https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee
To our community:
I’m Marc Whitten, and I lead Unity Create which includes the Unity engine and editor teams.
I want to start with this: I am sorry.
We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.
You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust. We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.
Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.
No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.
For those creators on Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, we are also making changes based on your feedback.
The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.
We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version.
For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.
We want to continue to build the best engine for creators. We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.
I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions. In the meantime, here are some more details.*
Thank you for caring as deeply as you do, and thank you for giving us hard feedback.
Marc Whitten
On September 18, Unity Software held an all-hands meeting to discuss the rollout of per-install fees. The recording was reviewed by Bloomberg, which said the company is ready to backtrack on major aspects of its new pricing policy.
The changes are yet to be approved, but here are the first details:
➡ Unity plans to limit fees to 4% for games making over $1 million
➡ Instead of lifetime installs, the company intends to only count installs generated after January 1, 2024 (so the thresholds announced last week won’t be retroactive);
➡ Unity won’t reportedly track installs using its proprietary tools, instead relying on self-reported data from developers.
During the meeting on Monday, Unity CEO John Riccitiello noted that the new policy is “designed to generate more revenue from the company’s biggest customers and that more than 90% of Unity users won’t be affected.” When asked by several employees how the company would regain the trust of developers, execs said they will have to “show, not tell.”
David Helgason, founder of Unity and its former CEO (he is currently on the board), also commented on the controversy around the pricing changes. In a Facebook post (spotted by GamesBeat), he said “we f*cked up on many levels,” adding that the announcement of the new business model “missed a bunch of important “corner” cases, and in central ways ended up as the opposite of what it was supposed to be. […] Now to try again, and try harder,” Helgason wrote. “I am provisionally optimistic about the progress. So sorry about this mess.”
RESPONSES
Unilaterally removing Terms Of Services and making them retroactive is a HUGE loss of trust in Unity’s executive and management team. There is no going back there, no matter if they patch this mess. Using Unity moving forward will just be a gamble.
4% doesn’t change anything. It does not fix any of the problems that have been raised, and asked repeatedly. Install bombing still not addressed. So many “corner cases” still not addressed, especially in the mobile space.
To little to late tbh it’s a systematic problem with the ceo being so out of touch that it’s going to happen again. Remember this was a man who wanted a dollar per battlefield player revive
Mega Crit said Unity’s decision was “not only harmful in a myriad of ways” but was also “a violation of trust”, and pointed to Unity’s removal of its Terms of Service from GitHub, where changes can be easily tracked.