Unity Introduces New Runtime Fee allowing them to charge per installation beginning in 2024

[Haaselh0ff]

Summary

 

Unity, the engine behind such hits as every Hoyoverse title ever and such indie greats as Among Us, will begin charging a new "Runtime Fee" beginning in 2024 which allows them to charge per installation if you go over a certain installation threshold or make a certain amount of money off the game.

 

The amount per installation/revenue (pictured below) is a varying amount which depends entirely on what Unity tier your company subscribes to as well as how many installs you get in a given year.

 

Unity made sure to plug their various other programs that are packaged with their listed below subscription plans.

 

 

 

Quotes

Quote

Games qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee after two criteria have been met: 1) the game has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months, and 2) the game has passed a minimum lifetime install count. We set high revenue and game install thresholds to avoid impacting those who have yet to find scale, meaning they don’t need to pay the fee until they have reached significant success.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:

• Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs.
• Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

Summary Continued

 

This has brought numerous amounts of backlash from Developers all across the website formerly known as Twitter. @AggroCrabGames posted the below tweet commenting about how this move easily hurts developers creating games for Game Pass stating that if "If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous debt in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business."httphttp

Other developers make similar comments including company InnerSloth developer @forte_bass which the company's main account retweeted.http

Unity also clarified some questions developers had in regards to how it counts an "installation" Clarifying that if a player deletes and re-installs a game it does indeed count as 2 installations and thus 2 charges.

 

My thoughts

 

What a fantastic advertisement for Godot! (who were also quick to post this new link to their discord and website : https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/

 

It sure seems like Unity wanted a piece of everyone's pie. Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail alone could easily amount to millions of dollars in revenue for them even without assuming people have downloaded the game on multiple platforms (PS5, Cell Phone, PC). The cost of this is exuberant and comes across as a crazy and greedy move leaving many developers wondering if they should switch to a different engine entirely. The argument AggroCrab makes is also extremely concerning. What about Game Pass? If you're not a developer shoving micro transactions in your game (at least Hoyoverse has that covered to account for this massive hit) then how could you possibly justify Game Pass as an option for your Unity game? You reach all these players just to be hit with this massive fee for having a good player base.

 

Hopefully Unity will do an immediate reverse course, but judging by their stock price they will not and will continue to make poor decision after poor decision till everyone moves to either UE5 or Godot.

 

Sources

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

https://www.ign.com/articles/why-unitys-new-install-fees-are-spurring-massive-backlash-among-game-developers

 

[dilpickle]

This always happens when the bean counters start making decisions.

[Haaselh0ff]

1 minute ago, dilpickle said:

This always happens when the bean counters start making decisions.

GOTTA GET THAT STOCK PRICE UP BABY!!

 

Seriously, what a bone head move. I didnt even mention the fact that a person could abuse this to install uninstall a game and abuse the crap out of this to hurt devs. Or that it further incentivizes people to add DRM to their games to stop pirates from installing it now that they're going to be charged per install and need to make sure someone paid for it.

[rcmaehl]

 

[wanderingfool2]

Welp, I'm done recommending people try playing around with Unity.

 

Revenue sharing I'm for 100%; but install based at a rate like that without any exceptions for size is to me where I would not want to develop anymore with it.

 

Based on my first Android game (back pre-unity days), where I didn't put ads in a great spot I would now owe Unity $200...despite only making $100 off of it (it was a terrible game btw, but still managed to get over 1000+ installs before I decided to remove it from the PlayStore)

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Haaselh0ff said:

Summary

 

Unity, the engine behind such hits as every Hoyoverse title ever and such indie greats as Among Us, will begin charging a new "Runtime Fee" beginning in 2024 which allows them to charge per installation if you go over a certain installation threshold or make a certain amount of money off the game.

 

The amount per installation/revenue (pictured below) is a varying amount which depends entirely on what Unity tier your company subscribes to as well as how many installs you get in a given year.

 

 

Unity was always the worst license (next to GameMaker's Adobe-style license, which makes using it to develop indie games a pain unless you only make HTML5 exports, otherwise it's 80$/mo to export to game consoles ).  Just because you can download the engine for free, doesn't mean you can make a free game because Unity wants install fees, and GameMaker want's ongoing developer install fees. Both of these make "free games"/"free software"  impossible to maintain unless there is some skinner box mechanic to empty the wallet of the player.

