Unit
Unity, the creator of a popular cross-platform engine and toolkit, will waive a runtime fee that was widely believed to have charged developers based on game installs rather than per-seat licenses. The move comes exactly one year after the fee was initially announced.
In a blog post attributed to President and CEO Matt Bromberg, the CEO writes that the company cannot continue to “democratize game development” without “a partnership built on trust.” Bromberg claims that customers understand the need for price increases, but not in “a new and controversial way.” Game developers will therefore not be charged per install, but will instead be categorized into Personal, Pro, and Enterprise tiers based on revenue or funding level.
“Removing the runtime fee for games and implementing these pricing changes will allow us to continue investing in improving game development for everyone while being better partners,” Bromberg writes.
A year of discontent
Unity’s announcement of a new “Runtime Fee based on game installs” in mid-September 2023 (Wayback archive), along with cloud storage and “runtime AI,” would have been costly for smaller developers who found success. The runtime fee would have cost 20 cents per install at the otherwise free Personal tier after a game had reached $200,000 in revenue and 200,000+ installs. Fees decreased slightly for Pro and Enterprise customers after $1 million in revenue and 1 million installs.
The move sparked an almost immediate backlash from many developers. Unity, whose then-CEO John Riccitiello had described in 2015 as a company that “had no royalties or [f-ing] “They were simply not a company to be trusted,” wrote Necrosoft Games' Brandon Sheffield. The developers said they would delay updates or change engines rather than absorb the fee, which would have retroactively counted installs prior to January 2024 for its calculations.
Unity's terms of service appeared to allow for these sudden changes. Unity softened the fee's impact on personal users, removed retroactive install counts, and capped fees at 2.5 percent of revenue. Unity Create president and general manager Marc Whitten told Ars at the time that while the fee apparently wouldn't affect the vast majority of Unity users, he understood that a stable agreement should be a feature of the engine.
Whether coincidental or not, however, Riccitiello announced his retirement the following month, prompting some celebration among developers but not a full restoration of confidence. A massive wave of layoffs over the winter of 2023 and 2024 showed that Unity’s financial position was precarious, in part due to acquisitions during Riccitiello’s tenure. The runtime fee would have minimal impact in 2024, the company said in filings, but would “rise from there as customers adopt our new releases.”
Instead of increasing from there, the runtime fee is no longer there and Unity made other changes to its pricing structure:
- Unity Personal remains free to use and its revenue/funding cap increases from $100,000 to $200,000
- Unity Pro, for customers over the Personal limit, sees an 8 percent price increase to $2200 per seat
- Unity Enterprise, with custom packages for those with more than $25 million in revenue or funding, sees a 25 percent increase.
“From now on, our intention is to return to a more traditional cycle where potential price increases are considered only on an annual basis,” Bromberg wrote in his post. The changes to Unity's Editor software should allow customers to continue using their current version under previously agreed-upon terms, he wrote.