The Unity Runtime Fee is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2024, and it’s been universally panned by developers on social media since its announcement earlier today.
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For instance, if a free-to-play game has made $200,0000 in the last 12 months but has millions of people installing it, the developer could end up owing Unity more than the profit earned from in-game purchases.
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Others are worried this could lead some smaller developers who built their games on Unity to pull titles from digital storefronts to prevent more people from racking up downloads.
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“I bet Steam, Epic, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft will love having waves of developers pulling their games,” writes Forest from Among Us developer Innersloth Games. “Innersloth has always paid Unity appropriately for licenses and services we use. I’m not a discourse guy, but this is undue and will force my hand.”
Other developers are actually asking people online to not install their game built in Unity, with Paper Trail developer Huenry Hueffman writing, “if you buy our Unity game, please don’t install it… demos also count, dont install this demo, you’ll literally bankrupt me”.
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Unity also clarified that the fee will not apply to charity games or charity bundles. Unity defended the pricing model, saying it’s designed to only charge developers who have already found financial success.
We only succeed when you succeed. Our 5% royalty model only kicks in after your first $1M in gross revenue, meaning that if you make $1,000,001 you owe us 5 cents. And this is per title!
Also, revenue generated from the Epic Games Store will be excluded from that 5% royalty.
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Unity has been under pressure lately, laying off hundreds of employees in the first half of 2023. Riccitiello also came under fire in 2022 for referring to developers who don’t focus on microtransactions as the “biggest f*cking idiots” before apologizing. Featured in everything from Cuphead to Beat Saber to Pokemon Go, it has been lauded for ease of use. However, trust in the platform has been declining over the years, leading many developers to look to alternatives.
Riccitiello also came under fire in 2022 for referring to developers who don’t focus on microtransactions as the “biggest f*cking idiots” before apologizing.
Classic CEO brainrot. There’s more to life than just maximizing profit.
Maybe this will be the kick in the rear that gets people to drop them enmasse. I’d definitely explore the other options for any new projects I was starting.
Even if they drop this fee, is it really worth the headache in the future when they try something again?
No, Unity has always been an inferior engine to others such as Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, Blender, etc. In fact, the Unreal Engine 3 UDK became free well over a decade ago, and it’s basically Unity if Unity weren’t the scummy corporate vampires they’ve always been.
I’m sorry but Blender game engine was pretty cumbersome to use. It was officially dropped awhile ago and last I heard it was picked up by the community
In a capitalist oligarchy? There’s really not.
I forgot it was John Riccitiello at the helm of Unity these days. That explains a lot.
Also quite interesting that he’s offloaded ~$2mil worth if Unity shares in the past year too
Well fuck me, apparently. The Adobe and Sibelius fees already break me, and I’ve invested enough in Unity assets (not to mention the learning curve) to get a game close to preproduction, and this could drive me out.
I’m a tiny Dev just trying to break into VR, console, and mobile by myself, and am dirt poor with no support, just my knowledge and talent. I’m working on three beta projects, but this makes me scared to continue on Unity.
I’m a good designer and developer with industry experience, but my health has forced me into smaller Indy projects. I put all my eggs in Unity’s basket and now it feels like they’re ditching me just at the point I was ready for production.
God dammit. :(
For future projects you may want to consider Godot or Stride. Free and Open Source.
Sometimes it seems to me that almost everything that isn’t FOSS/non-profit goes down the shitter these days in the name of profit. It really does feel like the only way to avoid getting fucked over is to completely ditch commercial stuff.
Our world sure does work, eh?
Stallman was right all along.
Yeah, I hope stuff like this shows people the value of FOSS
Jump ship to Musescore and Affinity while you’re at it my friend.
It’s not like nobody warned you Unity was bad, they’ve been hounding developers forever. I’ve personally been warning people to not touch unity and instead use the vastly superior Unreal Engine, ever since the UDK days. This isn’t the fall of Unity, it’s mid descent.
Kick 'em while they’re down
My hope would be that this encourages open source engine usage but it’ll probably simply make Unreal Engine more popular instead.
