Round Up: Developers React To Unity's New 'Runtime Fee' Policy

I will no longer buy any game that uses unity.

Unity - Real Time Development Engine for Shooting Yourself in the Foot

What a frustrating decision made by a massive influence in gaming. I understand the need for money, but the seemingly constant selfish decisions lately in gaming is quite disheartening. A large part of why I like gaming is the overall lower cost of entertainment, especially compared to many other hobbies. But at this rate the gap is quickly closing, with Indies inching closer to AAA pricing and AAA going up. Not to mention the increase costs of hardware, controllers, consoles and even the subscription to play online!

Imagine rocking up to MiHoYo or Pokemon Company and demanding money for Genshin or Pokemon GO.

The fist would be firmly inserted.

I really hope Unity gets sued or backtracks their policy. It is the most asinine and greedy fee ever and could destroy the gaming landscape considering how many games use the engine. I can understand if it were for new games and legacy games were grandfathered in based on old contract clauses and agreements.

If this continues I see myself buying a lot of titles this christmass before them being removed.

Be like the old Gods and write your programs in an assembly language.

Ironically enough, this change brought developers together into a Unity.

"People are licensing our engine and making tons of money, what do we do?"

"Charge them for every install of their games?"

"Brilliant! But what if they stop using our engine for future products?"

"Simple, make the cost per install retroactive."

"!!!!!!! Give this man a million dollar bonus. We're gonna be rich!"

(Probably)

It's decisions like this that chip away at my faith in humanity.

@Cashews I mean agree with you, it is more drama for seemingly no reason. The issue I see is prices constantly increasing, games being delisted, or future projects canceled. I love slay the spire and it is frustrating to see a future game delayed from unity greed.

Unity really sucks for doing this, just pure greed, developers have every right to be upset and justified.

@Haruki_NLI Pokémon Go isn't published by the Pokémon company, but by Niantic. They would face the Unity trash fee.

@Cashews Yes, that is absolutely obnoxious and unacceptable. Being disappointed is one thing, death threats is absurd.

That is an unfair statement, and I think you know that it is dramatic. We can work our jobs, care for our families and be annoyed about a topic relative to our hobbies.

At least Unity scrambled to clarify the eyebrow launchers about installs and charity bundles, but it will clearly take more than that to appease the devs unless they're really bracing for impact of a tangible userbase exodus for this initiative's sake - and creators are an astronomically less replaceable customer crowd than consumers.

Besides the obvious mid-production shifts, we've already got at least two Switch gems with a purchase deadline around their neck - admittedly not something I would like to worry about so soon after dealing with the ones for God Wars and Pac-Man 99, and chances are there will be more to come since I'm not holding much breath for Unity's backtrack yet, especially if it's run by a former EA CEO.😏 But our FWPs in this regard certainly pale in comparison to the affected and affectable studios' concerns.

@Cashews Come on, isn’t that just wee bit too harsh?

for real, idk where their sudden edge came from to hop into a game article and be like "i dont care i have a life" lol

@Cashews These people have families too and Unity might be causing a lot of people to lose their source of income.
I might not affect you directly but it does affect a lot of people who have families and jobs.
Also you don't care if people live under a bridge? Really? You're ok with people being homeless. Maybe read about the subject a little bit, gather information and then after that form an opinion instead of spitting bile against people you don't know.
I never met you, I didn't like your attitude in this post yet I would never wish for you or your family to be homeless.

@TheBoilerman
the problem is they will be sued in USA and EU and will lose very badly because they modified a pre-signed contract and without any agreement with the parties making retro-active for any games release even several years ago, no Judge will say is ok , plus they CEO is still liable for insider treading (and with him several managers because they did the same thing) having sold his stocks before the drop of the new.

I’m here for the colourful language.

It's a remarkably different take than when writers et. al ask for more money for work they've already done in the past.

But it does seem amazingly short sighted. I predict this will backfire horribly (which I would've predicted even before I saw developers threatening to stop doing business with them)

@aresius Generally you're correct, but it's possible that the original contract permitted changes like this in the future. Or it didn't cover past installs originally, which fees are a condition for continued use of Unity products. Or something else. Lawyers are very good at doing things like this, and I expect that they've taken into consideration the general rule you identify and have, if not a rock-solid argument, an argument with a reasonable likelihood of success.

