A week after Unity announced dramatic changes to its Unity Engine business model - drawing immediate and widespread condemnation from the development community - the company has reportedly told staff it’ll be making adjustments to the controversial new pricing plan.
As reported by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Unity leadership addressed employees in an all-hands meeting held earlier today (a meeting originally planned for late last week was cancelled following a “potential threat” from an employee), saying the company was “considering” introducing a cap on its hugely unpopular new per-install fees.
Unity initially caused an outcry last Tuesday, when it told developers that, on top of their existing Unity Engine licence subscription, they’d be expected to pay an additional monthly Unity Runtime Fee each time a user installed their game, starting on 1st January 2024. This would apply to all games, including those already on the market, that had made $200k USD or more in the last 12 months and had at least 200k lifetime game installs.
A cap sounds like it will be only a kickback for the AAA studios, rather than the indies
They’re floundering enough just from devs outcry.
I wish I could be a fly on the wall when they inform Microsoft & NVidia that they’re going to send them a bill for games running on Gamepass and GeForce Now.
Yeah, Publishers and so on would probably just remove and reject all games made with Unity, which made it incredible useless for anything but hobby projects that aren’t released on most plattforms and would sting even worse for games already made in Unity that find themselves that tehy can’t get into Game Pass, into bundles and so on.
