After having angered practically the entire video game development community, from independent creators to major studios, at Unity they have decided to turn backas they assured they would do a few days ago, and not implement the changes they had announced for their pricing policy starting January 2024.
The company intended to charge an amount for each installation of games developed with Unity from that date. Specifically, $0.20 for each installation. Both for new ones and for those that went on sale before or those that are already available. It didn’t matter if they only paid once for the game and installed it multiple times. A change that mainly affected small developers, and that was going to be an unaffordable blow to them in many cases.
Depending on the plan that the developers had contracted, the charge began from $200,000 in income, and with a minimum installation of 200,000 units. From that amount it would charge the developers 0.20 per installation, even though these are reinstallations of games already purchased previously that were reinstalled some time after deletion. Furthermore, Unity would only follow its own criteria on the installations made of each game.
Given the controversy generated, with widespread protests and developers and studios announcing that in the future they were going to develop their titles on other platforms, or even that they were going to withdraw games starting next year, Unity has had no choice but to change your decision.
In any case, the Unity Create President Mark Whitten, published an open letter to the gaming community at the end of last week to apologize for what happened. In it, among other things, the company recognized that «I should have talked to more of you, and we should have taken your feedback more into account before announcing our new policy«.
The communication also offered details of the changes to the pricing policy, and how it will work from next year. For starters, Unity will no longer charge existing games for each video game installation. They will also not charge a title installation fee to developers who subscribe to their Unity Personal or Plus plans.
Apart of this, “For games that are subject to the execution fee, we will give the option to charge 2.5% of revenue or the amount calculated based on the number of new users who interact with the game each month«. To calculate both amounts, the data held by the developers themselves is taken into account.
Furthermore, Whitten assures that developers “the lower amount will always be charged” Of the two. In any case, Will only be charged for games that exceed $1 million in revenueinstead of doing so with those that exceed $200,000.
Now it only remains to be seen if this change regarding Unity’s charging policies starting next January 1 calms the community of video game developers. But judging by the protests and the announcements of migrations to other platforms, including Godot, it seems that they have damaged Unity’s reputation irreversibly. It will be quite difficult for developers to trust the Unity platform again to bring their creations to life, because as has happened, they may find themselves involved in a unilateral policy change in which they lose out.
