I'm pretty sure gaming studios would be mostly fine with paying a percentage of the sales revenue to unity too, the problem is that Unity wants a flat fee even when studios aren't making any money.
No, fuck that. Paying a game engine for based on the success of my product is asinine. Absurd.
That's like car companies asking Uber drivers for a cut of their revenues.
Or knife companies asking restaurants for a cut (heh) of their revenues too.
It's sheer, sheer greed and nothing more.
Edit: I didn't convey well what I meant. Yes, of course you should pay for a commercial game engine. That's not asinine. I meant to say that it should be a flat fee, or maybe a tiered fee. But not something proportional to the amount of downloads.
Well, unity's business model was always to make it free and then ask for a fee on revenue because it's easier for small studios. The alternative business model would be to sell a direct license of the 3D engine, which will likely cost in the 10s of thousands.
It's expensive building a 3D/game engine, they sell one to you.
I'm not saying their latest move is not a real dick move, but it's normal that they want to be paid for the product they sell. Uber drivers have paid for their cars, right?
You can always build your own engine, if you think you can do better. Creating a game engine like Unreal or Unity is anything but an easy task, and they should get renumerated for that work. However, a more sensible pricing model than the shitshow Unity did is Unreal's: The first $1m in revenue is yours, after that, a constant 5% fee. Sounds reasonable to me.
Hey, when your game runs on my PC or console, I am the one paying the electricity bill for your game. Why the fuck do I have to pay for this, when I already bought the game? Isn't it enough, that we gamers invest real money and our time into your game? We want to get paid, too!
At least game engines provide massive value. Yeah they take a cut, but more money would have ultimately been used to produce a vastly inferior inhouse engine. Yeah Unity's recent move is douchey, buy it's still miles better than any of the extortion by app stores.
No one can tell me Apple's curation is worth a 30% cut. Ridiculous.
No one can tell me Apple's curation is worth a 30% cut.
I mean, it obviously is, otherwise companies wouldn't be paying it. The difference is that in the case of the distribution platform, it's worth it not because it would add any value to the game itself, but because of the monopoly of the platform, which provides value to nobody but the platform.
Enable DLSS3 on your card for just $2.99/month and get those sweet extra frames! We know gamers love higher frequency as well, so with just $4.99/month, you can boost your GPU and DDR6 memory clocks by 50%!
If you're an AI geek and want to use your card for training AI/inference, you can enable cuda cores for just $6.99 a month!
You joke, but it won't be too long before NVIDIA charges you a monthly fee to use features like DLSSupreme or some features on a card you already own. Then Intel and AMD will follow with something like Quantum threading for CPUs with four threads per core. Want to run more than one thread per core, pay a monthly subscription fee please.
Depending on the ownership of the product it may be classified as personal income not business income so there would be local taxes plus an extra tax because it is foreign income.
Unity continues to lose money as a business. I think it's fair to ask a royalty fee from more successful games (since their code constitutes a portion of the game code and assets). But they should do it the way Unreal Engine does. A flat 5% after a $1M revenue threshold. There should be a some sort of verifiable export service from game stores like Steam/GOG that report revenue and that can't be modified by the developer/publisher that the developer/publisher can then upload to Unity report their revenue.
If you want to access a built in audience then you can pay you it. I'm not sympathetic to publishers complaining about Google, Apple and steam. If they want to create their own audience, go for it. Amazon and epic are both trying.