It looks like all the “hard feedback” from the Unity user base has been heard, and Unity is adjusting its runtime fee update because of it.
Marc Whitten, the president of Unity Create, released an open letter on Friday to the community, followed by a live Fireside Chat with The Verge to try and explain the “why” and the “what now”.
Before digging into any of the details, in both the letter and in the interview, Whitten started with “I am sorry.” He then explained how the team should have taken in more community feedback before just implementing the runtime fee update.
Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.
In the Fireside Chat, Whitten added that the runtime fee was meant to be a way for Unity and its users to have some sort of “shared success”.
Of course, Unity is a business at the end of the day and it’s going to try and make a profit where it can.
But what changes will be implemented now that the community is in an uproar?
Well, first of all, the runtime fee no longer applies to users who are using the free version of the Unity plan: Unity Personal. “Our Unity Personal plan will remain free, and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal,” said Whitten in his open letter. They are also going to increase the eligibility cap for Unity Personal from $100,000 to $200,000. So, if you make less than this amount, you are still able to use the free version of Unity. Whitten said they would also be removing the “made with Unity” splash requirement from the Personal plan.
The runtime fee was initially based off of the number of installations, but now Unity is changing this to “engagements”, defined by Whitten in the Fireside Chat as “a legitimate user of your software on a particular distribution channel.”. These engagements will also be self-reported by Unity users instead of calculated by some unknown method from Unity.
Runtime fees will also now only apply to games that have a revenue of over $1 million and have a trailing 12-month engagement of 1 million users. If a Unity developer still feels like the runtime fee will be overly inflated, Unity has also offered a flat 2.5% revenue share option.
A lot of changes have been made since the original announcement, but the runtime fee update is still going ahead, and the trust between Unity and a lot of its developers has already been broken, so I’m sure we will see a lot more indie games being built on other engines like UE5 or Godot.
If you’d like to watch the full Fireside chat to hear more about what Whitten had to say about the updates and the new Terms of Service, you can check it out below.
