The pricing debacle really exposed Unity's vulnerability in the low-budget segment where switching costs are minimal. Godot's momentum feels almost irreversble now, even after Unity walked back the changes. The trust issue runs deeper than just pricing its about whether devs can bet their entire project on a platform that might shift the rules midway. Unity's dominance in the sub-$100k tier is clearly eroding faster than anyone expected.
The budgets of games with more than 1000 reviews is looking a little bimodal, i wonder if it would be possible to break the distribution into the two distributions and what kind of games end up in each distribution.
This is a really great analysis and mostly jives with what've I've seen anecdotally having worked in co-dev for over a decade with clients ranging from indies to AAA.
In the end though, quality -typically- equals budget -- regardless of genre, multiplayer, etc.
Please tell me the correlation between development costs and sales.
We're actually working on it (we want to do a whole series about ROIs) so it's on its way :)
Thanks a lot, it's very insightful and well presented !
Your work deserves so much more attention
I love the work you guys are doing! I think it’s going to be formative (or maybe transformative) for so many devs and industry people.
The pricing debacle really exposed Unity's vulnerability in the low-budget segment where switching costs are minimal. Godot's momentum feels almost irreversble now, even after Unity walked back the changes. The trust issue runs deeper than just pricing its about whether devs can bet their entire project on a platform that might shift the rules midway. Unity's dominance in the sub-$100k tier is clearly eroding faster than anyone expected.
The budgets of games with more than 1000 reviews is looking a little bimodal, i wonder if it would be possible to break the distribution into the two distributions and what kind of games end up in each distribution.
This is a really great analysis and mostly jives with what've I've seen anecdotally having worked in co-dev for over a decade with clients ranging from indies to AAA.
In the end though, quality -typically- equals budget -- regardless of genre, multiplayer, etc.
You may be interested in this write up we did for our own potential clients to explain how the "same" platformer game may cost anywhere from $1,000 to $10 million: https://doublecoconut.com/blog/2018/05/03/how-much-will-my-game-cost/