Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

>Unity made two cardinal sins: creating a pricing model that didn't align with customers' business models (tying price to downloads rather than revenue)

Everyone is assuming the majority of Unity's customers ("most" as measured by $$$, not by quantity of devs) aren't F2P games. I'm not sure that's actually the case; if most of their revenue comes from F2P then shafting everyone else in order to shore up their F2P business would likely be the correct business decision.




I'm not sure I follow. Aren't F2P games most misaligned with pricing per download since that means they end up with a bunch of negative value consumers and complete uncertainty whether they will end up with a positive or negative balance since they can't know much they will expend?

The traditional game developers can just go "Unity takes 1$ per download (or whatever), the average player downloads 3 times, the game costs 10$, 3$ goes to the storefront, so we have am average profit of 4$", which seems simple enough to deal with to me.


> complete uncertainty whether they will end up with a positive or negative balance since they can't know much they will expend?

Which forces them to use Unity’s Ads and other services which can be used to offset the per install fee. So on paper Unity would win either way.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: