Charts to visualize how much you owe Unity for their per-install Runtime Fee
Unity Technologies has announced a new Unity Runtime Fee that charges developers a fee of up to $0.20 per installed game above certain thresholds. According to my calculations, it can be a bankruptcy death-trap, at least in certain cases.
Shockingly, the owed percentage is unbounded to the point that the owed amount can exceed gross revenue, since it depends on installs, not sales.
Update 1: Unity since backtracked and apologized for the announced changes. With the new updates to the terms, Unity will clamp the install fees to be at maximum 2.5% of revenue. And the changes will not be retroactive after all. Furthermore, John Riccotello is stepping down as CEO. There are more details in the linked blog post.
Update 2: About a year later, Unity canceled the runtime fee altogether. Good.
Nevertheless, Unity has suffered a tremendous decrease in trust and goodwill, which already was not great before. With the cancellation, there is less urgency for developers to switch to a different engine, but the whole situation has highlghted the importance of being prepared for such a scenario and have eyes and ears open towards other engines as well.
The original post continues below.
You can check out the specifications in their blog post. Based on those, I've made two charts where you can look up how big a percentage of your gross revenue you would owe Unity, based on the number of installs and on how much revenue you make for each of those installs. The fee specifications are different for Unity Personal and Unity Pro, so there is a chart for each.
