Look at the millions of free to play games in the App-Stores.
Normally you have 98% of free playing users paying nothing, 2% pay.
Imagine now you have 1 million installs. 2% (20.000) pay you 200.000 / year.
980.000 players pay nothing. Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000, you made ZERO with your game... crazy. That is an uncalculatable risk for a small company.
You'd only pay above a million user and need to have above in 1 million revenue.
Previously you weren't even allowed to use Pro/Personal if you made over $200k (not just per game).
> Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000,
Not saying the whole price model is not stupid but only those developers who are very bad at basic math would pay this. Everyone else would upgrade to pro.
> Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000
Again, not really. Even in this case only a subset of user would pay 20 cent.
Another example demonstrating the incompetence of Unity's marketing department, they should've understood that most people can't really memorize more than a single number or be expected to spend over 30 seconds reading something (now I'm not saying that this change overall was not a terrible decision but even a significant proportion of people commenting here don't seem to understand how their per install pricing is going to work).
> For many developers it is now cheaper to switch the engine than to pay for Unity.
Only for a (possibly very) small minority.
I find the the fact that they had no qualms about retroactively applying this to already released game much more infuriating (if they did this, what can they do next?). The pricing itself seems fairly reasonable if make more $1.5-2 or so per user (compared to Unreal anyway).
Imagine now you have 1 million installs. 2% (20.000) pay you 200.000 / year. 980.000 players pay nothing. Now Unity want 1.000.000 x 20 Cent = 200.000, you made ZERO with your game... crazy. That is an uncalculatable risk for a small company.