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Unity draws heat over newly announced fees tied to game installs
12.09.2023 - 21:53 / destructoid.com / Stephen Totilo
This morning, Unity Technologies announced an update to its pricing plans and fees that sparked a bit of an outcry among developers. Unity says that, starting on January 1 of 2024, the company will introduce a new runtime fee based on game installs for any game that passes certain thresholds.
To break it down in straightforward terms, there are two components of Unity: the Editor and the Runtime. The Runtime is code that plays on devices, making Unity-made games work.
This new Unity Runtime Fee, as the company dubs it, would be based on each time a game is downloaded by a user. According to Unity, games that meet these thresholds qualify:
“With this new policy, as of January 1, 2024, we will offer Unity Personal to anyone regardless of how much revenue they make to provide more flexibility in how creators manage their licenses,” the company’s announcement explains. “Once a game passes the revenue and install thresholds, the studio would pay a small flat fee for each install.” It then refers to a table, detailing the fees.
Essentially, once a game clears the marked thresholds for revenue (per year) and lifetime installs, the developer will start incurring fees per install. And as Unity states, once it goes into effect on January 1, 2024, the fee will apply to all eligible games on the market that continue to distribute the runtime.
In clarifying comments to Axios’ Stephen Totilo, Unity says if a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that counts as 2 installs and consequently 2 charges. The same goes if a user installs a game on two devices. Unity also says that charity games and bundles are “exempted from fees,” per Totilo.
Alongside this new fee, developers also spotted a number of other changes. Namely, Unity Personal is no longer usable offline, and Unity Plus is being retired for new subscribers effective today.
There is a lot of discussion and ire drawn over these changes from developers, especially those working in the independent scene. I found a good summation of the issues from the developers’ side from Necrosoft Games‘ Brandon Sheffield here, and I’ll highlight one section in particular:
Ultimately, it screws over indies and smaller devs the most. If you can afford to pay for higher tiers, you don’t pay as much of this nickle and dime fee, but indies can’t afford to on the front end, or often it doesn’t make sense in terms of the volume of games you’ll sell, but then you wind up paying more in the long term. It’ll squash innovation and art-oriented games that aren’t designed around profit, especially. It’s a rotten deal that only makes sense if you’re looking at numbers, and assume everyone will keep using your product.
As developers continue to note, this means distinct issues for demos
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