The Week in Unity, or How to Kill a Brand - Hardcore Gamer

hardcoregamer.com:

For a good few decades the gold standard on how to tank a brand was New Coke.  In 1985 Coke decided to change its flavor, and that went over so well it became the textbook example of the a company being completely disconnected from what its userbase needed.  Then Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and the fallout made the Coke decision seem like corporate management at its most thoughtful, but there’s still enough life left in the platform that this Tuesday’s Unity announcement practically caused it to explode.  When a company that’s as ubiquitous in gaming as Unity decides it wants to compete with 1985 Coke and 2022 Twitter in terms of spiking its brand, people are going to talk.

The gist of the announcement is that in addition to its annual per-user fees, where each developer pays a set rate to use whichever tier of Unity they subscribe to, the company is introducing a Unity Runtime Fee based on installs.  The way it works is that each tier of Unity has a minimum amount of both revenue and installs before the per-install fee kicks in, with the free level, Unity Personal, starting at 200,000 installs and $200,000 in revenue.  The low-priced ($399 annually) Unity Plus is being discontinued with subscribers being automatically moved to the next tier up, Unity Pro (5x the cost at $2040 a year) with the first year at the old Plus rate.  The top tier for big studios is Unity Enterprise, and the download and revenue minimums are the same for Pro and Enterprise at 1,000,000 apiece.  The chart below has the per-download fee once both minimums have been exceeded.

Tuesday’s announcement hit the gaming scene like a bomb for a huge number of reasons, with the new Unity pricing structure being a fractal vortex of suck that only gets