$Unity Software Inc.(U)$ Unity is not crazy, but playing games is not crazy.

This morning (September 13th), Putaojun found that the circle of friends has swiped the screen again, and many practitioners are discussing the same thing: Unity's newly released "installation fee" charging mode-simply speaking, after January 1st, 2024, Unity products whose income and installation amount reach the threshold, whether they are independent games or free games, may have to pay an extra sum of money every month.

More specifically, Unity charges are divided into two categories and three grades: depending on the country where the installer is located and the Unity version used by the developer, the cost of each installation will range from $0.005 to $0.2. Please refer to the following table for details.

Not surprisingly, this new regulation has made the industry fry, and some people in Twitter, Weibo and various communities feel puzzled and angry. Some people say that Unity is self-destructing the Great Wall, which will make the situation of many small and medium-sized teams more difficult and make the industry more difficult; Some people are terrified and feel that they have not made much money, so they have to go bankrupt for it first... Others think that they are backstab developers, cutting leeks. Combined with recent hot spots, there is also a picture that is widely spread.

Overseas, there are also many developers talking in succession. For example, a developer named Dani put the data of his past two games into this table and found that he was in debt instantly. Some developers of low-priced games say that they may not earn so much money in their lifetime.

Of course, he also declared that this is just a joke calculation method, which cannot be taken seriously. Because Unity said: Only developers who sign contracts after the release of the new regulations will start to calculate this account in 2024. However, if the data of these 12 months this year is up to standard, he will have to pay a certain fee for the monthly installation volume after the implementation from next year.

01 new regulations on installation fees,

How much impact will it have?

No matter what the joke is, the key question is: How much extra cost will this installation fee incur, and how will it affect game developers all over the world?

Let's first look at an official calculation example: Suppose a team uses Unity Pro to develop games, with an annual income of 2 million US dollars (about 14.56 million yuan) and an installation volume of 5 million times in the past year, it has reached the double million threshold of Pro version. If it installed 200,000 times in developed countries/regions and 100,000 times in developing countries/regions last month, the final calculation will be 23,500 US dollars (about 170,000 yuan).

According to this data, this fee accounts for about 1% of the annual revenue of the game, and after one year, the proportion will reach about 14%, and it does not include the signing fee of Unity Pro version of $2,000/seat/year. Although it won't bankrupt a regular team, it can be regarded as a high cost.

After substituting into the real situation, many developers began to be anxious, because the application scope of Unity is too wide-on mobile, PC and host platforms, the number of games developed by Unity has exceeded 50%; Apps developed using Unity also get more than 5 billion downloads a month.

These different team and product situations involve many different problems.

On the one hand, you may see a lot of ridicule. For example, head products like "the glory of the king", "The Original God" and "Never Robbed" can undoubtedly reach the threshold, and their monthly downloads will probably be in the hundreds of millions. After the release of this new regulation, Tencent, Netease and Mihayou have not become the biggest grievances?

But in fact, the new regulations on installation fees will only be implemented after the agreement signed before expires. Grape Jun guessed that these domestic "big customers" had already signed a long-term contract with Unity, which was safe enough to avoid the extra charges brought by the new regulations for a long time. Many teams have even purchased Unity's engine source code for iteration, and the cooperation is quite deep. So in this matter, there is a high probability that they will not be greatly affected.

On the other hand, most people are most worried about some troubles and hidden dangers behind the rule of charging according to the amount of installation.

First of all, many people will worry that users' updates and repeated installations will be counted as a new installation. If someone maliciously brushes the installation volume, or the game is resold by pirated studios, resulting in a large number of installations, will the development team have certain risks to pay for these volumes?

In response to these concerns, Unity has made relevant explanations: for repeated installations on the same device by the same user, only one installation fee will be charged. In addition, their advertising technology already has related detection methods for pirated games. If developers still have doubts about this, they can contact Unity's security team to deal with related problems.

Secondly, if your income and installation volume in the past year have not reached the charging threshold, of course, you can play as you want. However, for those internally purchased products that do not cooperate deeply with Unity, have insufficient revenue ability, but barely meet the standard, if extreme situations are not considered, it is very likely that they will have to carefully calculate an account-the installation costs of the three versions are 0.02, 0.01 and 0.005 USD respectively. After exceeding the threshold, the ARPU value of the products will have to wrestle with this figure.

Looking at the Chinese market alone, the Unity Personal version charges $0.02, which doesn't seem too high, equivalent to 15 yuan. However, how to make ends meet on the premise of considering this extra cost will still become a problem that some teams need to solve.

A chart roughly calculated by an independent developer

For some small and medium-sized teams that operate large DAU products or have the ability to stably produce high-quality independent games, such new regulations also mean that they need to make some new plans. On Twitter, some teams have indicated that they will take countermeasures, such as taking off games before next year, or turning around and preparing to use other engines to transplant current products and develop follow-up products.

Announcement of "Baa Baa Revelation" development team

Announcement of the development team of "Crab Treasure Hunt Adventures"

02 I'm afraid it will become more difficult to maintain idealism

After the release of the new regulations, it can be said that it caused an uproar in the industry, and even some people thought they were crazy. If we put aside our emotions, this matter will not rise to the level of industry disaster, but I can also understand the anger of developers all over the world.

First, although Marcwhitten, an executive at Unity, estimates that only about 10% of developers will eventually be involved in the installation fee; And from the current rules, this new regulation only applies to host/PC and mobile apps-that is to say, this extra cost has nothing to do with most teams and small game developers, but whether it will be directly affected by this new regulation or not, it is an invisible threat to developers. Especially for small and medium-sized teams, even if this threshold is far away from them, it will be regarded as the sword of Damocles overhead.

< p> Secondly, for many gamers, playing games itself is something with some idealistic color. In the engine part, the support, community platform resources and friendly communication atmosphere provided by them for a long time have formed a good ecology. This makes everyone acquiesce in their hearts that such companies are partners all the way to a certain extent. However, after the release of such rules, people's psychological expectations will be somewhat affected.

However, it is not too late. After all, this rule has not been officially implemented. Maybe our attitude can still make things change before the dust settles.

Further, this is actually a difficult problem in the present era. Because it is getting harder and harder for most people to make money.

In Q4 2022, Unity just made its first quarterly profit since its listing. Unlike UE, it doesn't have a cash cow like Fortress Night. However, after AI became popular in the past two years, it needs more stable income to support research and development in order to promote many cutting-edge technologies and tools. This may also be why after the release of the new regulations today, its share price has risen to some extent.

There was a time when the entire gaming industry, as well as the outside capital that looked at us, believed that tomorrow would be better. The popularity of metaverse and AI has strengthened the valuation and confidence of various companies. All links in the industrial chain share beauty and beauty, and everyone believes in endless growth, not the so-called zero-sum game.

But in today's industry, everyone has to face reality. Perhaps it will become more difficult for most people to continue with long-term value and idealism.

$Unity Software Inc. (U) $

This article comes from WeChat official account "Game Grape" (ID: youxiputao), by Isaac