News Unity Issues Apology for New Runtime Fee Policy, Promises Changes

[Admin]

Unity’s new runtime fee policy is widely hated. It failed to soothe users with an explainer last week, so a more drastic change is coming – perhaps even a U-turn.

Unity Issues Apology for New Runtime Fee Policy, Promises Changes : Read more

 

[Giroro]

They didn't apologize for the pricing structure, they apologized for "The confusion". I guess they're blaming their customers for simply not understanding why they should pay the engine developer "infinite money forever" to let people install the games that they buy.

To me, it doesn't sound like Unity actually has any intention to pivot back to a logical and sane pricing structure. They just want to punish devs who are big enough to make money, but too small to survive a change in course. They've made it clear that, one way or another, they're going to try unfairly squeezing those customers for as much cash as possible.
If Unity is somehow struggling to make money, then maybe they should be looking at improving their brand image beyond "The asset-flip store new/solo/and genuinely awful devs use to throw together unplayable horror games that nobody buys and streamers make fun of. It makes one wonder, "how good can the engine really be when it seems like over half the devs using it can't figure out how to implement basic walking mechanics?"

So we'll see how this works out for Unity when a bunch of their biggest/real customers just jump off and start releasing their competing engines over the next couple years.

 

[colossusrage]

Pretty sure there was no confusion. The policy was terrible and fairly straight forward. If there was any confusion it was all the walking back done in the past 48 hours.

 

[hotaru251]

Shame if they do eventually backtrack on fees...

I was waiting for Nintendo to sue the ever living heck out of em as the ruby/sapphire remakes iirc used Unity.


This is Unity's poor excuse of damage control.

 

[JamesJones44]

They should have simply said 4% of revenue over $200,000. It would still make them cheaper than the Unreal Engine while monetizing more from semi successful games on mobile (which is what they wanted). Instead they came up with some crazy scheme that sounded unrealistic to small devs/publishers.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

Even if they walk back every single bit of it, Unity has showed their hand... or face... or something. I don't do idioms well.
The point is, the moment it was announced, they could never be trusted again. If they return to the status quo of last week, developers won't forget about it, and will forever be wary of developing with Unity. Unity has become too big of a risk to develop games for.

I guess. I don't know <Mod Edit> about developing games. I'm just thinking out loud. Move along. : )

 

[bit_user]

They didn't apologize for the pricing structure, they apologized for "The confusion". I guess they're blaming their customers for simply not understanding

Yes, that jumped out at me, also.

... why they should pay the engine developer "infinite money forever" to let people install the games that they buy.

Yes, but... developing & maintaining an engine is challenging & expensive, which is why few people roll their own. If Unity is losing money, then why is it so crazy that they would try to adopt a revenue model more similar to most of their customers?

To me, it doesn't sound like Unity actually has any intention to pivot back to a logical and sane pricing structure.

Which is what? Maybe I missed it, but I think the article didn't say what their current fee structure is like. TBH, I was surprised they weren't already charging a royalty.

So we'll see how this works out for Unity when a bunch of their biggest/real customers just jump off and start releasing their competing engines over the next couple years.

There are some open source ones, like O3D (formerly Amazon Lumberyard):

Home - O3DE

MEET O3DE An open source, real-time 3D engine DOWNLOAD Learn More

o3de.org

Godot:

Godot Engine - Free and open source 2D and 3D game engine

Godot provides a huge set of common tools, so you can just focus on making your game without reinventing the wheel.

godotengine.org

Open 3D Engine:

Home - O3DE

MEET O3DE An open source, real-time 3D engine DOWNLOAD Learn More

o3de.org

And others, I'm sure. Here's a wikipedia listicle, but beware that most entries are probably out-of-date:

List of game engines - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[targetdrone]

$0.20 per install? What kind of DRM does unity games have that they can track who's installing it?

 

[AgentBirdnest]

$0.20 per install? What kind of DRM does unity games have that they can track who's installing it?

I've been wondering that same thing... what if I buy games from GOG or Itch, and install them on an offline computer? õ_Ô

 

[ien2222]

...


Yes, but... developing & maintaining an engine is challenging & expensive, which is why few people roll their own. If Unity is losing money, then why is it so crazy that they would try to adopt a revenue model more similar to most of their customers?


Which is what? Maybe I missed it, but I think the article didn't say what their current fee structure is like. TBH, I was surprised they weren't already charging a royalty.

...

It actually isn't like other engine "royalties". Those are revenue based, this change in Unity is install based, and it's a rather significant difference. I believe UE5 is something like 5% over $1,00,000 in revenue, whereas this change is $.20 per install.

So, a dev gets a deal from Xbox for letting them put it in a free to play weekend for say $200,000. Not bad for a solo dev. Under UE5, if that dev still hasn't reached $1M they don't have to pay anything. Under Unity's new structure, if that game was downloaded 20mil times during that weekend...that's $4M that person would now owe Unity (or $4M minus any threshold that needs to be met...haven't taken a good look at it TBH).

It's a poopshow to be sure.

Here's a more in depth analysis by a dev that does gaming news from a few days ago:

Bellular News: Unity Are In EXTREME Trouble

 

[tamalero]

Unity’s new runtime fee policy is widely hated. It failed to soothe users with an explainer last week, so a more drastic change is coming – perhaps even a U-turn.

Unity Issues Apology for New Runtime Fee Policy, Promises Changes : Read more

Empty promises as usual.
No surprise that the top leadership sold a ton of shares related to the backslash.

