Tuesday before last, Unity out of nowhere dropped an announcement that they were changing their pricing structure, killing the Plus tier and introducing a new, completely unworkable pricing scheme based on "installs". After a series of meaningless "clarifications", today Unity issued a partial walkback. You should read that, I'm not really going to summarize it.
I have three thoughts.
The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond.
Thought 1: The fact that the new fees only apply to future versions is the critical change in this latest announcement, and probably(?) avoids a lawsuit. This will have interesting ecosystem effects since many people will now want to stick on 2022.3 LTS indefinitely. Possibly, some libraries will latch to 2022.3 and never update.
(Note that 2023 LTS will be released in 2024 and thus the new fees will apply. Yes, this is confusing.)
Thought 2: Which is more expensive now? Unity or Unreal?
So this gets grits teeth complicated.
The new policy is a bit confusing, but much easier to understand than last week's. They now claim that, once you hit $1m revenue, they will charge the lower of 2.5% revshare, or a charge per "number of new people engaging with your game" that they "calculate" based on your "self-reported data".
The part after the "or" there is the remnant of their baffling "install"-based pricing from last week. This new, "new installs" number is still untrustworthy gibberish. But! Now you can ignore it. So the "price" for using Unity is now effectively 2.5% of revenue over $1M, possibly reduced arbitrarily.
2.5% is less than Unreal's revshare (5% over $1m). But Unity is also still charging a per-seat fee, which Unreal doesn't. (In today's announcement they raised the revenue threshold for the per-seat fee to $200k— but they also killed the Plus tier, meaning for the smallest shops the per-seat fee just increased 5x.)
A per-seat fee plus a revshare is sour tasting. ("They're getting you coming and going.") Per-seat fees are really inconvenient for small operations like mine where some or all of your devs may only use Unity part time. But never mind how it feels. If you combine the revshares and seat prices, which costs more now?
Fans of Homestuck will recognize this diagram immediately.
Okay, this is a mess! But here is my takeaway: Unless you are making a lot of money, Unity is the more expensive option. If you're making a lot of money— multiple millions in revenue— then Unreal's higher revshare fee very rapidly dwarfs the price of Unity. But you have to make $1.08 million on a single-dev project— or $1.41 million on a 5-dev project, or $2.64 million on a 20-dev project— before Unity starts to look like a better deal than Unreal.
Is 2.6 million dollars a lot of money? Well, here's what's weird. The range where Unity looks like a worse deal is between $200k and $2.6m in revenue. Make no money and it doesn't matter, make over $2.6m and Unity is a money save. But that "mid-range" where Unreal does better? That's supposed to be Unity's target market. That's where Unity originally made its name. If Unity is now trying to abandon the midrange and make a play for the high end, there's a different problem: Unity isn't as good as Unreal on features. Maybe the idea is to abandon the midrange and the high end, but milk high-revenue, low-quality mobile developers who don't care about features— but if they don't care about features, then instead of paying Unity why not use all that money to retarget to (say) Godot?
Thought 3: This is manageable, but Unity is dead anyway
My gut is that if this open letter's policies were what Unity had announced to begin with, like last week, then people would have been annoyed, as they were with the 2021 changes, but you wouldn't have seen a community collapse or mass exodus.
However, that's not what happened. I do not think this open letter will halt the mass exodus. The core problem is that Unity can no longer be trusted. You can consider the new 2024 prices acceptable. But now what you really have to worry about is how they will change in 2026.
EDIT: Then there's this

