Don’t believe their lies.
Unity Technologies today made a decision that I think almost everyone saw coming; they announced the cancellation of runtime fees. This “too little too late” reversal comes literally one year (the fee was announced September 12, 2023) after Unity set fire to its trust and reputation by announcing that developers would soon be subject to installation fees.
There were of course a ton of problems with this new system, and most of that pointed to the blatantly obvious conclusion that Unity itself hadn’t put any thought or planning into the fees other than dreaming of holding out their hands and demanding “money please” for absolutely no extra work on their end.
Chief liar John Riccitiello went on damage control to claim that the fee wouldn’t apply to demos, but also wouldn’t apply to charity bundles or games. How would they tell the two apart? How would Unity calculate installs? What’s to stop someone from setting up a virtual machine and running a developer out of business by installing a game thousands of times? And I could go into a laundry list of shady things Unity was doing at the time, like attempting to scrub their older terms of service off the internet.
The last year has not been good to Unity. In addition to some high profile developers announcing they would no longer be developing on the engine, indie devs seem to be leaving the company in droves. The stock price is down 50% YoY, John Riccitiello got fired really fast once all this ballooned. Unity tried to buckle down on the fees without getting rid of them, impressing nobody in the process.
But today Matt Bromberg, the guy Unity hired as CEO to throw a bucket of water on the burning building came out today to announce that runtime fees are going bye bye. Bromberg states that this was after “deep consultation” which the company was kind enough to not bother doing before giving everyone the middle finger last September.
After deep consultation with our community, customers, and partners, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee for our games customers, effective immediately. Non-gaming Industry customers are not impacted by this modification.
Unity Pro users will see an 8% increase in their price and Unity Enterprise members will see a 25% increase in their cost starting in January 2025. And since this is a Hotcakes article I’d like to get to my opinion for developers who might be thinking of going back to Unity.
Don’t.
We all can guess why Unity made this decision one fiscal year after announcing it, and it’s because the projected earnings from the fees have not only not been as successful as they wanted, they’ve done far more damage. Unity didn’t have any “deep consultation” with developers or partners before deciding on egregious fees that they had no clue how to track and no real policy until people pointed out how flawed it was.
They didn’t care what partners thought when rolling out the plan, so why should we believe they care now? The price increase is a way to save face and recoup losses that Unity incurred on itself, but there is no reason to assume that once the flames have died down and the scars have started to heal that they won’t do something just like this again.
Like a cat dragged away from the plate of human food it knows it’s not allowed to eat, there’s no reason to believe Unity hasn’t just gone back to the drawing board to figure out how to be just terrible enough to their business partners to not tank the company next time.
Which is why no amount of apology or executive shuffling should bring back the developers who left or are leaving the engine.
MMO Fallout 