Calling all indie game developers, whether you’re just doing it for fun or trying to start off your career, Unity have decided to increase their prices.
For small-scale development teams or even solo devs, if you were using Unity as an engine to build your game upon, you were probably using one of the lower tiers of the Unity subscription model. Of course, the free tier offers the least perks, so if you were serious about your game, you were probably subscribed to the Plus tier.
Unity has decided to drop the Plus tier to “simplify the number of plans we offer.”. This means that you will now be forced to use the Pro tier, which is around three times more per year in cost. They have been nice enough to offer the Pro tier for a year at the original price of the Plus tier, but after that year, your price goes up.
If that doesn’t deter you, a runtime fee has also been added.
The runtime fee will be calculated per installation of your game. There are two thresholds that need to be met before you start getting charged, and a handy table has been supplied to help us understand these costs:
| Unity Personal and Unity Plus | Unity Pro | Unity Enterprise | |
| Hit Both to Apply for Runtime Fee | Hit Both to Apply for Runtime Fee | Hit Both to Apply for Runtime Fee | |
| Revenue Threshold (last 12 months) | $200,000 (USD) | $1,000,000 (USD) | $1,000,000 (USD) |
| Install Threshold (lifetime) | 200,000 | 1,000,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Standard Rate | Standard Rate | Standard Rate | |
| Installs Per Month | |||
| 1–100,000 | $0.20 per install | $0.15 per install | $0.125 per install |
| 100,001–500,000 | $0.20 per install | $0.075 per install | $0.06 per install |
| 500,001–1,000,000 | $0.20 per install | $0.03 per install | $0.02 per install |
| 1,000,001+ | $0.20 per install | $0.02 per install | $0.01 per install |
| Emerging Markets Rate | Emerging Markets Rate | Emerging Markets Rate | |
| 1+ | $0.02 per install | $0.01 per install | $0.005 per install |
Emerging Markets include countries not from the list: United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
An example of how the costs can be calculated from the FAQ shows the difference between standard and emerging markets rates:
Let’s look at a hypothetical game made by a team using Unity Pro with the following revenue and install numbers:
Revenue from last 12 months – $2M USD
Lifetime installs – 5MThe Unity Runtime Fee will apply to this game, as it surpasses the $1M revenue and 1M lifetime install thresholds for Unity Pro. Let’s look at the game’s installs from the last month:
Prior month installs (Standard fee countries) – 200K
Prior month installs (Emerging market fee countries) – 100KThe fee for install activity is $23.5K USD, calculated as follows:
(100K x $0.15 (first tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.075 (second tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.01 (fee for emerging market countries)) = $23.5K USD
With other engines out there, like Unreal Engine 5, that remain free to use Unity could be losing quite a few customers over these price changes.
Let us know in the comments if you dabble in Unity and if this will be affecting your future work with the engine.
