Unity has now officially canceled the controversial runtime fee. This fee was originally implemented in September 2023.
Unity is a game engine, released in 2005, used by indie developers to create many popular games like Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Sub Nautica, Among Us, and many others.
Around a year ago, Unity announced a new licensing model for its engine. Instead of using a subscription, Unity started charging a runtime fee depending on how many times their games were downloaded after hitting a certain milestone in revenue.
This change by Unity faced massive backlash from the game developers due to its nature. Its invasive nature, and how prone it was to manipulation led to the boycott of the engine by many creators. Just a month after this change was announced, CEO John Riccitiello left the company.
The new CEO Matt Bromberg announced that this runtime fee would be canceled. According to him, the company decided to return to the original subscription mode after extensive talks with the community, customers, and partners.
According to the new pricing strategy, the Unity Personal model will be made available for free until a game developer’s revenue hits $200,000. Other models will return to the original subscription pricing strategy. However, they will increase the prices a bit. Now, the cost of Unity Pro will be 8% and Unity Enterprise will be 25%.
Due to the immediate backlash faced by Unity, the company had to go back on some aspects of the fees. After the immediate backlash, the engine maker exempted the older versions of Unity from the fees and allowed the devs to self-report their earnings instead of tracking downloads.
However, it seems that these changes were not enough for developers to keep sticking with Unity. Despite being one of the most popular game engines on the market, Unity had to go back to its original subscription plan.
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