 

[tamalero]

I've been wondering that same thing... what if I buy games from GOG or Itch, and install them on an offline computer? õ_Ô

supposedly they are tracking the downloads too.

 

[Giroro]

Yes, but... developing & maintaining an engine is challenging & expensive, which is why few people roll their own. If Unity is losing money, then why is it so crazy that they would try to adopt a revenue model more similar to most of their customers?

Yes Engine development takes work and money, and yes it's reasonable for the engine dev to charge the game developer upfront and/or a royalty on sales. Which is the standard and rational way of pricing things.

But when have you ever bought a game that charges every single time you install/reinstall it?

 

[-Fran-]

Well... miHoYo (HoYoVerse) opened up developer positions specifically targeted at "game engine development". Unity is royally screwed if one of the biggest money makers in the mobile space is willing to move away from their engine. Others will just do the same math and jump ship.

Regards.

 

[edzieba]

Yes, but... developing & maintaining an engine is challenging & expensive, which is why few people roll their own. If Unity is losing money, then why is it so crazy that they would try to adopt a revenue model more similar to most of their customers?

Because Unity already charge a per-seat-per-month fee for Unity. They're demanding extra money on top of the fees they already charge developers for engine development and support.
If it were simply business incompetence leading to revenue being lower than expenses, then the simple solution is to increase the fees they already charge, same as any other service business.

 

[palladin9479]

Yeah the per-download fee was a very bad idea that just smells like some non-IT MBA good idea fairy. I get that they are in the red now and need to increase revenue from successful projects. They really should of gone with a different model like per-purchase or percentage of revenue. Digging around, this actually seems like a torpedo aimed at the AppLovin / Ironsource micro-transaction / ad revenue platform. Unity was planning on waiving this fee for anyone using their own Unity mediation platform.

My thoughts are the are going to rethink this and get rid of the per-download fee and instead go to a flat model with a discount / waiver for those using their own mediation platform. Phone games make most of their money through these platforms and it looks like Unity was trying to get a piece of the action.

 

[Mattzun]

Unities real goal was apparently forcing devs to use their in game ads
If you use their monetization/ad system, you get 95 percent off the per install fees

In theory, that makes sense - much of the revenue in the games market comes through ads or microtransactions and their CEO is certainly a fan of the worst monetization models.

If they hadn't been so greedy, they could have probably gotten away with it.
If they had warned people that this was coming in 2024, said that you could continue developing games started before the end of this year under the old TOS (as the old TOS said) and clarified what you needed to do to stay under the old terms, they wouldn't have sparked an outright revolt

 

[bit_user]

Because Unity already charge a per-seat-per-month fee for Unity. They're demanding extra money on top of the fees they already charge developers for engine development and support.
If it were simply business incompetence leading to revenue being lower than expenses, then the simple solution is to increase the fees they already charge, same as any other service business.

Again, it seems obvious to me that the best solution is to align their revenue model more closely with that of their customers. If they merely increased the per-developer seat costs, I'm sure you'd still have small developers screaming bloody murder.

So far, the most legitimate sounding complaints about their proposal are precisely related to the mismatch between Unity's new fee structure and the revenue model of their customers.

 

[helper800]

Unity shot itself in the foot and was like, 'Hey, we are sorry for all the confusion regarding our monetization practices, we are so sorry, please forgive us and keep using us please...' Meanwhile there was no confusion...

It really pains me, because I learned C# and C++ to an extent on Unity. Its one of the most user friendly engines out there and is very well maintained with few bugs. It seems obvious to me that a revenue share at 200,000 of say 3-5% would have made much more sense, or a flat rate per license fee of say 1 or 2 dollars. I am personally not involved with game development anymore because its one of the worst industries to work in. It is however, one of the most impassioned industries with so much more than monetary investment at stake for a lot of the smaller independent developers out there. The proposed monetization structure of Unity would be crushing to so many in development games and it is so obvious to almost everyone that looked could see how devastating this would be. There are so many games developed in Unity now, that would never have been if this plan were to have gone through...

 

[edzieba]

Again, it seems obvious to me that the best solution is to align their revenue model more closely with that of their customers. If they merely increased the per-developer seat costs, I'm sure you'd still have small developers screaming bloody murder.

So far, the most legitimate sounding complaints about their proposal are precisely related to the mismatch between Unity's new fee structure and the revenue model of their customers.

The 'revenue model' their customers brought into was "pay for dev seats only, no royalties". Adding royalty fees (be they per-sale or per-install) is why developers are pissed off in the first place!
"Small developers" would not have been "screaming bloody murder" over fee rises, as small developers would not be reaching the thresholds to trigger a move away from Unity Free in the first place.

 

[bit_user]

The 'revenue model' their customers brought into was "pay for dev seats only, no royalties". Adding royalty fees (be they per-sale or per-install) is why developers are pissed off in the first place!

Thanks for confirming that. I think it shouldn't be surprising for the vendor to shift revenue models, after building a big enough customer base, although you could've reasonably expected the vendor to do a better job of rolling out the new scheme. That is, if they were actually concerned about long-term revenue.

A company I worked for developed a hardware product that included a commercial OS. The OS vendor suddenly increased their licensing fees by like 5x, with very little advanced notice. We were stuck paying the new fees for a couple software release cycles, but we switched to a different OS as soon as we could. It turns out the OS vendor was acquired right after that. So, it sure looks like they abused their "captive" customer relationship to juice revenues and make themselves appear to be a more appealing acquisition target.

Perhaps there's something similar going on with Unity? Sometimes, when people or companies appear to act in a short-sighted way, there's a very good reason for it.