Last week, Unity rolled out a new look version of its controversial Runtime Fee in the wake of a seismic backlash from developers who felt the original policy represented an egregious act of betrayal for a myriad of reasons.
19.09.2023 - 09:13 / wccftech.com / John Riccitiello / Unity Ceo / Runtime Fee / Will
Unity is preparing to announce major changes to its controversial Runtime Fee install policy. Announced last week, it asked all developers who reached specific thresholds to pay a fee for the first game installation on any single device.
The policy sparked a major uproar in the Unity development community, forcing the company to reconsider. While the changes aren't official yet, Bloomberg got hold of a meeting recording where Unity executives outlined the new plan, which reportedly caps the Runtime Fee at 4% of the game's revenues over one million dollars. Developers will also be asked to report the installation figures themselves instead of being forced to deal with Unity's proprietary technology. Lastly, the installation threshold won't be retroactive, so only new installations made after the policy's announcement will count toward reaching the Runtime Fee thresholds.
In the meeting, Unity CEO John Riccitiello reportedly said:
I don't think there's any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened. It is a massively transformational change to our business model.
Whether these changes will be enough to win back the trust of the game development community remains to be seen. GamesIndustry.biz spoke to a few developers who don't really believe they can trust Unity going forward:
Ustwo Games chief creative officer Danny Gray: Even if everything was reverted now, the trust is lost, and it will be difficult for Unity to regain the faith of developers, particularly considering changes to the Terms of Service. Communication is important. Hopefully, this is an opportunity to begin a closer dialogue between everyone involved in making games across all studio sizes to find a solution and a way forward that works for everyone.
Tamara Alliot, CEO of Nerial: Even if they backtrack this time, who's to say they won't do something like this again in the future?
Last week, Unity rolled out a new look version of its controversial Runtime Fee in the wake of a seismic backlash from developers who felt the original policy represented an egregious act of betrayal for a myriad of reasons.
A Unity representative claims the company pulled its terms of service (ToS) from Github because "views were so low."
On Friday (September 22), game engine Unity announced that it was making changes to its controversial upcoming Runtime Fee, and developers have been sharing their thoughts on the amended policy.
Unity have announced that they're making changes to their "runtime fee" in response to overwhelming negative feedback. The key changes are that the fees no longer apply to developers using Unity Personal, and will only apply to developers using Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise who upgrade the next version of Unity which ships in 2024.
Next Up: Read Game Developer's interview with Unity Create President Marc Whitten , discussing the road to the changes below and what Unity has learned from the backlash surrounding the original Runtime Fee policy.
Unity has done a 180 on a controversial new pricing scheme that users of its cross-platform game engine almost unanimously disparaged. A new pricing policy is still incoming, but it’s far less fraught for independent developers, many of whom threatened to leave the engine and platform behind rather than pay.
In an open letter to its community, Unity has revealed its reworked free structure and controversial runtime fee changes. Under the new structure, the Unity Personal edition will remain free and incur no runtime fee. The new cap before the fee starts has been increased from $100,000 to $200,000, and no game with under $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee. Interestingly, the new Runtime Fee will only apply to the next version of Unity that is shipping in 2024. Already shipped and current in-development projects will not be subject to the fee unless they upgrade to the 2024 version of Unity. In the post, Marc Whitten, leader of the Unity Create team apologized for what has transpired in recent weeks.
Unity has unveiled its planned changes to the controversial Runtime Fee policy that would charge developers fees on a per-install basis.
The president of Unity Create, Marc Whitten, has published an open letter responding to the backlash over the recent Unity Runtime Fee announcement, and has outlined a number of changes that are going to be made to the policy before it’s enforced in 2024.
Re-Logic, the indie game developer and publisher behind the 2D sandbox title Terraria, has condemned the newly announced Unity Runtime Fee, and has announced that it is donating a substantial sum of money to two different open-source game engines, to help keep them “powerful and approachable for developers everywhere”.
Controversy at Unity seems to be the story that never ends at the moment. Though today it appears that the owners of the popular game engine may be about to concede, at least a little, on the Unity Runtime Fee announcement that set the developer world on fire last week.
More than 500 developers have joined the protest against Unity's Runtime Fee policy by switching off monetization.