 

Unreal's terms are even extremely reasonable (5% of all revenue.) Not perfect, but this is why you see "good" games that use the GPU and CPU extensively built on Unreal, but not Unity. Unity is Mobile-first, and has a reputation for being used for junky asset-flip fake games.

 

Then you have Godot and Stride (formerly Xenko) which are basically Unity-like which are both under the MIT license. Godot is a mobile-first style of engine (engine environment designed around OpenGL ES and HTML5 exportables), where as Stride is more of a desktop-first one (iOS and Android available, but not game consoles or web.)

 

Like I'd recommend Unity developers who aren't heavily invested in the Unity asset store to build their next game on Godot.

 

[da na]

Unity has just been getting worse over the last several years... 

[KaitouX]

Quote

I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)

- If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges

- Same if they install on 2 devices

- Charity games/bundles exempted from fees

 

I noted that the charge per installation seemed vulnerable to abuse. Unity says it will use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team

lol the party that profits from frauds is the one that is going to put protections in place. Makes complete sense.

[PocketNerd]

Enshitification: Unity Edition

[Taf the Ghost]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Unity was always the worst license (next to GameMaker's Adobe-style license, which makes using it to develop indie games a pain unless you only make HTML5 exports, otherwise it's 80$/mo to export to game consoles ).  Just because you can download the engine for free, doesn't mean you can make a free game because Unity wants install fees, and GameMaker want's ongoing developer install fees. Both of these make "free games"/"free software"  impossible to maintain unless there is some skinner box mechanic to empty the wallet of the player.

 

Unreal's terms are even extremely reasonable (5% of all revenue.) Not perfect, but this is why you see "good" games that use the GPU and CPU extensively built on Unreal, but not Unity. Unity is Mobile-first, and has a reputation for being used for junky asset-flip fake games.

 

Then you have Godot and Stride (formerly Xenko) which are basically Unity-like which are both under the MIT license. Godot is a mobile-first style of engine (engine environment designed around OpenGL ES and HTML5 exportables), where as Stride is more of a desktop-first one (iOS and Android available, but not game consoles or web.)

 

Like I'd recommend Unity developers who aren't heavily invested in the Unity asset store to build their next game on Godot.

 

The fact Epic somehow comes out of the modern game engine days as the reasonably option is wild. But, here we are.  I thought maybe Unity had been bought by a Venture Capital or Private Equity firm. No, they're a public company that went on a buying spree and recently cut some jobs.  But.....

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello

 

Old Jonny Boy re-enters the ring!  Though I don't think he was the studio murdered. He just likes to buy up everything, which is exactly what Unity did after they went public.

 

I don't have an issue with a company making money off their engines. But Unity is going to create this horrible gap that anyone that wants to make a "cheap" game is going to have to think really hard about it. Vampire Survivors is the one to watch here, as that's in Unity.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 hours ago, da na said:

Unity has just been getting worse over the last several years... 

They went public, the engine is their core revenue source and they've moved into pure extraction mode since its likely the revenues are not as high as necessary to keep up their valuations that the upper Execs need to cash out massively. (It's the latter part that does a lot of the damage to companies, honestly.)

[Quackers101]

Unity is in a bad state, you get some pros but more cons.
Also what we have seen many years now, some of the business focus making it look very different than a decade ago?
They have released or is going to release some cool stuff, so sad to see this going on.

Else every other engine is taking their shot at unity, from unreal, godot (open source?), and a few others.

[WereCat]

I had no idea that anyone could overtake Activision Blizzard in greed race. 

[SorryBella]

7 hours ago, Haaselh0ff said:

What a fantastic advertisement for Godot!

 

But this is assuming that every devs want to port Unity titles to other engines, or have the resources to. Unity just priced out indie devs. Also, to add, Devolver might be very much reserved in approving Unity-based titles in the future.

You wanna know what that also includes? The upcoming 2nd title from Nomada, Neva. Anything I say to Unity would just break CS if something happened to the development of it.

[williamcll]

Does this mean Unreal is now cheaper?