It’s fun to read Unity getting SMOKED on social media

So many hot takes on this from people that have very little idea of what to be scared or upset about.

I was planning on using Unity to learn to make games. Anyone know anything about Unreal?

On another note, what a trashy, money-hungry, industry-destroying move. It's too late to go back, and now gamers are losing access to fantastic games because developers and publishers are not willing to pay the outlandish fee. Great job, Unity, absolutely great...

Of all this, what I get out of it is that I might have to shell out a bit to get Slay the Spire before it's delisted, then meh, I'll spend the cash.

Shame for the devs.

I’m still convinced that this is an operation being run by Epic to kill off their competition and Riccitiello is on it.

Great use of article image.

You won’t see me shed a tear when Unity inevitably gets hit with legal action.

Maybe games makers will actually program games in the old fashion way, stop them regurgitating games that only have a different face but feel the same!

@Pod Those hot takes are probably as fact based as yours!

This most matters to me because of Silksong. If Team Cherry has to spend another 5 years porting the game away from Unity... 😡

It wouldn't be so bad for Unity to do this if it were up front BEFORE a developer starts using the software. But for many developers, they have a game or a project that they started without ever agreeing to these terms. It's like if I bought a Switch and then 4 years later, Nintendo says "alright, we're going to charge you a tax on owning that system, both for the past and future." It's completely unethical.

While I understand the new license can be an issue for free-to-play games, paying 0.2$ per game sold & installed doesn't seem that much for a pay-to-play game. Developing your own engine will cost you much more than that, except for big studios who can afford it and use it in multiple games.

There's no need to boycott Switch games made with Unity, if there's a physical version. Has anyone else thought that this change of policy might be a reaction to pending strike action? Unions have been pushing for residual payments linked to every time movies or episodes of series are streamed, and it's not hard to envisage a similar push in regards to gaming. Please note, I'm not defending this policy at all. Physical titles are one very real and possible way around this. Cult of the Lamb and Slay the Spire certainly exist physically, for Switch.

all it will take is some other engine to swoop in, provide an alternative, and Unity's use will die. Well done idiots.

Even if they reverse this decision, if an alternate engine is like "hey, here's an approximation of Unity and we won't ever do something as crappy as that" then developers will also flock to that. Trust in Unity will be gone.

Although, it's hard to walk something like this back when you've shot your own feet to smithereens...

I guess we'll see a lot more of unreal games in the future

That moment when you remember Hollow Knight Silksong was being made in Unity...RIP

It’s astonishing anyone there thought it was a good idea to hire that clown CEO who caused all the drama with EA too.

@FantasiaWHT
true but in some country like Italy contracts can be nullify by a Judge if some part are oppressive or illegal by the law itself or by the Judge common sense , could be for others like USA i don't know We will only know when a class action is made (IF will be made )

Just wondering does anyone know what's going to happen to my Cult of the Lamb physical I'm waiting on

I will support them by refusing to purchase any Unity games going forward.

Incredibly tone deaf move by executives (or maybe just one executive as seems to be the trend this year).

Expecting further concessions by Unity, hoping the board ousts the CEO, or that Unity is heavily pressured (or even acquired) by Meta or Apple, two companies that are silent on this so far but are strongly tied to Unity because of their VR/AR projects. (And Apple and Epic are not talking)

We want a cut every time you sell the game and get paid = reasonable

We want a cut regardless of if you get paid or not = unreasonable

We want a cut regardless AND we are going to tell you how often the game was downloaded AND we are not going to disclose how we come up with that number AND there will be no flittering to prevent abuse or us padding it. We literally just tell you how much you owe us and you have NO recourse and no appeals process = evil on a level only US capitalism can produce.

Boycotting Unity games is actually harmful to studios that are trapped by a huge investment of time and money in their development, unfortunately. The studios and indie developers have to do the fighting and buying their games can actually help them with the fight (they’ll need income to make new investments in switching engines and/or litigation against Unity)

@Bunkerneath Nothing is going to happen, it was a joke from the developper. They are not going to shut it down.

@Athropos sold, sure, but they will charge for EVERY install, every time.

