this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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The damage was not the actual pricing (which was cheaper than Unreal), the reason people are going to leave for Unreal/Godot and never come back is the loss of trust. Nobody wants to be chained down to a company that’s willing to pull the rug out like this.
Every corporation that sells proprietary software will do this eventually. The only way to prevent it is by removing the need for trust and demanding open-source software!
Many software companies in niche industries with few options end up being bought out by conglomerates or private equality which then turn the screws to their captive users.
Hashicorp recently switched Terraform's license from open source to a business license. Community forked it in a month. Source: opentofu.org
The new Unity pricing is not necessarily cheaper than Unreal. It depends on the price model for the game in question.
Many free-to-play games see massive amounts of installs, but very little average revenue per game. See of those devs did the math for their games, and found out that their average revenue per player was around 18 cents. So if Unity charges 20 cents per install, the dev would outright have to pay Unity 2 cents more than the player even gave them in revenue.
Some other devs calculated that the install fees would come out to 106% or the total revenue that their game had made.
Unreal's price model is generally 5% of revenue, so that would be significantly cheaper.
But it depends a lot on the actual price model for the game. Some games will pay rather little in install fees, while others will pay excessive amounts.