I reported earlier today about Unity’s tweet apologizing and promising we could expect news of major changes based on the community feedback (or as I like to think of it; “firestorm of anger”) coming to the new and controversial runtime fee price change they originally announced on the 12th of September last week. Now, however, it appears we don’t have to wait that long for a glimpse of what these changes might be, thanks once again to reports from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier.
Among the news coming out from the internal all-hands meeting held earlier today (Monday the 18th of September) is that Unity is planning to set a maximum limit of the fees to be no more than 4% of the game’s revenue (presumably for any given billing period). And as has been revealed earlier the fee would only apply to customers earning over $1 million in revenue and getting over 1 million installs. Regardless of how this is counted, Unity is effectively 1% cheaper than Unreal Engine, their primary competitor. No word yet if the waiver for developers opting into Unity Ads and ironSource services would still count.
Another change is reported to be the issue of retroactively counting installs, with Unity now saying that all developers would start at a count of 0 installs on January 1st 2024, instead of however many millions they had already sold up till then.
Finally, Unity CEO John Riccitiello revealed that Unity would be turning away from nebulous and non-transparent proprietary tools to track game installations and instead rely on self-reporting from developers. Of course, I don’t expect they’ll turn off these tools on their end and will likely use them to highlight under-reporting from developers that might trigger further investigation/auditing.
Marc Witten told Bloomberg that they hadn’t made any public announcements yet because of their deep regret on how things were done the first time around (last week’s announcement). To this effect, Unity is reportedly talking through things with all its partners and ensuring that the new policy changes have been accepted by all major partners before moving forward. With that in mind, I expect more details about the policy will likely change again before the final public announcement due later this week.
One point, in particular, I expect they’ll have to address is the retroactive effect this has on the terms of service older LTS versions of Unity developers “bought-in” on with the promise of no form of revenue share. If Unity announces that the new runtime fee will only affect future releases of Unity then they might just appease enough developers to look past this week’s disaster, but if not, many developers will undoubtedly feel they have no reason left to trust Unity.
Once again, stay tuned to Razzem for future updates on the story.