I have games on my Switch that I remove because of space, then re-install when I want to play them again, and have done so several times. One game I am sure I have already installed 6 times already this way.

That's 6 times a fee. Imagine having to pay to play a game every time you insert the cartridge. That's the issue here.

@aaronsullivan
it is one person, the CEO of Unity is the same pig who have ruined EA in the past with all kind of microtransaction to milk players He even wanted in the past to make us paid with real money for reloading weapon in games faster

I love when there's news like this because there's always at least one tone deaf fool complaining that since it doesn't directly affect them no one should care about it

@Daniel36
they already changed that because of backslash will be only for the first installation, the problem still apply for pirate version and for installation of the same game on multiple devices AND because they make the thing retroactive

Oh damn, I wonder if other parts of our society are based on greed and exploitation.

"More then 90% of our user will be unaffected"

LESS THEN 7% OF YOUR USERS ARE GAME DEVELOPERS.

So what? You're saying that not only is this going to effect everyone who has ever sold a unity game, but somehow you are also going to be ***** over 3% of the students, teachers and hobbyists that use your product as well?

@Athropos

Not sold and installed. Installed, period.

Every time any one who has your game gets a new computer? Pay unity.

Every time they install it to a new hard drive? Pay unity.

Game stops working so they re-download it and re-install? Pay unity.

Person buy it from you once and installs it on their 5 computers? Pay unity 5 times.

They delete the game for space and then want to play it again in a few months? Pay unity.

Download stats, how they are collected, and where they come from are all invisible. Only unity sees them. You can not dispute them. You can not appeal them.

This happens in perpetuity and NEVER expires. Unity is creating a reality where on a long enough time-line you will owe unity more money then your game ever made. People will stop buying your game, but you NEVER stop paying unity.

No reasonable person would ever enter into a deal like that, even if the alternative costs way more.

@aresius Ah, thanks. Still scummy though.

@HeadPirate - Well, yes! (in answer to your 3% remark)

@asukaArachne I like these articles too because there is only very rarely a person who has true insight to people's actual motivations and completely empty prayers. That person serves as a mirror to how groupthink develops and can be exploited by all sorts of people for their own gain.

This is the first time I'm actually glad I didn't finish the Game Dev degree I was going for. The school was teaching Unity, which means that if I'd continued, much of that gained knowledge would now be useless.

Y'know, once I finally get around to building a decent PC, I was gonna segue back into messing around with game development as a hobby like in my college days. I had a stellar experience with Unity and was gonna dabble with that first, but with this mess I'll probably bypass it and mess around with Unreal Engine and Game Maker Studio instead.

The new pricing is obscene enough depending, but to make it retroactive? Yeah, no. The shadiest part about it (IMO) that I wasn't aware of until now was the quiet terms of service change. I don't blame dev studios and even hobbyists from being ticked at all.

A poor decision all around. One that seriously needs a rethink. BUT...that said, I don't condone the doxxing and death threats at all. Yes, it's a crappy decision, but that doesn't give people leave to be [insert words of choice here] to those directly or indirectly involved with this company. I don't care if I'm for or against a cause, you will NOT get anywhere with threats of violence or worse. ESPECIALLY where innocent side parties and/or those who had nothing to do with this decision are involved. Humans can be better than this.

@Cashews i imagine it disincentivizes deep discount sales at least

@azblue game Development is a horrible career choice unless you have unusual talent or are a founder. If you are in the western hemisphere and a regular grunt coder - you are the first out the door when trouble strikes. You get paid peanuts, work more hours than any other tech industry and are the first out the door when trouble inevitably rears it's head. heck half of what they do is illegal - such as Blizzard's harassment.

Other software jobs are much more comfortable. You make a decent wage, work human hours (although still more than most people) and are given a modicum of respect.

I sincerely don't know why anyone puts up with it. Why they haven't unionized en masse, like the movie industry, makes me question their intelligence.

@Athropos Hollow Knight sold 3M, multiply that for .2 and then add the scammy way of accounting sales (not sales but game installs) now make it retroactive for all the games every single game studio has realesed using said engine and you would have a pretty clear idea why are they upset. Still think its not that much?

