Unity caves in a "liitle" to pressure. Writes open letter.

[Alabtrosmyster]

Yeah tht 30% is crazy.

It is, but this is the standard fare for online store fronts as far as I'm aware.

Extremely expensive for what it is.

To be fair tech is a lot in California, life is crazy expensive other there, one can only wonder what kind of riches you need to buy your dog a small dog house.

 

[Gamernyc78]

It is, but this is the standard fare for online store fronts as far as I'm aware.

Extremely expensive for what it is.

To be fair tech is a lot in California, life is crazy expensive other there, one can only wonder what kind of riches you need to buy your dog a small dog house.

Oh I know lol and I'm in New York City where it's also super expensive so I know how that goes.

 

[Old Gamer]

Not really, some of the biggest games in the world are made on Unity. Genshin Impact brings in more money than CoD annually and runs on Unity. Fall Guys, Among Us, Hearthstone, etc, I think it’s just as valuable as UE5

The install fee is definitely meant to milk money from f2p games.

 

[anonpuffs]

 

[Zzero]

That’s why I said they should be revolting against the store owners. 30% is egregious ik it’s industry standard but to me that’s more obscene than 4%

Pretty much all of the main publishers have revolted against the storefront owners and set up their own competing stores. Then, a few years later, when it has become obvious that they lost way more than thirty percent of sales by being off Steam (or Google Play, etc.) they come crawling back.


Edit: Perhaps, if they were to work together through shared orgs like the ESA to build a multi-publisher storefront that didn't charge its stakeholders beyond a maintenance fee, then that could crack the nut. But they lack the vision, the grace, the good will and the respect towards consumers to make it happen. And they all suffer for it, and will continue to do so.

 

[Yurinka]

I know, my point was they charge 30% for doing nothing, so paying 2.5% for use of a valuable product isn't so bad in comparison.

They charge 30% for bringing a ton of potential users, mantaining the store, handling the transactions/currency change etc., the store related customer support, friends/chat/online leaderboards/trophies/matchmaking/etc.

I did work at a gaming publisher who was top in Facebook browser gaming and early mobile gaming back in the early mobile gaming times, and to avoid the 30% we did build our own store. It was a shit ton of work that required a ton of costs and was very difficult and expensive to drive many users there. We understood that it was a better idea to let the store to way bigger company and pay them a fee, even if we agree that 30% is a bit abusive. Maybe 10%-15% would be more fair.

The 30% is over the revenue, something that the publisher can verify and track. The Unity install fee is over something that Unity can made up, and they charge that on top of around $1800/year per seat (each computer of the office/worker that uses it). It's better what UE does: to charging nothing of the first million made by the game and after that, charging a % of the revenue made after that first million, and not for the seats or for a metric that publishers can't control/track/verify. And well, the best deal is the Godot one: completely free and open source.

There's something more abusive that: the revenue share that publishers take from the devs. That is the most common reason of the death of many indie studios.