Unity announces its revamped pricing model | After outcry from the gaming community, Unity revealed a new plan that’s a drastic departure from what was initially announced.::Unity has introduced a revamped version of its new pricing model. The updated pricing scheme arrives a little more than a week after the disastrous original announcement that infuriated developers.
The new Unity pricing is not necessarily cheaper than Unreal. It depends on the price model for the game in question.
Many free-to-play games see massive amounts of installs, but very little average revenue per game. See of those devs did the math for their games, and found out that their average revenue per player was around 18 cents. So if Unity charges 20 cents per install, the dev would outright have to pay Unity 2 cents more than the player even gave them in revenue.
Some other devs calculated that the install fees would come out to 106% or the total revenue that their game had made.
Unreal's price model is generally 5% of revenue, so that would be significantly cheaper.
But it depends a lot on the actual price model for the game. Some games will pay rather little in install fees, while others will pay excessive amounts.