Sérgio Varanda’s Post

Not exactly correct, as the installs from emerging markets* would be taxed at a fixed 0.005$ per install. Also the game needs to have made 1M+$ in the previous 12mo for any fee to be applied. Regardless, those are not even the scary numbers, the scary number is the 0.2$ per install on the personal license, and which comes with significantly lower thresholds as well. The backlash will be tremendous (or rather already is) and I do not believe that Unity will ultimately apply this policy by January 1st in its current terms. * - any country other than United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, and United Kingdom.

Your math is a bit flawed because if you invested 1 million and got 10 million installs it mens CPI was 10c and you would earn around 5 million$ which is unlike for US market real CPI would be 50c and you would get around 2m installs if lucky then you would pay only for 1st million 10.000$, let's assume you had 125% ROAS you would make 250.00$ and pay unity 10.000$ so let's be real it's not that big of a deal.. Please use correct and realistic math that is actually used in games.. Appsflyer charges you 7c for each install on free plan and best you can get is about 2c deal.. So we are already all calculating that in the logic..

No charge for re-installs, fraudulent installs (install bombing), automation/test installs, charities, or for people who placed their games in a subscription Lifetime install counts are used only to determine whether said game is eligible for Runtime Fees Requirement Eligibility: (1) have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months, AND (2) have at least 1,000,000 in lifetime installs Using said game as example: 10M users, 1.2M revenue, Enterprise license, all within 2023. Say said game saw another 200K installs in Jan 2024. This puts total lifetime installation at 10,200,000. Runtime Eligibility criteria check: 1) Did the game make over USD $1M? YES ✅ 2) Did the game have at least 1M lifetime installs? YES ✅ Said game qualifies for Runtime Fee! How to calculate the fees for Feb 2024? 100K * $0.125 (first 100K installs) + 100K * $0.06 (next 100K - 500K installs) = $18,500. Runtime fees for Mar 2024 differ based on the installs from Feb 2024.  Factoring 5x Enterprise licenses at 3k each, that's an added 15K (a year), aka $1,250/month. In essence, from the 200K profit, Unity claims 33.5K, leaving the developer with just 166.5K to cover salaries, overheads, and other expenses. https://unity.com/runtime-fee

If your game generated 10 M installs in a month (or even in a few months) - there will be a line of rich people willing to not only pay your Unity fees, but give you a pile of money :) If you think you can only make $1.2M from all those users.... you need a new person for monetization (before the rest of your team quit). Average ARPU in games is orders or magnitude above "$0.1". but yep, after first 1M installs, 100K * 0.125 + 400K * 0.06 + 500K * 0.01 + 8M * 0.01 = 12.5 + 24 + 10 + 80 = $126.5K it is sizeable... I think I would prefer a revenue %, not install based revenue (if revenue % was easy to calculate - for both Unity and developers...).

You don't have to pay for the first million installs, it is only a fee for the installation above the threshold, still a weird decision from Unity, but the math looks a bit different.

It is difficult to understand the reason for this offensive pricing model. Also, this change might shift the solo developers and small studios to other alternatives. I guess Unity wants to work with much bigger studios only 🤷

You have to pay only after you take over 1,000,000$ only for incremental players. I’ve described it in detail in my article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unity-runtime-fee-you-understand-wrong-ramis-adenov?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via

If it’s a hyper casual game they can integrate with the Unity Ad mediation and pay $0 in fees. I’m not a fan, but its not quite as bad as people are making out.

It sounds like they want to piggy back their mediation solution via this. But then again... most devs this is relevant to might be using ironsource already

This move has the potential to kill a lot of companies and projects which their base are essentialy low tier countries.