This article is a follow-up to the Unity Runtime Fee article.
After ten days of silence, Unity Technologies finally made an update on the changes they are implementing in their price structure.
We will check the changes and give some thoughts about the situation.
Motivation
I want to touch briefly on the motivation for these changes because it is important to be on the same page before analyzing the actual changes.
We must remember that the company has to change its price structure. They are losing money, and if the company can’t be profitable, the product will have to cease to exist. I know many people see this as corporate greed or a result of the company being public. That’s not the case here. Sure, the first batch of changes was greed and trying to push everything to the limit. I agree with that. But they have to make changes no matter what because the product is in trouble if they don’t get more cash flow.
Having that out of the way, we can look at changes to see how good or bad they are.
Changes
I want to highlight three things for these changes that, for me, are the most important ones.
The first thing is that the changes are fair. Why? Because they are in effect for the next version of Unity, 2023 LTS. This is extremely important for me because it respects the developer’s choice to build something with Unity. If you have an old game, a game to be released, or just started your new project, your plans will remain the same. Unless you desperately need or want something available only in the latest version of Unity, you will have 0 impact from these changes. This should have been the starting point of any conversation regarding changing prices on the engine. I’m glad they took this approach.
Second, the thresholds in installs and revenue are still not based on Unity data. The developer will report the information to Unity and decide how much to pay. This adds some extra work for developers since they must report monthly to Unity, but it is still a better approach than “trust me”. It is important to understand that Unity will not trust the developers for this. They still collect their data and calculations as a baseline. They can’t rely on self-report data, and they need some baseline to compare and see if the information provided by the developers is accurate.
Finally, in my opinion, the price changes are decent. There is no intention of making anyone broke, they just want more money. And like any other product, if you like what they offer, you now know the price. If not, go with an older version or another engine. But I feel comfortable with the numbers they set for a tool like this and with the community behind it (more on this later).
Runtime Fee
Let’s recap the actual changes based on what they published. Remember that this only applies to the 2023 LTS and future engine versions.
The new model is still based on installs and revenue, that didn’t change much. They removed Unity Plus and kept the price on the other plans, along with some new benefits. It is pretty much the same as before.
One change everyone wanted was restricting the Unity splash on the Personal edition. Finally, they removed that constraint.
They also explicitly say now that they can discuss the option to remove the fees and estipulate other types of agreements in some cases. Before, it wasn’t explicit, and we already had news of companies waiving the fees if they changed to Unity Adds. At least this time they are upfront with this.
Regarding actual numbers, for those cases where the game surpasses thresholds in installs and revenue, the company will charge based on the runtime fee or 2.5% revenue. The most important part of this is that it will be the lesser of the two. The idea is to pay the least amount possible.
Another important distinction they made is regarding initial installs. The same game on multiple devices will not count towards the runtime fee if they are from the same distribution channel. Let’s say a game is on Steam, and the same user installs that game on three computers. That will count as one install. The same user has a game on PC and Xbox and installs it from Steam and Xbox store. That’s two installs. Reinstalls also don’t count.
There is one change I noticed that will be problematic. The first round of changes didn’t include WebGL games. Now, these games are included in the runtime fee. I don’t have experience in this regard, but I’ll see how that could be a reason for those game types not to update to the latest versions of Unity.
The big loss
There is still one significant loss for Unity, and that is trust. They lost the trust of the community and developers the first time they made these changes. The changes were so greedy in such a corporate way that the only option would have been to revert all the changes altogether and apologize. Sadly, that wasn’t an option for the company.
Sure, they apologize in a classic corporate way, an open letter to the community. The problem is, we don’t believe you. The first batch of changes wasn’t something a small studio or indie developer tried to do and just made a mistake. The changes were exactly what they wanted, to check if they could get away with it. Gladly, the community response was in sync, and they had to reconsider. But still, it was meant to be that way; it wasn’t a mistake from Unity Technologies. Ultimately, their CEO is not new to this way of doing things; just check his past actions in Unity and other companies.
Even after the new changes, they still lie about the reason for removing the TOS repo from GitHub. Really? Was it because nobody read it? Seriously, that’s your excuse?
With this trust destroyed, there is one thing that still bothers me. Since the changes in the pricing model apply to future versions, will we start to get a (more) bugged engine with incomplete features to just force our hand and upgrade? If this were from another company, absolutely no. But this is Unity Technologies, a company that made all these changes without caring about their customers, so every scenario is possible.
Final thoughts
This whole episode is a real shame. One of the most important engines in game development destroyed their customers’ trust and put their main asset at risk.
You see, in my opinion, Unity is indeed a great piece of software, but the main asset of Unity is its community. Without the community that Unity has built over the years, I don’t think the product would have been as successful as it is. For me and several others, one of the reasons for getting into Unity is the support from the community and the amount of material this community has built for the engine.
We will see how this evolves in the following months. Several members of the community and indie studios are already moving away for future projects. How significant will the impact be? Time will tell.
References
Summary and FAQ https://unity.com/pricing-updates
Pricing Updates https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
“Apology” https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee