A whole year later, Unity completely withdraws the malicious runtime fee
A year ago, Unity Technologies created a huge problem for itself and the developers that use its game engine: it introduced a nearly universally hated new fee tied to a developer’s game installs. While Unity claimed the fee change would only impact developers with “successful games” that generated a lot of revenue, Unity users didn’t see it that way — for those developers, it was a huge risk that could lead to financial ruin. The company ultimately retracted portions of the runtime fee change on September 22 — something that some developers saw as a minor improvement.
Now Unity is withdrawing the slandered fee in full, effective immediately, the company posted on its website on Thursday“I’ve been able to connect with many of you over the past three months and I’ve heard time and time again that you want a strong Unity and understand that price increases are a necessary part of what allows us to invest in moving gaming forward,” said new CEO Matthew Bromberg wrote“But those increases do not have to come in a new, controversial form.”
Bromberg took over the helm from interim CEO Jim Whitehurst, who took on the role after former CEO John Riccitiello stepped down weeks after the term fee disaster.
Unity will now use a “seat-based subscription model” for all of its gaming customers, it said, including companies using Unity 6. Unity 6 is the latest version of the engine, which still charged a runtime fee. Seat-based subscription models typically charge based on the number of people at a company using it. Here’s Unity’s plan, straight from the press release.
Unity has said it will be making changes to its subscription plans in 2025, including pricing. (Unity has also said it will review pricing annually.)
On social media, developers have praised Unity for finally completely changing their pricing model. “Finally,” InnerSloth co-founder Forest Willard wrote on X. “For the record, Innersloth has already migrated our next games from Unity. We found a lot of speed and power in a custom platform on a minimal engine. That said, Among us doesn’t have to worry about upgrading to the next-gen consoles anymore. Thanks for that, Unity.”
Many others have expressed similar sentiments, including Godot creator Juan Linietsky. “Thankfully, many Unity users will no longer feel forced to move to Godot because of this,” he wrote. “I hope that if they do move, it’s because they genuinely like our work and our mission.” Still, many developers — including those who support the move — lament how long it took Unity to make this decision.
In the wake of the debacle, several game engines entered the market to meet the demand for new options, including the open source, free engine Godot, which reportedly “doubled its user base” after the Unity change caused developers to look elsewhere. according to Game File. Another engine, GameMaker, made its engine free for all non-commercial use; it also changed its commercial PC license to a one-time fee. Godot in particular has recently seen a boost in investment — $15 million in December 2023 — to scale up the engine.
Meanwhile, Unity marked 2023 by laying off more than 1,100 people over the year, closing multiple offices and terminating a deal with Peter Jackson’s Wētā FX. In January, Unity implemented another round of cuts, laying off more than 1,800 people in what it called a “corporate reset.” In 2023, Unity generated $2.1 billion in revenuebut was not profitable, reporting a net loss of $826.3 million, a figure lower than previous years. The company has never made a profit, but former interim CEO Whitehurst told Game Developer in April that he “to grow the company to a size we are proud of and profitable.”