this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
365 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

58137 readers
4667 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off::Unity has announced that starting on January 1st, 2024, it will implement a new pricing model that will charge developers based on how many times a game was installed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

If you're lucky $200k could pay back one full time employee for a year and get you some marketing. If you're an indie dev trying to get off the ground that full time employee wage likely wouldn't even be the same person it would be a series of contract workers. If it is your first game you have a ton of legal things to set up for the company and IP as well. Then there are store fees to pay for the privilege of being allowed to sell your game. Maybe you're testing the waters on something and selling a game for a dollar, free tier license, it goes bigger than you expected, now a full 20% of sales (assuming a single install per sale) is going to Unity, plus store fees. Your game uses an online service that financially doesn't scale well because you didn't expect 200,000 people to play your game? Hope you can cancel it quick or those API call fees are going to hit hard too. $200k is nothing in game dev land and this change kinda lasers in on indie devs hoping to break into the industry.