The intense backlash over Unity’s decision to assign staggering new per-install fees to game studios last week probably made last night’s admission inevitable: At 7:13 p.m. EDT on Sunday evening, Unity tweeted an apology for the chaos it caused:
“We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.”
Worth noting is that the company doesn’t apologize for the fee, only for the mess the fee policy caused. It does not directly own or apologize for its actions.
As readers will already know, Unity has been faced with employee resignations, broken studio partnerships, ad system boycotts, reported death threats that shut down the company, and the anger of the vast majority of the gaming industry over the course of the last week, all owing to Unity’s decision to unilaterally impose brand-new fees on Unity game developers on a per-install basis. The new fees not only hurt indie, mid-size, and free-to-play titles the most but have essentially demolished any sense of trust in the Unity community as the fees were not part of the licensing agreement. Stealth-editing the developer TOS after the fact didn’t help matters either.
Don’t get too excited about the company’s newfound penitence, however; one indie developer has already put the lie to Unity’s claim that its runtime fee won’t apply to charity bundles after Unity reportedly declared that some of its charities weren’t “valid charities” but rather “political groups,” making clear the company aims to spend time and money dodging its promised carve-outs. The charities here happened to be a children’s hospital in Michigan and the non-profit Planned Parenthood. “I speak on behalf of all of us when I say: GET F*CKED!” Orgynizer studio LizardFactory said before telling players about its plans to ditch Unity.
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