@Zulzar personally I think that punishes the developers as much as Unity. Insofar as we are not the actual customers of Unity, there’s not too much we can do. Developers are the ones who have to boycott.

How in the heck do you go about retroactively billing someone? What is the process for this? Sounds pretty wild, man. Side note: Anyone that sold their stocks ahead of the announcement are gonna want to lawyer up.

@HotGoomba This is amazing! 😂😂😂

Unity is the most popular game engine for students and hobbyists. That’s the majority of their customer base. Like everyone, Unity is feeling the squeeze of inflation. They need to raise prices… but they have a lot of competitors and they are scared that if they raise prices all those students and hobbyists will go to a different product. These people are looking for something cheap to learn on, they aren’t ready to invest a lot of money into an engine yet. So Unity tries to come up with a scheme to charge only professional developers that are actually profiting by using Unity. So far that all sounds understandable to me. But then, instead of doing something simple, like simply raising the price of a commercial license they try to get all clever, attaching this small fee to every installation. Probably they convinced themselves that this also was friendly to small developers - really small developers, who, like students, will not be seeing their prices go up. But it has the effect of making Unity more expensive than competing engines for successful developers. Suddenly developing your game in Unity has turned out to be a significant financial mistake. Hence the freak out. Unity was too clever by half here, they need to go to a more straightforward price increase.

Indie developers naturally have to do what they think is right. It sounds like a d*** move from Unity (is that ok to say? - d*** move I mean, not Unity lol) to me, and wish them all the best. Love Cult of Lamb's response. I'm a fan of clear and transparent messaging.

Ah dang it now I have to get lunistice before it gets delisted.
Right after I already bought god wars before that got delisted.
Unity REALLY needs to get their act together before more games get delisted and disappear.

That Gamemaker response is hilarous. I'm very glad that my 2d titles are in GML and 3d in Unreal. I can't fathom this Unity anouncement at ALL and I'd never consider it as a dev moving forward.

I do wonder if subs like Gamepass are prompting Unity to make some of these changes. Unity is seeing devs get money up front (and purchases on top of that) from however gamepass is working and is trying to restructure their business model.

Before some rando @'s me, I'm wondering simply why the changes were made from a business perspective. I have no opinion on whom it impacts currently as I simply don't have enough information.

Forget the actiblizzard aquisition drama, this is a real problem.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how messed up the contract would have to be to allow Unity to even make that move. And whether that part of the contract is legal

@EriXz @Daniel36 No, since the announcement they made it clear it is not retroactive and reinstalls do no count.

When things are going well, you can always count on Riccitiello to f*** it up!

@Athropos
well this change a lot much more better than how it was imposed before

@Cashews
Dude... what a way to shout to the world that you don't care about people's livelihood. This affects demos, charity bundles, pirated copies, Xbox Game Pass, and Steam gifts (to say the least). Review bombing on Metacritic will be replaced by malicious people using VMs to mass-install games to bankrupt a developer; people could lose their jobs, man. That affects their savings, their homes, their kids.

For those who still live in a Batcave and did not understand some parts of the article, Twitter is now X.

I would like to see what the arrangement is with the Unreal engine in comparison. I'm not sticking up for unity I thought it might be kind of dead at this point. Does anyone know if Unreal Engine operates in the same manner? There have been some fun games on Unity way back when but it seems to me outdated now.

@EaglyBird yeah, you're right. It's just hard to ignore when people's lives and income are on the line, not just our hobby and passion.

@EaglyBird Good advice, I just did just that.

@HeadPirate They've already confirmed that reinstalls do not incur a fee so what exactly are you going on about?

@Cashews This literally effects every game made with the Unity engine, this is a big deal for consumers as well. Games are already getting deleted.

So which venture capital group invested in Unity because this is pure vulture capitalism at it's worst.

Once again greed making people do the worst decisions. I hope they realize this is beyond stupid.

@sanderev Speaking of the free game Pokemon Go, apparently it has been downloaded 500 million times. That means Niantic owes Unity 100 million dollars. I can sense some lawsuits in the future.

@Cashews Bad take is all I am going to say, also game development is not a poor job career. It still makes more money than being a cashier, etc, plus people who does game development are most likely enjoying their job hopefully.

