1201
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
1201 points (99.0% liked)
Game Development
3470 readers
6 users here now
Welcome to the game development community! This is a place to talk about and post anything related to the field of game development.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Donations are somewhat sustainable because the per-user cost of having stuff on the internet is super low. So even at $1 USD per month any remotely successful service becomes wildly profitable. People just thought that banner ads would be yet-even-more profitable since they can be applied to everyone who looks at the site, not just regular users.
In going to be dirt poor if I have to subscribe to every site I visit online.
But not every user donates
But in that case, it would be best to do a subscription model of like $10-ish per year.
This would involve an agreement not to sell data, to collect only data with a use demonstrated to be critical to the operation of the service, and a plan to dispose of that data within X amount of time. This also needs a written contract stating that the cost of subscription won't go more than X% above the user's pro-rata share of the demonstrated cost of providing the service, consisting of certain very specific purposes (building, servers, ISP, employee revenue, etc.) to avoid cheating for more profit. A subscription service, protected against privacy infringement and price gouging (a profit limit).
If it's ever going to work this would need to be a government-mandated privacy act. I usually hate government intervention, but this is very much a necessary evil to prevent price gouging.
I only suggest this over donations, because realistically, after upscaling to a global audience, only 5-10% of traffic would be users that choose to donate, increasing costs to around $10-20/month, which yet again lowers the number of people who choose to donate. It stabilizes, but at such a low percentage that it's unsustainable at a large scale without millionaire donors, and a very small percent willing to pledge $20-30 ish per month throughout the entire product lifetime...