As soon as the pressure fades, the waiver will be reduced to 50% and then eventually dropped completely - but of course the new fees will remain.
They must think the average game developer has no business sense whatsoever.
Based on the backlash, my prediction is that Unity either quickly reverses course (damaging their brand a little and perhaps costing the CEO his job) or stubbornly doubles down (damaging their brand a lot and giving Godot and others an opening to eventually rival them).
I looked into it a bit more and unless I did some bad maths or misread their terms, the whole Runtime Fee looks like a badly disguised sales funnel to me: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/unity-runtime-fee-a-look-at...
The Personal and Plus tiers in particular now need to basically find additional 50 or so cents per install (factoring in platform fees and publisher fees), whereas for Pro and Enterprise tiers that figure is closer to under 10 cents).
In other words, once you start having to pay the Platform Fee on the Personal or Plus tier, it very quickly becomes cheaper to just get a Pro subscription and have the Platform Fee go away for 800'000 more installs on Pro (on top of the 200'000 you get without the platform fee on Personal/Plus).
Let's see how I got there, let's take their Runtime Fee rates: https://unity.com/runtime-fee
For Personal tier you start paying after 200'000 installs (threshold), whereas with the Pro tier you start paying after 1'000'000 installs (threshold).
That gives us 1'400'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Personal tier and 600'000 installs that we need to pay for with the Pro tier, for which the runtime fee will be calculated and which are above the corresponding thresholds.
For the Personal tier, which has a fixed rate, the platform costs are then:
1'400'000 * 0.20 = 280'000 USD
100'000 * 0.15 = 15'000 USD
400'000 * 0.075 = 30'000 USD
100'000 * 0.03 = 3'000 USD
TOTAL: 15'000 + 30'000 + 3'000 = 48'000 USD
With 1'600'000 units sold, the overhead per a single unit then becomes:
Personal: 280'000 / 1'600'000 = 0.175 USD
Pro: 48'000 / 1'600'000 = 0.03 USD
Personal: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.175 = 0.35 USD
Pro: 1/(1-0.5) * 0.03 = 0.06 USD
Personal: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.35 = 0.5 USD
Pro: 1/(1-0.3) * 0.06 = 0.085 USD
Personal full cost (overhead): 0.5 USD
Personal after 30% platform cut: 0.5 - (0.3 * 0.5) = 0.5 - 0.15 = 0.35 USD
Personal after 50% publisher cut: 0.35 - (0.5 * 0.35) = 0.35 - 0.175 = 0.175 USD
Pro full cost (overhead): 0.085 USD
Pro after 30% platform cut: 0.085 - (0.3 * 0.085) = 0.085 - 0.0255 = 0.0595 USD
Pro after 50% publisher cut: 0.0595 - (0.5 * 0.0595) = 0.0595 - 0.02975 = 0.02975 USD (close enough to 0.03 USD)
Here's the graphs that I came up with, first how the total runtime fee changes based on the tier: https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/4/-/u/n/14-unity-pricing-gr...
Also, approximately how the runtime fee overhead changes with publisher/platform fees included (with the example percentages above): https://blog.kronis.dev/images/1/6/-/f/e/16-fee-per-install-...
Any game whose monetization strategy is "ads" is uniformly trash-quality shovelware. They're not here for the long haul, they're here to optimize short-term profit and dump as much garbage on the app store as they can.
Well if the reports are to be believed, developers were signing agreements with Unity which allowed them to make unilateral changes to fees. If so, devs really do have no business sense.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of Unity's usual contracts, but this is the kind of thing that a court might not take Unity's side on.
I think you've got this wrong. Unity is (multiple really, but for the purposes of this) two products - the engine and unity ads. Unity ads is the money maker, this is an attempt at bridging that gap. Ultimately unity don't care how they pay you, they just want to know that if you're building a successful game off their products, they're going to get paid. They can't do a revshare (because for some insane reason they talked themselves out of that a few years back), so they're left with something that quacks like a revshare, but won't negatively impact their most profitable customers and force them to reconsider.
Ultimately, I think that's as far as they got with the analysis and failed to consider well... everything else.
Not quite. Unity merged with a company that sells mobile ads: ironSource. They are direct competitors of AppLovin, the dominant player in that market. The terms and backroom deals that Unity is offering devs will waive these fees if they use Unity's ad products instead of AppLovin. This is clearly an attempt to abuse their position in one market (game engines) to bolster their position in another market (mobile ads).