Unity introduces new fee per game download, but it’s not as scary as it sounds.
Update: A large community uproar resulted from this announcement and Unity has responded. Read more about it in my follow-up: Unity clarifies and walks back to yesterday’s pricing change announcement.
Unity just updated us on the plan pricing and packaging updates for their Personal and Plus subscription plans and their more premium Pro, Enterprise and Industry plans which cost anywhere from ~2000 to ~4000+ (depending on seats) USD per year. But it’s not these yearly licensing fees that are increasing in price, instead, it’s a new fee being introduced called the “Unity Runtime Fee”.
This new fee is based on any time a game using the Unity Runtime process is downloaded, on any device. Effectively the Unity Runtime process is the actual engine all the games made with Unity run on, the Unity Editor being just the visual interface developers use to access the Unity Runtime process. So for those of you who catch on quick this fee will apply to every download of every game made with Unity.
There are some exceptions for the little guys however, developers and publishers are exempt from this fee if their game has made less than 200,000 USD in the last 12 months, or has under 200,000 lifetime installs. This is for Unity Personal and Plus accounts, for Pro and Enterprise the limits on both go up to 1 million. If developers are successful and breach the threshold volume starts to matter, as the rate is 0.2$ for Personal and Plus accounts, $0.15 for Pro, and $0.125 for Enterprise accounts if you only breach the installs by under 100k, however as soon as you start getting more installs (presumably earning more) the fee per install goes down gradually, all the way to $0.01 per install for Enterprise level accounts. See the table Unity provided below for more detail.
Along with this change in payment structure unity is making standard a bunch of new features that in the past weren’t. Personal accounts get Unity Asset Manager, three Unity DevOps seats, and 200 Windows build minutes. Unity Pro gets all the same plus more storage per seat for the Asset Manger (50GB instead of 10GB) and Team Administration tools. Enterprise follows a similar pattern with more storage, seats and better Team administration tools. All subscription models get access to Unity Sentis, which is their new AI model which can be used for anything from generating NPC dialogue (text and speech), to building levels, to lip syncing, to generating 3d models, and of course to help code and develop gameplay systems in Unity.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that Unity Plus is included in these pricing structures and feature access changes, but the subscription tier itself is being retired as of today, being instead rolled into Unity Pro. Existing Unity Plus subscribers will keep their access through the contract period, and will be offered the ability to upgrade to Unity Pro at the same price they’re used to from Plus, though this seems to be only for the first year. Make sure to check out their full blog post for more details right here.
For gamers, we’re expecting this won’t make much of a difference as far as pricing goes as it should be a relatively minor extra cost for companies already successful enough to have breached the minimum threshold, and will obviously have no effect on the ones who haven’t. But as with anything like this, only time will tell. In the meantime, if you’re looking to get into Unity development, check out my guide on best Unity 3D tutorials for beginners.
