Mattrified Games Blog

As many game developers, especially, smaller, independent ones such as myself, are aware, Unity, has announced a new runtime fee for games.  From what I gather it implies that games made with the free Unity license (Personal) with over $200K in revenue in a calendar year AND over 200K lifetime installs will start paying a fee per install over that limit, something that sounds small on paper, like two cents, but can add up very quickly if you're game is somehow getting millions of downloads.  Suffice it to say, many are not happy about this announcement.  I do believe some fear is a bit reactionary, a bit knee jerk and exaggerated, dreaming up scenarios that 98% of devs will never have to deal with.  For example, at those values, I will never have to pay this fee for either MerFight and Battle High, but this is rather myopic -- though not as myopic as Unity's thought process behind this idea.  A LOT of questions have come up since this announcement: Does this in...

This post was original written and posted to my website in August 2021.  Despite this, I feel these are still relevant; I also added an additional section, Uphill Battle #6. So you want to make an indie fighting game? Well, first off, good luck! Indie games are already a tough, competitive market to break into, and the fighting game genre is not the easiest to target. I'm the last person to want to discourage you though. I'm making a fighting game with merfolk in it almost entirely by myself. That being said, I wanted to write about what I see as difficulties and uphill battles that I and others are most likely going to face when creating -- but more importantly, releasing -- indie games in this genre as well as some things they could do to help. Note, these thoughts are my opinion, so take them with a grain of Pink Himalayan salt . I'll upgrade my opinion from normal salt to this.  Why not? Uphill Battle 1: Big & Old Competition I mentioned competition ...