A year after vaporizing industry trust, Unity abandons runtime fees, raising subscriptions instead

September 13, 2024 12:30 PM

A year ago this week, the doofuses running Unity surprise-announced they were adding new per-install and runtime fees with multiple tiers designed to leech money from developers and publishers who kept Unity a market leader. The industry blowback not only forced Unity to backtrack and apologize but ultimately contributed to the downfall of Unity boss John Riccitiello, who resigned after a month of drama and protests.

You’d probably forgotten all about it, but Unity’s new boss, Matt Bromberg, decided this would be a great time to press the big undo button on the runtime fee thing and replace it with a… subscription hike.

“After deep consultation with our community, customers, and partners, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee for our games customers, effective immediately,” he writes. Saying that its mission requires a measure of trust with game devs, Bromberg explains that the company is “reverting to [its] existing seat-based subscription model for all gaming customers, including those who adopt Unity 6, the most performant and stable version of Unity yet, later this year.”

However, the new plan also doubles the funding ceiling for Unity Personal while raising subscriptions by 8% and 25% for Pro and Enterprise studios, respectively. Enterprise customers are defined as those with more than $25M in revenue/funding, but Pro users are defined as those bringing in $200K, which… isn’t very much and definitely still claps indies hard.

“From this point forward, it’s our intention to revert to a more traditional cycle of considering any potential price increases only on an annual basis. Our commitment remains that if we change the Editor software terms in ways that impact you, you may continue using your current version of the software under the previously agreed terms as long as you keep using that version. […] Canceling the Runtime Fee for games and instituting these pricing changes will allow us to continue investing to improve game development for everyone while also being better partners.”