Unity is cancelling its runtime fee pricing which caused a major uproar last year. If you don’t recall, last year around this time, Unity announced a new mandatory runtime fee for developers who used the engine to make games and sell them. Instead of charging devs a subscription for using the engine, the company rolled out a pay-per-download fee chat charged developers for every game download.
As a result, this fee saw developers having to pay more for game development while also creating an unpredictable price hike depending on the fluctuations. While larger studios could handle this, smaller indie teams were hit quite hard by the change. Many of them blasted Unity for not warning them about the change.
Other developers called the company out for implementing a system that could essentially be exploited with “fake” downloads. The system was also unable to distinguish between a demo download and a full game. This means developers would pay Unity for demo downloads.
Unity did restructure the system. The company implemented a threshold where the runtime fee would only kick in after $1 million was counted in all tiers of products for a studio and team.
A year later Unity has now changed the system again. This time completely removing the runtime fee from the program. Unity CEO Matt Bromberg announced that Unity would go back to a per-seat subscription model. However, the change also comes with a price hike. Starting on 1 January 2025, Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise will increase in price.
The pricing change doesn’t really matter if you’re reading this and have no plans on developing games. If you are interested in the subscription models, you can read all about the changes on the official blog page here.
The runtime fee no doubt caused some major damage to Unity. The engine was created as the go-to platform for smaller devs to build projects on. The engine became popular thanks to its open development and affordable pricing. Let’s hope the change back to the older payment system brings back the trust.
