Game Developers Unite Against Additional ‘Runtime Fees’ For Unity Engine
Earlier this week, Unity Technologies faced massive backlash from video game developers when it announced its plans to add “runtime fees” for the Unity game engine. Basically, the company will be charging developers a small fee for every installation of a game that uses the engine on top of the annual licensing fee.
The said runtime fees could reportedly be as much as 20 cents per installation. While the amount might not put a dent in a big studio’s revenue, it will obviously be felt more by indie studios who make up the bulk of Unity’s customers, most of whom have smaller playerbases and operate free-to-play titles.
In an effort to do some damage control, the company followed up the announcement with a statement assuring game developers that they won’t be charging for reinstallations on the same device, charity bundles, free trials, small demo releases, streaming and web games, or dummy installations to harass developers. They, however, failed to explain how they’ll be able to filter which installations they’ll be tacking fees on. Early access releases also won’t be counted as trials.
“We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms,” Unity explained in this FAQ.
Unity further said that the pricing change will affect less than 10% of its customers. Unfortunately, the concessions they made did little to appease angry game developers.
“These answers do nothing to allay my primary concern, which is that billing on installs instead of revenue has the potential to destroy a company that makes a popular game they can’t figure out how to monetize, something common in mobile gaming,” said former Star Wars The Old Republic developer Damion Shubert.
“It hurts because we didn’t agree to this,” Rust creator Garry Newman added. “We used the engine because you pay up front and then ship your product. We weren’t told this was going to happen. We weren’t warned. We weren’t consulted. We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity’s engine. We’ve paid them every year. And now they changed the rules.”
We want to acknowledge the confusion and frustration we heard after we announced our new runtime fee policy. We’d like to clarify some of your top questions and concerns:
Who is impacted by this price increase: The price increase is very targeted. In fact, more than 90% of our…
— Unity (@unity) September 13, 2023
