It was THIS close to becoming a demo
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Until you make 200k you don't get charged. So you're likely fine to release it and if it's successful port it to a different engine before you hit that.
Problem is that if you intent to monetize it then you might "accidentally" make a good game that is installed a lot and maybe you charged 5$ upfront via steam. Now you come by the 200k$ threshold and have to pay steam 30% and assuming worst case you have 500k installs.
Meaning you owe now unity 100k$.
So 200k - 60(steam)-100k is 40k$
You have now 40$ left to produce your game.
Even worse. If you have now stopped selling the game due to reasons. People reinstalling it will cost you 20 Cent
So wait. If I bought a game they can just brick it down the road?
Well yea, if you buy any digital game anywhere but GoG, I don't know any others that have policies like theirs, you're basically just renting it, you dont buy the game you just buy the license. GoG has a system set up to where you actually own the game, and if they went out of business tomorrow, you could still play your games fine.
Let's say you happen to buy a game or dlc off of a second-hand site and redeem it on steam, origin, or whatever launcher. You use it, and it works, and you play for a while, no problem. Well, if that key you bought is flagged for whatever reason, and the publishers of said game can decide to revoke the license you bought, and that's a wrap. Because that's all you're buying, even straight from steam or anywhere else - just a license. I used the second-hand website as an example because it does happen there. I haven't really heard anything happening on legit purchases straight from a vendor, but the legal wording is all there, and what I described is possible.
$200k divided by $5 is 40,000 sales. You aren't likely to have 500k installs from 40,000 sales....
no idea how much time and work it might take, the hype could die down in-between if it's a long time
This is why it's best to write your game to be engine agnostic with integration points.
But It does feel like a waste of effort until something like this happens.
Can you show me a single engine agnostic game? I don't see how that's even remotely feasible
I guess it would be doable by trying to write a bunch of wrappers around engine specific stuff, but holy shit development would be... ugh. Slow and ultimately a confusing mess to maintain still
Imagine not writing your game in assembly
Roller Coaster Tycoon.
Pff i write my game with 1's & 0's in a text editor