undefined | Better HN

0 pointsstonemetal11y ago0 comments

>When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter.

Not only does it reset per quarter, it is per product as well.

0 comments

jameshart11y ago

That seems pretty gameable (and who would be better at gaming systems than games devs?). "Oh, yeah, we made $2999 on Gem Clan Quest, then $2999 on Gem Clan Quest Super Deluxe Edition, and $2999 on the Gem Clan Quest Candy Kingdom DLC, which is more of a sequel really, so it's a totally different product..."

Gustomaximus11y ago

My guess is their not interested in the small fry and are looking for companies that earn hundreds of millions.

If a company was gaming this pricing creating 100 products each earning $4,000 (vs. $400k) they are saving $15,000 and are likely to hurt their business via customer confusion.

obstinate11y ago

It may also be a case of people you don't want as your customer. I can only imagine that someone with this kind of attitude would use support resources very heavily if they had access to paid support. Maybe not to the tune of $15k, but who knows.

unsignedint11y ago

Doesn't necessarily have to be that high. It's more that they are trying to earn their revenue for actual game publishers of all sizes.

Other than the particularly small scale operations (someone's side project, etc.) if the product hasn't hit $3000 revenue in its lifetime, even small/medium sized business would be fairly troubled in the standpoint of sustainability.

kosoy11y ago

It's an issue of not being able to compete with Unity any other way too. Small developers that gain experience with your engine sometimes become big developers, who are going to be used to your engine. Makes sense.

Elhana11y ago

That does not scale really well, unless are really on the edge of this 3k. As soon as you start earning more, your users will be confused if you release 'new' product every month. Besides, I bet if you read full license, it will have proper legal rules there against this and other tricks you might come up with.

alexgrist11y ago

I think maybe this falls under the EULA?

"6. Records and Audits

You agree to keep accurate books and records related to your development, manufacture, Distribution, and sale of Products and related revenue. Epic may conduct reasonable audits of those books and records. Audits will be conducted during business hours on reasonable prior notice to you. Epic will bear the costs of audits unless the results show a shortfall in payments in excess of 5% during the period audited, in which case you will be responsible for the cost of the audit."

dlu11y ago

Yeah, but I think $3,000 is a small enough increment for them. You'd need to do this dozens of times for it to be a meaningful aggregate amount. And that situation should be fairly obvious and easy to police.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse