Unity ‘Debace’ Forces Dev to Cancel Nintendo Switch Port of WipEout-Style Racer

25.09.2023 - 14:57 / ign.com / Marc Whitten / Unity Pro / Nintendo

Controversy and upheaval around game engine Unity has forced the developer of a WipEout-style racer to cancel its planned Nintendo Switch port.

BallisticNG, which launched on Steam via PC in 2018 and currently enjoys an “overwhelmingly positive” user review rating, was set to recent a port on Nintendo’s console, but this is no more.

Explaining the decision in a post on Steam, developer Neognosis said it was moving forward after what it called the “Unity debacle”.

Last week, Unity announced key changes to its widely panned Runtime Fee policy, which spawned both derision and confusion from developers and the gaming community at large when it was unveiled earlier this month.

As originally announced, starting on January 1, 2024 Unity would have started charging developers a small fee every time someone downloaded a game built on Unity's game engine after a certain threshold for minimum revenue and install count.

The different tiers of Unity plans (Unity Personal/Unity Plus, Unity Pro, and Unity Enterprise) had different thresholds and, per the original announcement, smaller developers using Unity Personal/Unity Plus would have had to pay Unity $0.20 per install once their game passed $200,000 in revenue over the last 12 months and 200,000 life-to-date installs.

Backtracking, Unity said there will now be no Runtime Fee on games built on Unity Personal, which will remain free. It also increased the financial threshold of Unity Personal from $100,000 to $200,000, and removed the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen. "No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee," Unity's Marc Whitten said.

Crucially, Unity said the Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS [Long Term Support] version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. “Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity," the company said.

"For games that are subject to the Runtime Fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month," Unity continued. "Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount."

It seems this statement and a perceived requirement from Nintendo to run Switch games on newer versions of Unity has caused significant concern at Neognosis.

“Nintendo has a rolling Unity version requirement for game releases and we're already behind the threshold by two years,” Neognosis explained. “Two weeks ago this wouldn't have been an issue, no doubt there'd have been some pains in updating