you're worried about that price like I was, remember that you would only want to upgrade if you're about to hit that $200k annual rev marker, and once you upgrade, that marker jumps to $1M annual rev.
The biggest thing I've learned from graphing out this data is that if you are not a free game (because remember, the Runtime Fee is only after X rev *on a particular game*), you have to actually pay attention to how much rev you make per install. The second biggest thing is that it becomes a necessity to upgrade to either Pro or Enterprise when your game begins to get very profitable ($200k annual rev).
Assuming you get Unity Pro/Enterprise for your successful game, the only conditions I've found where you pay Unity a fee that is higher than the rev you make per install is if you make less than $0.01 per install and have over 2M or so installs ($60k in fees, no rev made, using Unity Pro). However, with those exact same numbers, your rev that year can only be $240k or so, which doesn't actually reach the $1M rev marker for Pro, so you don't owe anything and you're actually up $240k (minus ~$2k for annual Pro). If you had Unity Free with the same numbers ($0.01 rev per install and 2M installs), then you would be down about $140k, which is why it's important to understand the pricing plans Unity has and when they become necessary to upgrade to.
So, who's getting hit the hardest with these changes? It appears to be games that have a ton of installs, very low rev per install, and have $200k/$1M+ rev. If you avoid at least one of those items, it seems you're unlikely to pay anything unusual, and for most indies, you'll pay nothing at all.
I hope this was helpful to someone!
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