Unity Technologies Reworks New Runtime Fee

feryquitous · September 22, 2023

Summary

Unity Technologies revised its previously announced "Runtime Fee" with a number of changes and concessions, pending legal finalization. Gone(?) are the worries of retroactive license changes and murky install-counting as a basis for the fee.

Quotes

Quote

The [pre-update] changes were announced only last week, and immediately attracted the ire of nearly everyone in the gaming community, prompting a panicked “clarification” soft-pedaling of the “runtime fee” that would be owed with every install of a game past a certain level of revenue. The plan was intensely unpopular, as apart from the increased costs many would incur under it, it suggested that the people running the show at Unity were completely disconnected from the community.

Quote

In an "open letter" published today, Unity executive Marc Whitten outlined the revised plan. Here's the big stuff:

The new install fee (called a "Runtime Fee") will not apply to games made with the Unity Personal or Plus plans, only the Pro and Enterprise plans.

The free Unity Personal plan was previously restricted to studios that made less than $100K in the past 12 months. That threshold has been increased to $200K.

The Runtime Fee won't apply to games made on the current or older versions of Unity, unless the developer moves them onto a new version releasing next year or future versions.

Games which are subject to the Runtime Fee (they've made $1M in the past 12 months and have been installed more than 1M times) can opt for a 2.5% revenue share instead, and will always be billed whichever amount is lower.

Installs will be self-reported, rather than determined by Unity's "proprietary data model."

Quote

The change from "installs" in last week's announcement to "initial engagements" this week is intended to replace a term "the community found to be unclear," according to a Unity FAQ. As a statistic, the initial engagement number is meant to track "a distinct end user [who] successfully and legitimately acquires, downloads, or engages with a game powered by the Unity Runtime, for the first time in a distribution channel."

This definition means that multiple installs by a single user (on a single or multiple devices) should not count multiple times toward the total. Public displays of a game (in a museum, for instance) will only count once as well, and pirated copies should not count at all. A single user purchasing a game from two different app stores would count as two "initial engagements," however, and games distributed via subscription and streaming services or WebGL applications will need to pay per user.

Unity acknowledges this might be a hard statistic for developers to precisely track and expects developers to estimate based on "readily available data" like units sold and first-time user downloads. For those who can't make an accurate estimate, Unity recommends using the alternative 2.5 percent revenue share cap.

My thoughts

The changes generally make sense, but this incident left a bad taste in my mouth. A lot of user trust was lost with this incident, and I don't see many developers sticking around when the next harebrained monetization scheme is inevitably pulled out. The good thing here is that the community backlash was intense, which could amount to some deterrent from attempting future changes along these lines in the industry.

Sources

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/22/unity-u-turns-on-controversial-runtime-fee-and-begs-forgiveness

https://www.pcgamer.com/unity-install-fee-changes/

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/unity-makes-major-changes-to-controversial-install-fee-program/

Extra: first-party FAQ for comparison

https://web.archive.org/web/20230920074750/https://unity.com/pricing-updates

https://web.archive.org/web/20230922172708/http://www.unity.com/pricing-updates