redo the math for an indie with Unity Personal and a sudden hit with 250k sales
Units Sold: 250000
Gross Sales: $1 247 500
Steam Fees:
$0-10M (30%): $374 250
Unity Fees (personal or plus):
250 000 : $50 000
Net Sales: 823 250
Now it's more or less 6%, and that's before development costs and taxes.
It's a big bite for something that's impossible to code out of the project.
Imagine if Oracle charged a dollar every time someone ran your software the first time on the JRE in that machine. installation on a new machine? pay again. Old customer reinstalls the JRE? pay again. main executable or JRE update? pay again.
Except there's no fee for the first 200k installs, so the Unity fee is only $10k for the 50k after the threshold.
You could also have saved $8k by upgrading to Unity Pro for $2040, though of course you run the risk of paying for that plan and not selling 250k units.
Unfortunately the blog post is so poorly worded that I'm not sure after that. My reading, too, is that once you reach the threshold, you pay for those first 200k installs, too! The table says 'per install', not 'per additional install' or anything like it. Not sure though.
It's a big bite for something that's impossible to code out of the project.
Imagine if Oracle charged a dollar every time someone ran your software the first time on the JRE in that machine. installation on a new machine? pay again. Old customer reinstalls the JRE? pay again. main executable or JRE update? pay again.
Not so funny anymore.