some people have been going around saying the unity news isn't so bad because "it doesn't affect very many people" and
-
there are plenty of reasons to be nervous about a move like this even if it doesn't (currently) affect you
-
the indie studios that aren't getting millions in budget from venture capital but are still doing gamedev full-time professionally are already squeezed enough without unity skimming even more off the top
some people are acting like grossing 200k in a year for an entire studio is like winning the jackpot, when in reality between platform holders, publishers, and governments taking their cut what's left could well be far below subsistence wages for team members already
so yeah, a large percentage of unity users won't be affected, but a large percentage of the indie "middle class", who make a large number of the indie games most people enjoy, will be highly affected. and i don't think that's okay. i think that's worthy of some panic
like, here's a breakdown of 200k for a team of 4
- platform takes 30%, devs keep 140k
- publisher takes 30% (wow, nice deal!), devs keep 98k
- split 4 ways, each dev gets $24,000
- pay income tax 15% socials 12% income tax, each dev gets about $17,900
wow! what wealth! and that's without even getting into the fact that there are non-salary expenses to making games and that games take multiple years to make so amortize that 1st year revenue over the 3 years it took to create and even without non-salary expenses you're looking at $6,000/year for your efforts
