Unity has once again revised the fee plans for using the Unity engine, so that they now deviate significantly from the original and heavily criticized intentions. The first details are available.
After Unity attracted a lot of criticism from developers with changes to the monetization plans for the game engine of the same name, this followed A first course correction later this weekwhich resulted in further adjustments at the weekend.
Building on this, a… open letter written to the developer community explaining the changes. This shows that the previously criticized runtime fee for games developed using Unity Personal will no longer be implemented.
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Additionally, the revenue limit up to which users of Unity Personal, which is intended for individuals, hobby developers and small organizations, can stay in this tier will be increased – from $100,000 to $200,000 per year. Additionally, the requirement to display the “Made with Unity” splash screen when starting the game is no longer required.
Runtime fee continues for Unity Pro and Enterprise, but with changes
The new Runtime Fee Policy remains in effect for Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise. However, there is one crucial change: it no longer applies retroactively to games that have already been published. From 2024, only games developed with the next LTS version of the engine will have to pay the runtime fee.
“Only games built with or updated to the Long Term Support (LTS) version – released in 2024 (or later) and currently referred to as 2023 LTS – will be affected,” said Unity’s Marc Whitten .
For these games, the fee is only due when two thresholds have been exceeded: $1,000,000 in gross sales over a twelve-month period AND 1,000,000 initial registrations.
After that, developers have the choice between a 2.5 percent revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with the game each month.
“Both numbers come from your own information and are based on data that is already available to you. You will always be charged the lower amount,” emphasizes Unity.
Unity admits that they should have spoken to the developers
“I’m sorry,” Whitten said in the open letter. “We should have spoken to more of you and incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new runtime fee policy.”
He added: “You are the ones who make Unity great. And we know we have to listen and work hard to earn your trust. We have heard your concerns and we are making changes to the policy we announced to address them.”
Further news about Unity:
The latest announcement follows criticism from several indie developers about Unity’s runtime fee policy. She was referring to the fact that developers should pay fees to Unity every time a game is installed. In the original version, older games and even multiple installations on the same platform were supposed to count retroactively, which raised fears of a kind of “install bombing”.
More news about Unity.
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