However, I’m not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn’t $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that’s only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I’ve used Unity before and it’s still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I’m missing something.
Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.
It’s the complete unpredictability that devs and businesses hate. 2% of every purchase they can plan for, but with install fees they could get randomly billed for copies that were already sold, and that is unacceptable. This isn’t a one time fee, whenever somebody installs the game on a new device, the dev gets charged. Not to mention the fact that some people might have multiple devices, but randomly in 3 years they could get a new PC and suddenly the dev gets charged again, all the while the dev didn’t make anymore money from that copy. Who the heck would agree to a system like that?
Not to mention that if a game gets added to a service like GamePass, then the service gets the bill. No way Microsoft would say yes to that, which means the Dev misses out on deals that could’ve made them a bunch of money.
A competitor could literally buy one copy, make a script that spins up 1000 vms a minute and downloads your game over and over on “new devices” and put you out of business
Retroactively charging developers, that’s stupid.
However, I’m not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn’t $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that’s only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I’ve used Unity before and it’s still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I’m missing something.
Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.
It’s the complete unpredictability that devs and businesses hate. 2% of every purchase they can plan for, but with install fees they could get randomly billed for copies that were already sold, and that is unacceptable. This isn’t a one time fee, whenever somebody installs the game on a new device, the dev gets charged. Not to mention the fact that some people might have multiple devices, but randomly in 3 years they could get a new PC and suddenly the dev gets charged again, all the while the dev didn’t make anymore money from that copy. Who the heck would agree to a system like that?
Not to mention that if a game gets added to a service like GamePass, then the service gets the bill. No way Microsoft would say yes to that, which means the Dev misses out on deals that could’ve made them a bunch of money.
A competitor could literally buy one copy, make a script that spins up 1000 vms a minute and downloads your game over and over on “new devices” and put you out of business