Unity finally apologizes to game devs with latest round of fee concessions

September 22, 2023 2:30 PM

Unity has delivered what is essentially its latest round of concessions to the gaming industry after nearly two weeks of uproar over its originally proposed retroactive per-install fees.

Unity’s Marc Whitten apologizes directly to the community this time, unlike the last time. “We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy,” he says. “Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.”

Unity’s new pitch doesn’t actually get rid of the per-install fees it plans to leverage on game developers. In a nutshell, it foregoes fees on Unity Personal, it doubles the revenue cap to $200,000, it reassures devs that games earning less than $1M per year will see no fees, it offers pro and enterprise users a choice of being billed on a 2.5% revenue shares or a installs, and it reiterates its earlier concession to make that data self-reported. It also goes even further making the policy non-retroactive:

“The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity. We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version.”

Whitten is promising to answer questions during a stream this afternoon at 4 p.m. EDT.