In a hurried “regroup” Unity has decided to dramatically soften it’s “once per install” fee and says it’s “listening to community feedback”.
Well, that didn’t take long, less than a day after Unity’s announcement it would be requiring developers to pay a fee per end-user install the company has responded to the overwhelming amount of negative feedback, bad press, and outrage among indie developers big and small. In a series of tweets, forum clarifications, and direct communication with Axios’ Steven Totilo; Unity has both clarified a few points of contention and walked back completely on others.
If you didn’t read the news I broke yesterday, be sure to check it out for the full story at this link: Unity updates its paid plan. But long story short, Unity wanted to charge developers or publishers a one-time fee (anywhere from $0.20 to $0.01 per install depending on volume and subscription plan) for installs of the Unity Runtime process on any end-user devices. This would effectively be an additional fee on top of the license fee developers pay based on a game’s popularity and profitability. The salient note was that if a game had made less than 200k for Personal license users, or 1 million for Pro license and had less than the same amount of downloads developers would be exempt from the fee.
Once this was announced many angry developers took to X (formerly Twitter) to voice their dissatisfaction, some claiming they would never develop a game on Unity again. Several valid concerns were brought up, among which were “install bombing” a concept where malicious players could use bots to reinstall the same game thousands of times to cost the developer more than they make, uncertainty around how it would work for pirated games, game demos, charity giveaways, game bundles, and subscription services like Game Pass.
In response to this anger Unity has responded with the following:
- Game demos that don’t eventually upgrade into the full game on the same install will be exempt (so early access would still count).
- Charity giveaways will be exempt.
- Anti-fraud measures will be used to determine if a game is a legitimate install or pirated.
- Only the first install will count, uninstalling and reinstalling will no longer incur the fee multiple times. Though installs on multiple different devices; laptops and home computers etc. will still count twice (unclear how they would determine this).
- Services like Game Pass, bundles, and Epic’s free weekly game would still incur the fee, however, it would be the publisher that would be on the hook for that and not the developer (so Microsoft and Epic etc.)
- Unity estimates that this fee will only affect about 10% of Unity developers given the threshold and exemptions.
Many developers and users still aren’t happy however, pointing out that while revenue-sharing plans common to other engines might have a higher upfront cost for developers, it is also a more predictable and transparent cost, and far less abusable by bad actors. Others question the integrity of making such a move at such short notice, making Unity seem like an “unsafe” partner and claim that trust has been eroded between Unity and its customers. You’ll find all this and more in the X thread responding to the initial Unity announcement.
