No need to guess, worst case scenario is 10%.

tomnipotent · on Sept 12, 2023

> worst case scenario is 10%

You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true.

Let's pretend you sell 300,000 units at $0.99 with the Unity Personal Plan.

    Units: 300,000
    Gross: $297,000
    Unity Fee: $20,000

That puts unity at 6.7%. The issue isn't Unity, it's the developers bad business model for charging $0.99 while opting to use Unity.

tapland · on Sept 12, 2023

> You seem to have pulled this number out of thin air, and I cannot see a scenario where this is true.

Why? Could you explain why 300k units w/ $200k gross would be impossible?

Is it not legal to sell unity games below $0.99 each, maybe not even in other currencies?

I'd rather be enlightened than shit upon if there's a reason I'm missing why the worst case scenario is 6.7% and not the apparent 10%.

You could also add to that why 6.7% is now possible which is more than 2x the 1-3% from earlier?

Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers and accuse me of pulling numbers out of thin air with the technical worst case scenario?

tomnipotent · on Sept 12, 2023

Steam and Epic both have a minimum price of $0.99, not sure about Apple & Google App Stores. Credit card processors have a minimum charge that makes lower prices untenable.

> Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers

Where did you pull 10%, happy to go over your math/model.

tapland · on Sept 12, 2023

> Where did you pull 10%, happy to go over your math/model.

The example numbers I posted would give 10%.

The pricing was easy enough that the 10% worst case could easily be pulled from it.

I wouldn't trust the numbers from someone who needed a model to go over to see that and I seriously thought you were joking about not getting where the 10% worst case was from.

tomnipotent · on Sept 12, 2023

I wasn't considering F2P or ad-supported games, so my mental model was seeing $0.99 as the pricing floor. If you want to arbitrarily choose an ARPU, we could get that percentage to any number we wanted to make a point.

danShumway · on Sept 12, 2023

> If you want to arbitrarily choose an ARPU

From https://www.statista.com/statistics/263797/number-of-applica...:

> As of July 2023, nearly 97 percent of apps in the Google Play app store were freely available

I don't think "arbitrarily" is the right word to use here. Your mental model might have been $0.99 as the pricing floor, but that mental model does not represent the reality of mobile app stores. Paid apps are a minority on both iOS and Android, the dominant revenue model for mobile games is to offer free downloads/installs with advertising and in-app purchases.

reitzensteinm · on Sept 13, 2023

It blows my mind that you open with "The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal" and close with "I wasn't considering F2P or ad-supported games".

Your "mental model" didn't consider 80% of the market by revenue?

mrguyorama · on Sept 12, 2023

Worth noting you are ignoring the 30% that app stores take off that gross, which Unity still counts against you.

tomnipotent · on Sept 12, 2023

That's not relevant to Unity's cut in this example, since the percentage is based on gross.

mrguyorama · on Sept 12, 2023

My point is that 30% makes the situation worse, because it is not available to you to pay Unity's cut, so it's as if you made 30% less revenue. IE Unity pricing kicks in at $200k gross, but that's only $170k net, which is what is available you as a business to pay Unity.