[Avocado Diaboli]

How does Unity track those installs? Are pirated games also included in that calculation?

[saltycaramel]

If (a big if, mind you, still) Apple’s visionOS platform becomes “the next iPhone”, it being very Unity-centric could mean tons of cash for Unity, because, whether you like these fees or not, you’re de facto forced to use Unity. (until Godot and UE write a plug-in for visionOS, but obviously the most “native” as in blessed-by-Apple way is Unity)

[williamcll]

25 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

How does Unity track those installs? Are pirated games also included in that calculation?

A lot of telemetry

[KaitouX]

How much money would Unity get from Among Us alone if it was released after those changes? That game is cheap, but it sold a ton and has cosmetics, so it surely would be over all thresholds, but it's free on multiple platforms and Google Play alone says 500M+ downloads... Add that to 20M+ owners on steam(not installations), that it was free on Epic, is available on iOS, and is included on gamepass, it's likely over 1 billion installs, which would make Unity at least 10 million dollars if they were an Enterprise user, 20 million if Pro, and a massive 200 million if they were a Personal or Plus user. That could easily bankrupt an indie dev that makes a F2P game with Micro transactions, or with paid versions that ends up going viral like Among Us.

[porina]

Will have to crunch some numbers later, but this doesn't sound good for games aiming for high install counts using a f2p model.

 

I did look at home brew game dev previously. I kinda started on Gogot but was debating if I should check out the bigger names like Unreal and Unity since they may have wider applicability if I really get into it. I was leaning towards Unreal already as it seemed a better one stop solution than the fragmented mess that Unity was. Also, I found Unity licence terms unreadable which was also off putting. Basically couldn't work out the limitations of the "free" tier at the time.

[Kisai]

58 minutes ago, KaitouX said:

How much money would Unity get from Among Us alone if it was released after those changes? That game is cheap, but it sold a ton and has cosmetics, so it surely would be over all thresholds, but it's free on multiple platforms and Google Play alone says 500M+ downloads... Add that to 20M+ owners on steam(not installations), that it was free on Epic, is available on iOS, and is included on gamepass, it's likely over 1 billion installs, which would make Unity at least 10 million dollars if they were an Enterprise user, 20 million if Pro, and a massive 200 million if they were a Personal or Plus user. That could easily bankrupt an indie dev that makes a F2P game with Micro transactions, or with paid versions that ends up going viral like Among Us.

 

At any rate, no developer wants to become upside down in owing Unity money, so you can bet this has already likely shelved or terminated several games.

 

Here's a fun thought experiment. Goose Goose Duck is an Among Us clone that basically does Among Us somewhat better. Both of those are Unity. Which developer do you think is going to switch game engines just to save this BS install fee?

[AlexGoesHigh]

 

[RoseLuck462]

Does this mean that all games made with Unity are technically always online since it would need to send a report every time a game is installed? Will it mean having to have an online connection to install?

 

Eitherway this move sounds awful 

[wanderingfool2]

3 hours ago, RoseLuck462 said:

Does this mean that all games made with Unity are technically always online since it would need to send a report every time a game is installed? Will it mean having to have an online connection to install?

 

Eitherway this move sounds awful 

It all depends on how they implement it.  Since it something as simple as a fresh install count, all it would have to do is essentially keep a config file that has a flag set saying it's registered itself as an install.  Most users wouldn't bother figuring out how to make it look like it's already "installed" and it wouldn't require being online (instead it could just call out if there is an internet connection, but continue if not).  This kind of approach might be good in that it if someone deletes their config it counts as a new install.

 

Like if they "needed" more money; I would have been okay with them lowering the indie level revenue sharing level.  Even if they did something like $5,000 (but didn't really enforce it) I would be okay with it.  At $5,000 a year before revenue sharing it would start making people consider the paid options, and those who don't will be sharing a lot more revenue...and it doesn't feel like a kick in the gut either (since at $5k/m that's at a level where self reporting the profits would only take a minimal amount of time)

[Paul Thexton]

17 hours ago, Haaselh0ff said:

Unity also clarified some questions developers had in regards to how it counts an "installation" Clarifying that if a player deletes and re-installs a game it does indeed count as 2 installations and thus 2 charges.