Unity has apologised for its new Runtime Fee which received major backlash as the upcoming fee is set to charge developers when people download games made using its technology. Several indie developers, gamers, journalists and market experts expressed frustration at the half-baked pricing which seems unfair towards emerging developers and may also be incompetent towards tackling piracy-related issues or instal-bombing.
"We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused," the company said in a post on X.
"We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback."
Read More: 'Raises Barrier For Indie Devs': Unity Receives Backlash For New Runtime Fee
It's Unity Vs The Games Industry
According to the pricing, Unity Personal and Unity Plus devs will have to pay $.20 for every game installed. Unity Pro devs will have to pay between $.02 and $.15 for every install past theirs, and Unity Enterprise devs’ costs range from $.01 to $.125. The Unity Runtime Fee is based on the number of users installing games built on the engine and will reportedly kick in after developers cross specific revenue and install thresholds. For developers operating on the Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise licenses the fee will kick in after a game earns $1 million over the 12-month period and passes a million installs.
The blowback to Unity's new pricing has been intense. While some developers called the pricing system a 'violation of trust', and vowed to switch engines, Xalavier Nelson Jr., founder of Strange Scaffold, revealed recently that some developers using the engine were discussing a possible class action lawsuit. Unity had previously confirmed that the change would affect less than 10% of its customers, but it did little to pacify the community, especially because several members of Unity's management sold a substantial number of company shares ahead of the company's announcement of its new pricing system.
Dutch developer and co-founder of Vlambeer criticised Unity at length, on X. "It's terrifying to think Unity leadership dragged this over the weekend leaving every studio out there with genuine existential concerns, and even now cannot simply go 'our intent is to drop the per-install fee'," Ismail wrote. "We have to be worried longer and we have to keep talking about this."
"This is a trust issue. Devs spent the weekend trying Godot & Unreal for the first time in their lives. One dev managed to port their (text-based) game core over to Godot in 14 hours of work. Studios prepared to apply for some porting grants to Unreal. Those steps are significant.
"The biggest irony is that in their hunt for big money, Unity had to destroy the one thing that could've helped regain some trust: a TOS [Terms of Service] clause that says they can't change the TOS retroactively. The very clause that existed but they revoked ahead of the runtime fee announcement."