Game Developers Are 'Fucking Livid' Over Unity's New Fees

Game development tech firm Unity, the company behind the widely used video game engine of the same name, has announced changes to its pricing model—sowing discord and fury among video game developers who call it harmful and “gross," among other descriptors.

One day after the announcement, Unity has already walked back and clarified some of its policies. However, there's no current indication that the firm will completely withdraw its new fees that have some developers reconsidering their plans for upcoming games.

In a blog post published Tuesday, the company said that it will charge developers more fees for its Unity Runtime service—one of two key parts of the game engine—if they meet a minimum revenue threshold within the past year and surpass a specific number of total user installs.

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This means that Unity Personal and Unity Plus developers will have to pay the Unity Runtime Fee (URF) if their game has exceeded $200,000 in revenue in the past year and has over 200,000 total installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise game developers will have to pay the fee if their game has made more than $1 million in revenue in the past year and has over one million total installs.

“We believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share,” Unity said of its reason for the change.

What does this news mean for game developers using Unity? Small developers who don’t make much money from their games in a given year won’t be charged the fee, while more successful developers making over $200,000 in revenue will see the fee added to their Unity subscription.

Unity is one of the most popular game engines for mobile and PC games. Its engine is the most popular among games on the Steam PC marketplace, with nearly 38,000 Steam games using its software per Steamdb data. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine trails behind, with over 10,000 games on Steam using its game engine.

One potential issue with this decision is that it arguably punishes successful developers while allowing the smallest of indie developers to continue to scrape by without paying additional fees. While Unity says that “a large majority of Unity Editor users” will not be assessed the URF, it appears that developers seeing even modest success will be charged the fee.

According to Unity’s own FAQ forum on the new fees, the install count is triggered again if a gamer uninstalled and then reinstalls a game—so game developers could end up paying the price for users who might wish to reinstall a game due to personal hardware issues, or a desire to temporarily free up disk space.

But Axios reported Tuesday that Unity President and General Manager Marc Whitten has already switched course, stating the firm wouldn’t charge if a user reinstalls a game. Unity then asserted late Wednesday that it would not count reinstallations toward install counts via a lengthy Twitter post.

Unity has not yet responded to Decrypt’s requests for comment.

Pirated or unlicensed game copies, if installed and played, were initially said to also count toward a game’s URF install quota. Unity first claimed that its existing “fraud detection practices” would at least partially address this concern, but then clarified late Wednesday that “fraudulent installs” would not assess fees to developers.

And developers offering alpha or beta testing experiences will also be effectively punished by the new rules, as any install of a game regardless of development stage will count toward the URF install count. Whitten said that “game demos” would not count as installs, but “early access” game versions would could toward the install count.

Disgruntled developers

Overall, the developer response to Unity’s decision has been overwhelmingly negative. Indie game studio Blinkmoon's CTO Mike Wuetherick, who previously worked at Unity for over six years, tweeted that he's “livid” over the new fee structure.

“I just convinced the studio I work for to switch to Unity for the new game we're working on, only for them to pull this bullshit. I'm fucking livid,” Wuetherick said on Twitter. “I literally have to decide whether to pull the plug on the project and reset today. It’s not looking good for Unity, let's just say.”

Pim de Witte, former mobile game developer turned CEO of gaming clips site Medal.tv, argued that Unity has a “mobile monopoly” among iOS and Android developers, and that Unity’s new policy doesn’t take into account the millions of gamers with Netflix-style game subscriptions. Such services, like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, let gamers install potentially hundreds of titles at will without paying the developer directly.

But Whitten stated that developers with games on Game Pass or similar services will not be directly charged—instead, the subscription issuer would be assessed the fee, Axios reported. This means that Microsoft and Sony may be left to foot large Unity bills, which could cause them to hike up subscription prices or offer fewer games to subscribers down the road. 

Late Wednesday, Unity wrote on Twitter that it would not charge game developers for installs from subscription services.

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Tomas Sala, developer of BAFTA-nominated game The Falconeer, called Unity’s decision “gross.”

“I already committed to their engine for my new game. Put years and years of work into my pipeline,” Sala said. “I have no options, cannot go back, can only bend and pay up.”

Aggro Crab Games, makers of indie games Going Under and Subway Midnight, said that Unity’s new fee may cause the studio to stop using its engine for future games because of the potential incurred costs. 

“On behalf of the dev community, we’re calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product’s actual users,” the team wrote, adding: “I fucking hate it here.”

Innersloth, the game studio behind the viral Twitch hit Among Us, said that Unity’s new fee will “harm” the studio and cause the team to “delay content and features.” The studio urged Unity to “stop it.”

In the world of NFT gaming, Magic Eden Chief Gaming Officer Chris Akhavan called the Unity news “another reminder of managing platform risk.”

“These events are rare, but quickly become existential for game studios already dealing with serious margin compression as growth in the overall games market has slowed,” Akhavan wrote on LinkedIn.

Wildcard developer Paul Bettner said that he loves Unity’s engine and has used it for 15 years. But Bettner shared in a Twitter Space Wednesday that he feels Unity’s decisions over the past few years have been “very difficult and challenging for developers.”

“It makes me so sad,” Bettner said of the news. 

When asked in the Space about the potential financial impact of the new fees for developers, Bettner told Decrypt that the effects could be dramatic, leading to “bills in the six figures” for some developers.

Unity plans to start charging the new fees on January 1, 2024.