#unity runtime fee

[veetri-bitcrush]

It's so... uh... dystopian to be hear the friendly Nintendo Direct announcer through the lens of the Unity debacle :P

We're making it guys, we are in the future we've been toying with in fiction.

[glugglestar]

when a company offers a "compromise", look at it like that's what they were implementing in the first place.

chances are, the company is trojan horsing its userbase - giving them a shit deal and then presenting them with a better one when the backlash starts to come in. The deal will be better, but NOT good. do not fall for this tactic

[benignhumor]

The Godot community watching Unity self destruct:

[ignis-aeternus]

Theres a video out there of a bunch of blank 3D models doing the coffin dance where the casket has the Unity logo on it and I can't find it

If anyone has this please share

[safetycgreen]

For everyone who's seen the unity "backtrack", please remember that the runtime fee is still absolutely bullshit and you should absolutely not use unity where you can. They've played their hand and decided that they can squeeze money from whatever bullshit they think they can get away with. DO NOT USE UNITY, DO NOT LEARN UNITY, DO NOT MAKE CONTENT FOR UNITY.

This is still an awful tos and absolute poison for the gaming community and the developer community. Install fees are poisonous for everyone.

[sagerenard]

It’s such a shame, I really enjoyed using Unity but at least it’s incentive to learn Unreal now!

I hate looking at stock prices but in the end it’s like the only thing that will affect the actual business decisions at Unity…so I hope it suffers from these new fees

I was honestly incapable of even conceiving of anything as evil as Unity is pulling today. Like holy shit. Will we let these fuckheads take our hands and arms when we give them a finger!?

Game developer unionisation is more imperative than ever fucking before now.

I'm very worried about my close friends using the engine. Some of them say they likely won't be affected, but can you really know? With the wordy, shoddy and vague FAQ they posted, they have all the room and us developers none. Fucking barf

[auranym]

indie games are safe!!

good news! unity has walked back a lot of the runtime fee!

they made a blog post outlining their new terms, the link is here. but if you want a sparknotes version, here's the highlights:

1. the runtime fee is not retroactive. previously released games are safe.

2. the fee only applies to the next major version of unity. developers can choose not to upgrade if they don't want do deal with it.

3. the fee is opt-in and number of installs is self-reported. if they'd prefer, developers can instead pay a 2.5% revenue share. (for reference, unreal is 4%.)

4. interestingly, the splash screen is being completely removed. this is probably a way to improve their reputation.

overall, this is a HUGE improvement! but, if I remember right, there was not any revenue share before, so, we are not at the same point we started. unity will still be taking a larger cut of developers' revenue if they choose to use newer features. but, it is nowhere near as drastic as we thought it would be.

overall, I think we're in a stable spot now, but I also think unity has lost most if not all of the trust it had. especially with indies. there has already been a mass exodus, and I kinda hope that will keep going.

[treasure-mimic]

So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

[prokopetz]

For my money, the most interesting part of the whole Unity debacle is that by a strict reading of the new policies, ceasing to offer one's Unity-based games for sale won't even work as a means of getting around the fees: if your Unity-based game is no longer available for sale after January 1st, you'd still be on the hook for the Unity Runtime installation fee for new installs performed by previous legitimate purchasers, even in cases where such installs are performed from physical or archival media or are otherwise impossible for you to prevent. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens if Unity's publisher ever actually tries to enforce payment that scenario.

[transfaguette]

always sucks when one of the biggest companies in a space is also The Worst

Unity, which for a long time the majority of indie games and several AAA titles have been developed in, recently announced a new “Runtime Fee” that would charge developers $0.20 per install of their game, starting January 2024. Retroactively!!!! Yes you heard that right. Got a new computer and want to reinstall your favorite game you bought 3 years ago? That’ll cost the dev $0.20, when they themselves make no additional money. A bad actor could, in theory, install a game hundreds of times just to hurt a developers bottom line. But even just in benign scenarios, its enough to threaten the viability of small indie studios. Even if devs wanted to jump ship now, number one they’d have to port all their games to a new engine, a monumental task on its own, and they’d have to learn a new engine and new workflow, new pipeline, etc. This is catastrophic to the indie scene.

And this isn’t handled through the platforms they sell their games on like steam or itch.io, it’s woven into the backend of the engine itself. Unity claims they have systems to detect piracy (but they’re proprietary and secret!) and developers won’t be charged for illegitimate installs. But none of us can be actually sure of that. They are literally making “piracy costs the devs money” a real actual legitimate argument.

And to top it all off, their ghoul of a CEO dumped his shares right before the announcement. They Knew this would be hated and they’re trying to get away with it anyway.

Do note, this only applies to games that already meet the threshold for profit sharing. If you are a hobbyist or making a project for school etc, this won’t affect you.

What can you do? Keep in touch with your favorite developers and indie publishers on social media. Hopefully with enough backlash and support for indie developers, they will retract.

[i3utterflyeffect]

HEY, INDIE GAME TUMBLR

so i want to let y'all know something-- unity has started a per-install fee for game developers. what this means is anytime someone installs a dev's game that they paid for, a fee comes out of the developers pockets.

yeah. you can guess how bad this is.

I don't have a very far reach but i urge y'all to reblog and research this stuff.

Many game devs, including Cult Of The Lamb and Rain World are talking about removing their games from install pages because of this, and a lot of games could be lost because of this. So many games could be lost from this.

Please spread the word and talk about this. Game developers are pissed and you should be too.

[netscapenavigator-official]

So..... a weirdo right-winger tried claiming that game engines are woke.

Godot made a post joking about this by saying, "Apparently game engines are woke now? Well then, we won't complain. Show us your #Wokot games in the replies."

And people are... mad at that? So mad, in fact, that if you search "Godot" on YouTube, the caliber of videos you get would have you thinking they pulled something worse than Unity's runtime fee.

And then because people were pissy about it, the official account started blocking people (heaven forbid a company not associate itself with right-wind sympathizers and bigots). And now people are mad about that??

I'm so lost.

Like, whiny little alt-right trolls got what they deserved, and for some reason the FOSS community is freaking out and attacking Godot?

[izzasecretredacted]

these are like pretty big names in the mobile market btw

[sabbitabbi]

Wishing Unity a very "Choke on your money"

"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share."

Never ever install your favorite game y'all