To be fair, while unreal isn’t FOSS, it’s source code is at least openly viewable so devs would find it easier to make easily transferable alternatives
Also if theirs a engine bug you can crack it open and fix it yourself, handy if you’re not a AAA studio who has epic Devs on speed dial. Though I believe you do have to share any code alterations with epic if it’s hosted on a private repo
Unity’s CEO must have met with Reddit CEO over a party and after discussion, came to this horrible profit making decision I guess.
Someone in another post mentioned the cuurent Unity CEO was the CEO for EA when it was voted worst company in America… so it kinda explains a lot.
Can someone explain to me why they might have gone with this strange pricing model instead of the very simple revenue sharing model that Epic uses?
Because a lot of mobile games are made in Unity, and mobile has a higher rate of people who install and then uninstall without really playing the game. People also install things by mistake on mobile, thinking they’re something else.
So by charging based on installs, they’re able to squeeze developers a lot more (especially mobile game developers). Competitor engines like Unreal don’t run very well on mobile.
Something something $$$.
But yeah, revenue sharing makes a ton more sense. Maybe have a per-seat option up to $X in revenue, and a revenue percent above that amount.
I’ve been using Godot for engineering simulations and I cannot recommend it enough for this one niche.
Just a reminder that other game engines exist. Some are even free and just as powerful, if not more.
This doesn’t help people who were already knee deep in a project.
I might invest in some cheap liquor instead.
Unity is Unreal’s biggest marketer now, it seems…
Curious if some of the many internal AAA engines out there might start to get shopped around as a new alternate to UE. Sony, Ubisoft, and Microsoft all have a few in house engines that at least on paper seem viable for branching out — the biggest obstacle would be support, I suspect. Which isn’t a trivial obstacle, to be clear.
idTech is due for a resurgence. Maybe Valve could even get a revival in usage of Source.
I’d love to see Capcom license the RE Engine with how nice and smooth all the games made on that have been
I’m confused. I’ve never licensed a game engine, but I figure you’d write what charges you pay into the contract, and as far as I know, you can’t just add additional charges in later without renegotiating the contract. At least, you’d have no way to enforce those. So I’m sort of at a loss how this is even supposed to work.
Twitter has gotten enshittified. Reddit has gotten enshittified. Now Unity is getting enshittified.
It’s time to learn the lesson: don’t be a sharecropper on somebody else’s property.
They must have lost their minds. Bankrupt or even pay Unity back for a successful game you made and finished months ago? I hope they get legal action.
Seriously. If they were changing the terms going forward, that’d at least be defensible, but trying to make it apply to everything that’s ever been made is just nonsensical.
Even then it would be pretty bad for a lot of devs. If you’ve been developing a game in unity for years, you can’t just easily change engines just because they’ve changed the rules of using their engine.
I agree with you; they’d have to give plenty of notice that the changes were coming and maybe even offer exemptions for developers who can show they were working on something significantly before the announcement… I don’t think there’s any way they could reasonably do it that would avoid all backlash, but this just seems like the absolute worst way to handle it.
So they owe devs on all previous installs? Like back payment? Or just going forward if you’ve ever used Unity?
Any future installs starting on January 1. It does, however, mean that many developers will be more or less forced to pull their games off of storefronts, if it actually goes through. It also means that if you bought a Unity game in the past, you’re costing the developer money every time you install it (again, if this actually goes through - I can’t imagine they won’t backpedal.)
The real issue with this isn’t the policy itself, which I would bet money won’t actually be enacted, but the fact that Unity (thinks they) can just unilaterally and retroactively change their policies. If this actually held up in court, which I think is a tenuous possibility at best (but I am not a lawyer so take that with a grain of salt), it sets an awful, awful precedent.
Good thing i switched from unity to godot a while ago
i have a couple Unity games that are close to shipping, i think i’ll hold off on that and rewrite in Godot instead. I was already considering it since working with Godot is a thousand times more pleasant than Unity anyway.
They pushed this change with the always online dev kit. I believe the price change is a smoke screen for the other changes. Soon they might step back on this decision.
The aftermath from its main audience, mobile devs, is going to be biblical.
Suddenly there’s an 150% increase in Dev jobs using Unreal Engine 5
