Game Developers Are ‘Fucking Livid’ Over Unity’s New Fees

Game development tech firm Unity, the company behind the widely used video game engine of the same name, has announced changes to its pricing model—sowing discord and fury among video game developers who call it harmful and “gross,” among other descriptors.

One day after the announcement, Unity has already walked back and clarified some of its policies. However, there’s no current indication that the firm will completely withdraw its new fees that have some developers reconsidering their plans for upcoming games.

In a blog post published Tuesday, the company said that it will charge developers more fees for its Unity Runtime service—one of two key parts of the game engine—if they meet a minimum revenue threshold within the past year and surpass a specific number of total user installs.

This means that Unity Personal and Unity Plus developers will have to pay the Unity Runtime Fee (URF) if their game has exceeded $200,000 in revenue in the past year and has over 200,000 total installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise game developers will have to pay the fee if their game has made more than $1 million in revenue in the past year and has over one million total installs.

“We believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share,” Unity said of its reason for the change.

What does this news mean for game developers using Unity? Small developers who don’t make much money from their games in a given year won’t be charged the fee, while more successful developers making over $200,000 in revenue will see the fee added to their Unity subscription.

UnityEngine is one of the most popular game engines for mobile and PC games. Its engine is the most popular among games on the Steam PC marketplace, with nearly 38,000 Steam games using its software per Steamdb data. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine trails behind, with over 10,000 games on Steam using its game engine.

One potential issue with this decision is that it arguably punishes successful developers while allowing the smallest of indie developers to continue to scrape by without paying additional fees. While Unity says that “a large majority of Unity Editor users” will not be assessed the URF, it appears that developers seeing even modest success will be charged the fee.

According to Unity’s own FAQ forum on the new fees, the install count is triggered again if a gamer uninstalled and then reinstalls a game—so game developers could end up paying the price for users who might wish to reinstall a game due to personal hardware issues, or a desire to temporarily free up disk space.

Source: GG