So they can legally retroactively change the contract to say that everyone owes them a cut of all there sales? What?

@aresius Wasn’t the EA guy the one to suggest charging players for reloading in battlefield or something? The guy was too greedy for EA lmao.

This is the most times I've seen "*****" blatantly visible on a NL article! Think of the children won't you?! Yeah I know I can't say it here even if they posted it there. Hehe

Haha but yeah Unity is shooting themselves in the foot with this. But I also smell a bigger plot here, because there's no way they thought this would fly. Alas unless some actually bigger name studios come forward, these few small companies protesting won't do anything.

Unfortunately the Cult of the Lamb people were joking to get sales. A shame because I would have bought it to support them for having balls, but not now.

I read on Reddit that Unity has never turned a profit in all of its years of existence. To me, that tells me that taking a commission on every sale of a game that is made using its engine is probably the only way for them to ever actually make money, and I can't blame them for adapting their pricing in order to actually make money.

But every "sale" is very different than every "install," even if only first installs are counted. Add on the lack of transparency in the counting methodology and the ludicrous retroactivity of the policy change, and they took a reasonable idea and made it completely bonkers.

I'm surprised to see very little talk of litigation in the comment thread here. Reddit was filled with talk of it and it seems like that's the most likely outcome here. Nintendo, Disney, Microsoft, and more are all affected by this and won't play nice. I don't see Unity "out-lawyering" that all-star lineup of litigants.

As for player response, boycotting games that devs choose to keep available for sale is nonsensical. Why would you NOT buying a game help a dev in any way? If they have it for sale, that means they believe they are better off if you buy it. So support them by buying it.

@EaglyBird But it’s so tempting though.

@Nintendo_Thumb $10M. Multiply by .02 not by 20%. Likely much less on the tiered system.

Pokemon Go has had revenue of an estimated $5B. Is the architecture that makes the game possible not worth a tiny fraction of that?

I did not know the infamous ex EA CEO John Riccitiello was running Unity. He was trash then, it seems he hasn't changed a bit.

@Key19

The retroactive part is what I find intriguing. No doubt studios will try to fight this. Hopefully the bigger studios can do enough that it in turn helps all studios.

@Cashews

You seem to be triggered. Would you feel the same if whatever company you work for goes under because of poor decisions, wherein you lose your job and ability to provide for your family?

I'm sure people have more concerns to worry about than your ability to work and provide for your family as well. You sound like a great person. 🙄

@Athropos Reinstalls on the same machine do not count. But what counts as "the same machine"? Do they use the Hardware Id (like Windows Activation)? This means that changing your graphics card or RAM ALONE can count as a new install of the game. And what if someone has 5 PCs? That person will cost the developer $1 extra.

Do that for a free to play game x 1.000.000 users and it will litterally cost the developer MILLIONS!

This will force them to make the games more expensive, which in the end will hurt the player.

What are the big studio reactions? As nice as the reactions from the indie studios are…we all know they are not gonna be the ones that are capable of fighting back on this.

@Haruki_NLI Well they are, Genshin is on Unity so they'll want pay on every download.

I don’t mean to be, erm, mean, but I’ve never heard of any of those developers. Not sure this is a backlash Unity haven’t anticipated. If a big player went at them, that would make a difference… let’s see how this develops.

@Cashews How did you get $0.02? A quick search says it's $0.2 per install. 20 cents (i.e. $0.2) multiplied by the number of copies which is 500 million. That's .2 x 500,000,000.00 = 100,000,000.00 which are dollars, so that's 100 million dollars. If I'm wrong I'd be happy to learn where I messed up, but I'm not seeing it.

[edit: which at that point it's cheaper to file a lawsuit than to pay up.]

@Nintendo_Thumb from thier page where it has all of the tiers broken down:

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

It looks like if you are a cheap subscriber you pay a lot and if you have a better thing you pay much less. something like that. Obviously pokenon go would be a high tier. and if they aren't: F 'em honestly. I'd charge them a high fee too. because they arent meant to make billions because of a license when it is built on your back.

should be much less for them. .005/per in your are enterprise.

@dew12333
They probably are not.

@Cashews That's a good point, guess I haven't really looked into it much.

@Pod Strong claim there sir (muscle emoji's).