I don't think you understand the policy.

Unity isn't doing what Unreal did and asking for a cut of every sales. That would be surprising, that would be impactful, but that would be a manageable amount of money.

Unity is asking for a fee on every _install_ of the game, even if it amounts to one single sale of the game. Quoting their FAQ[0]:

> Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?

> A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.

That means that if you sell a game for $1, and if a user reinstalls it 6 times over the course of their ownership of the game (changing computers, just uninstalling/reinstalling to free up space every now and then, adding or removing mods, etc...), and you made more than 200.000 sales... You now owe Unity $1.20 for that user. And you only earned $1 from that user. Sure, you can pay Unity 1500/year/developer to rise the threshold to $1 million and lower the fee to $0.15 per install, but that's not a "deal". That's a racket.

This is absolutely, completely unsustainable. And not like "this will cost some money to companies" unsustainable, more like "it will be cheaper to hire people to port our game to another engine" unsustainable, as the person handling the business side of Among Us stated yesterday[1]:

> This is legit the kind of math I'm doing too. I've learned that Unity's fee won't be retroactive which is delightful, but also Among Us gets enough dls per month that I could just hire two whole people to port AU away from Unity instead of them taxing us for 0 added value.

And that's not accounting for business models like bundles or game passes. AGGRO CRAB, the developers behind the upcoming "Another Crab's Treasure" game announced earlier this year and coming out early next year, has stated that they are unsure whether their GamePass release will be sustainable for them[2]:

> This means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If only a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

To be more exact and add some context, as reported by journalist Stephen Tottlio[3], Unity executive Mark Whitten stated that the fee would be sent to Microsoft:

> As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.

This will, however, deincentivize Microsoft to publish games made by studios who use Unity because Microsoft would be potentially publishing at a loss, which of course they don't want to do. So, not the exact same impact to developers, but the same difference for them.

And of course, that's not accounting for all of the "freemium" models here and there. And I don't mean microtransactions, I mean games that lock part of the content behind a paywall but propose access to most of the game for free. That business model, sustainable so far, is now literally going to end up with Unity asking for more money than you earn a year. (and yeah, this is a real risk for some companies. Anduo Games, the company behind the NSFW game Third Crisis, is still wondering if they're in that exact situation and what they can do about it[5]).

This move is just bonkers. Like, it's a business model where just using a game engine means that you can end up owing more money to a company than you earned over the lifetime your game.

And this is why people are not happy about this move.

[0] https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...

[1] https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1701696983617180010

[2] https://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/170169103683230926...

[3] https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma...

[4] https://itch.io/post/8572430 (the link is to a comment and is fully SFW, the game this comment is about isn't)