What Happens When the Unity Runtime Fee is Removed: The Impact of Developer Feedback on the Unity Platform and the Next-Generation Unity Project

Friday’s changes remove the Runtime Fee for games created “with any currently supported Unity versions.” Instead, the fee will only affect games created or upgraded with the Long Term Support version of Unity expected in 2024. Only when the game has reached $1 million in gross revenue for the trailing year and 1 million initial engagements will the fee be applied. From there, devs can pay the fee “either based on monthly initial engagements or 2.5 percent of your game’s monthly gross revenue. You will most likely be charged the lesser of the two. Smaller developers will not have to pay the fee to use the version of the game engine known as Unity Personal.

Even though the most egregious changes have been walked back, some developers say the damage has been done. “The demonstrated willingness, eagerness to change an agreement, even going so far as to delete their GitHub [repository] that stated developers would only be beholden to the agreement under which they signed up, erodes trust,” says Brandon Sheffield, one of the many developers who have been vocal about the changes announced last week. Part of that is because he and his team were among the first to be Privileged to these changes and pushed back against them. “We knew the reaction would be resoundingly negative, but we weren’t listened to.”

Throughout this rollout, users have asked how Unity will determine when a game has met download and revenue thresholds. It previously said it relied on proprietary software but wouldn’t reveal how the software worked. Developers were worried that proprietary software would run afoul of privacy laws or that it was unreliable. Unity has come out and said it will allow users to self-report revenue.

Unity, the company behind the game engine of the same name, is walking back part of a controversial new fee policy announced last week that infuriated developers and ignited a firestorm of criticism across the industry. “We should have spoken with more of you, and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing,” Unity president Marc Whitten wrote in a mea culpa published today on the company’s blog.

Regardless of what happens in Unity, Necrosoft Games won’t use it for its next project. “We simply don’t trust them to stick to their word,” he says. “We don’t trust them to update their engine in ways that affect us, as PC/console developers, in a positive way. I think they have done irreparable damage to their brand for game developers in general, and the walkback isn’t going to fix it.”