Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off

After laying off almost 900 employees, Epic Games has announced an expansion to the Fortnite V-Buck «pricing alignment», citing vague financial factors like «inflation and currency fluctuations». The price of Fortnite's premium currency is set to rise in various international markets, including the world's largest.

Fortnite is to increase the price of its in-game currency V-Bucks in a number of countries, including the US and across Europe. While publisher Epic Games attributed the decision to economic factors - citing previous “pricing alignment” in countries including the UK over the summer - the move will follow hundreds of job losses at the company, partially as the result of lower than expected revenue for their immensely popular battle royale shooter.

Over the past few years, Epic Games has been one of the biggest success stories in the industry. The massive popularity of Fortnite changed the entire gaming landscape, establishing the blueprint for a successful “live service” title. The profitability of Fortnite allowed Epic to do things like launch the Epic Games Store with better profit sharing for publishers, push a lot of cutting-edge new technology with Unreal Engine 5, and more. Unfortunately, it seems Epic’s run of unfettered success may have hit a speed bump.

Polish indie studio The Astronauts launched Witchfire in early access last week via the Epic Games Store. It's the developer's second game following The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and it's a completely different genre (rogue-lite dark fantasy first-person shooter) compared to that game.

After Unity announced, then modified, then re-announcened its new Runtime fee program, the video game development community wanted to know how and why this disastrous roll-out happened. In addition to the letter Unity Create president Marc Whitten published on Friday, he also held a live fireside chat on YouTube in which he addressed some of the community’s biggest questions and concerns.

On Oct. 21, 2016, video game performers went on strike against 11 video game companies, including Activision, Disney, Electronic Arts, Insomniac Games, Take-Two Interactive, and WB Games. Video game performers who were part of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) stopped working for nearly a year, from October 2016 to November 2017 — the longest strike in SAG-AFTRA’s history.

After facing quite a bit of backlash and criticisms for its recent monetisation update, the company behind the ubiquitous Unity engine has released a new updated plan for monetisation going forward, along with an open letter to its community explaining the changes.

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

Looks like we're getting another foodie crossover in Final Fantasy 14. Yesterday, the Twitter/X account for KFC Japan posted a short, ominous video of the Colonel overlooking the cliffs of La Noscea with the caption (courtesy of Google translate): «Colonel Sanders is steadily preparing for a new adventure in another world…»

After a week of intense criticism and backlash, Unity has apologised for the «confusion and angst» caused by the announcement of its unpopular Runtime fee policy. In a post to social media, the company has promised to make changes following the strong reaction from the development community.

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

Unity has apologised to developers for “confusion and angst” caused by its proposed new pricing structure that sought to charge game creators a fee every time their game was installed, promising that changes will be made - but without suggesting that it would pull away completely from implementing the much-criticised plans.