The Unity "runtime fee" will not affect the project

First off, let me just say that there has been an absolute shitstorm... nay a shithurricane of misinformation regarding what Unity has said. People watch videos, they look at screenshots, they didn't see the original announcement, they aren't developers themselves, and they're just believing propaganda being posted by people it doesn't even affect.

The original table was taken out of context and everything exploded from there. The context of the original table is when you go over both thresholds for the fee to apply to your games.

Then people are acting like it would bankrupt anyone. It was at most a $0.20 fee. Even in the original version, if you're making enough money and have enough installs for it to apply to you, it only applied to installs after you reach the threshold, not retroactively to all prior installs.

That's all about the original version of what was said, before any of the backpedaling and clarification that Unity did on the matter.

Now, let's put this into perspective, shall we?

Subnautica 2 is about $30. Let's just assume they would have to pay the highest rate on the original chart, and use the initial clarification that it only applies to initial installs by a user, not to literally every download (it's absolutely absurd to think it would be every individual download, or that piracy would count). Someone buys the game That's $0.20 out of $30.00 which for that game would mean a 0.6% royalty rate past $200,000 of revenue.

People said they were jumping ship to Unreal. Well, guess what. If your game qualifies for the runtime fee for Unity, it qualifies for the royalty rate that Unreal charges past a certain revenue point. That's a 5% royalty. So they're basically if their game costs $30, they're saying "I can't afford an 0.6% royalty, so I'm jumping ship to Unreal and paying a 5% royalty."

Surely paying almost 10 times as much is cheaper, right?

So how does any of this affect Crystal Frost?

It doesn't. I haven't made over $200,000 by selling copies of Crystal Frost, and I never will because once Crystal Frost is ready for actual release, it will be provided for free. The patreon is just to help fund development of it, and I don't expect the patreon to ever cross that threshold.