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 theyβre switching engines on social media.
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 wonβt go more than X% above the userβs 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 itβs 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 itβs 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 lifetimeβ¦
