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.
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. :(
The problem is they keep changing the license terms every 6-12 months and the changes have always been retroactive. I think they've changed it about once every year for the last 5 years and this year they did it twice. Games often take years to make and that means you might have no idea what the terms are going to be by the time you're ready to release.
So lets say they walk this back. What about next time?
Yes, this, too. :(
It doesn't seem right that they can retroactively change their terms and just decide you owe them money. I'm guessing this is legal since they are doing it anyways?
It's really no different than a service upping their subscription fee or a grocery store raising the price of eggs. There's no law that says the price will remain the same forever. You can of course add it to the terms of a contract, but it's at your (in this case Unity's) own discretion.
Here's their Pricing Change FAQ.
The main difference is that if you built your product on their platform, you don't have the option to pick a different vendor for what you've already built like you would for subscriptions or eggs. It feels much more akin to extortion to me.
You built your product on their platform and agreed to the terms they set. Thats a level of commitment you put in. Them changing it afterwards is forcing you to agree to new terms that you wouldn't agree to if you weren't forced.
If the issue is using their servers, or keeping the runtime code updates, there should at least be the option of self hosting or locking into an older version.
Having said all that, I know very little about vendor contracts and don't doubt you when you say legally its the same as any other price change. It feels different because of the lack of choice.
Oh, I’ll keep going, for sure! (…with one eye on developments.) But now I also need to prepare contingencies if their licensing goes the way of Avid, Adobe, and most recently Reddit and the bird one.
Something major might have to change and I can’t be blindsided by it, so I have to carve out time to deal with this, anyhow.
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
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
Jump ship to Musescore and Affinity while you're at it my friend.