On September 22, 2023, Marc Warren sent an open letter apologizing for Unity’s planned change in pay policy. Unity announced a new runtime fee policy that would charge developers for every game installation, including on free and educational games. The policy was met with widespread backlash from the community. Unity promised to make updates and it finally has.
Unity announced that it made updates to the Editor Terms and runtime fee policy to address some of the concerns that were raised. This is the update mentioned in the open letter from Warren. The Editor Terms have been updated to make it clear that developers can stay on the terms of the version of Unity they are using, even if the terms change later.
This means that developers will not be forced to upgrade to a new version of Unity if they do not want to, and they will not be subject to any new fees or terms that are not included in the version of Unity they are using. The runtime fee policy has also been updated to make it more fair and transparent.
Here is a summary of the changes:
- The Unity Personal plan will remain free and exempt from the runtime fee.
- The revenue threshold for the runtime fee has been increased from $100,000 to $200,000.
- Games with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue are now exempt from the runtime fee.
- Developers now have a choice of paying a 2.5% revenue share or a calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with their game each month.
- Developers can self-report the data used to calculate the runtime fee.
- The runtime fee policy will not apply to games created with or upgraded to the next major release of Unity (shipping in 2024) and beyond.
- Games that are currently shipped and the projects currently being worked on will not be subject to the runtime fee unless the developer chooses to upgrade them to the next major release of Unity.
This pretty much addresses every issue that people raised but this shouldn’t have been an issue to begin with. Unreal Engine clearly leads the charge for Triple-A games and animation, so I couldn’t believe Unity would make that kind of change against developers. This just makes Unreal seem even more like the clear choice.
Hopefully, this new change will ease a lot of concerns many developers had.
