It took a little longer than expected, but Unity finally reversed the most contentious points of their runtime fee policy and made welcomed tweaks to others.
In an open letter to the community which includes another public apology Marc Whitten, head of Unity Create has officially revealed the changes Unity intends to make to the controversial Runtime fee they announced on September 12th. Last I wrote about this issue it was when we got information leaked by Jason Schreier of Bloomberg from the internal Unity all-hands meeting earlier this week. From this we got a few improvements to the policy; 4% revenue cap on the fee, developers self-reporting the numbers, and no more retroactive counting of numbers (so games already over the threshold would start at zero on January 1st).
First, one of the biggest concerns and breaches of trust the Unity developer community were angered by was Unity retroactively applying the fee to older versions of Unity, effectively forcing developers into the scheme and potentially saddling them with huge bills they’d have little recourse to avoid (even removing games from the steam store wouldn’t save them from people uninstalling and reinstalling already purchased games). Now the fee will only apply to Unity LTS versions (lifetime service version) released in 2024 and later, meaning that developers can once again stay on the terms of service they “signed” on whatever LTS version their game is currently on, and avoid the fee by not upgrading. This is a huge deal and will effectively mean no large and popular games currently on the market will likely ever have to pay the fee.
As was revealed from the all-hands leak, Unity is also transitioning away from their proprietary install tracking system (which they never did end up revealing exactly how would work), and into developers self-reporting the figure based on data they will have available through the analytics module.
The second change; instead of the fee being capped at 4% revenue as was leaked earlier in the week, Unity will now give any game subject to the revenue fee the option of staying on the fee system or switching to a flat 2.5% revenue share model akin to what developers are already used to from Unreal Engine (though half since Unreal takes 5%). Given that the data is self-reported, developers should be easily able to calculate the cheapest option for them before the bill is due. Unity claims you’ll always be billed the lesser amount each billing cycle, whichever that will be.
Lastly, the Unity Personal plan will indeed remain free, and the requirement to upgrade to Pro (which has existed for years now) will be set once a game hits 200k in revenue instead of the previous 100k. This is completely separate from the runtime fee. In addition, the 200k threshold for Unity Personal to start applying the fee is now gone, and Personal just like Pro games now needs a revenue over 1 million before they’re no longer exempt from the runtime fee. As a bonus, Unity Personal users will no longer need to use the “Made in Unity” splash screen when booting up their games.
Finally, Marc Whitten did a Q&A with Jason Wiemann (a leading Unity developer and education content creator with one of the biggest Unity-focused communities on Discord) about the changes and goes into more granular detail there, it’s a good listen be sure to check it out.
I will most likely do a postmortem on this whole situation next week once the dust has settled some more and we get an idea of how the community has received this change. These appear to be mostly great changes overall, but some people in the community still feel betrayed and would like to see the executive branch of Unity be replaced.
