Well, that happens so much these days.
Phones and whatnot.
Unity DOES seem to be really too pricey for what I've seen it do. Hell, UDK is technically cheaper.
The moment you cross $50k you owe them 25% (which at 50k is $12,500). You might get away with staying under 50k for a single dev studio, personally for me to quit my day job I need to make a lot more than that. If you want to talk about a studio with say 5 devs, unity you'll need 5 license sets (lets asume android and ios, 4500 per dev). If you make enough to pay each dev 50k (which is really low) you are easily looking at ~70k in licensing compared to 22.5k for unity for unity. On top of that the unity license is useful for more than 1 year, so year two unity licensing is $0 and UDK is still ~70k, year 3 next unity (5?) comes out (speculation it might be 3 years cycle) and you get a discount of some kind most likely, but if not you spend 22.5k again after 3 years you've spent 45k on unity licensing and $210k on udk licensing, thats assuming fairly bare bone sales to sustain a studio, hopefully the studio is making twice that (putting ability to pay salaries in a reasonable level), then you would have paid $420k to udk and still only 45k on unity.
You only have to pay 25% on revenue gained once you pass 50,000, you don't instantly owe them money once you reach 50,000. Here's a quote from Epic:
A team creates a game with UDK that they intend to sell. After six months of development, they release the game through digital distribution and they earn $60,000 in the first calendar quarter after release. Their use of UDK during development requires no fee. Upon release they would pay US $99.99 for a Royalty Bearing license. After earning $60,000, they would be required to pay Epic $2,500 ($0 on the first $50,000 in revenue, and $2,500 on the next $10,000 in revenue). On subsequent revenue, they are required to pay the 25% royalty.
I apologise if this was what you meant and I just simply misread your post.
Developer
