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Unity is sorry, and “should have incorporated more […] feedback” before announcing their new pricing policy. This is in a nutshell what Marc Whitten (President and General Manager, Unity Create) explained on the official Unity website just before the end of last week.
As a reminder, Unity recently announced a new pricing policy that caused a massive uproar in the community: starting from January 1, 2024, and for installations exceeding 200,000 downloads, every new installation of a game created with Unity would have been charged $0.20.
Developers and studios were outraged by the project. There were multiple concerns: a significant increase in costs, uncertainty about whether demos and pirate installations would be counted, what would happen when people reinstall their games several times…
Unity quickly tried to clarify some points but failed to appease the community’s anger. Some studios openly stated that they intended to switch to a different engine for their future projects.
Which is why Unity decided to go back to the drawing board, and to announce a revamped pricing policy:
- The “Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal”.
- Furthermore, Unity explains, “no game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee”.
- For people and studios using Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, there are changes as well. Runtime Fee policy will “only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond”, not on already released games as previously planned. Furthermore, for games that are subject to the runtime fee, you will be able to choose to pay either a 2.5% revenue share or the runtime fee.
This announcement could help appease Unity customers. However, it is not clear whether this whole ordeal will have a lasting effect on the popularity of this game engine.
