Game developers say Unity’s big change puts studios at risk

Unity Technologies, the company behind the cross-platform game engine Unity, announced a new pricing model on Tuesday – and it has been almost universally condemned by the video game development community on social media since the announcement went live.

Unity is widely used by AAA studios, indie developers, and everyone in between. It is the basis for games such as Pokémon Go, Hollow Knight, RustAnd Hearthstone, among many others. Unity’s new payment structure ties a fee to game installs, when the Unity Runtime code is launched on a player’s device, rather than a revenue sharing model.

“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based on each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” a Unity representative said in a blog post describing the fee. “We chose this because every time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. We also believe that an initial setup fee allows creators to retain the ongoing financial gain from player engagement, as opposed to a revenue share.”

Unity’s runtime fee is collected once a game “exceeds a minimum revenue threshold in the last twelve months” and “exceeds a minimum lifetime install count,” according to the blog post. These installation costs vary based on Unity pricing plans. Unity Personal and Unity Plus customers will have to pay $0.20 per install after reaching $200,000 in revenue in the past year and having more than 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise users pay $0.15 and $0.125 per install respectively, after earning $1 million in the past year and having over 1 million lifetime game installs. (These costs will decrease as higher thresholds are met.)

Unity said it set these figures “to avoid impacting those who have not yet found scale, meaning they will not have to pay the fee until they have achieved significant success.” Free-to-play games will have another option, which is to use Unity’s LevelPlay service for game ads, to offset the costs.

“The developers who will be affected are generally those who have successful games and generate revenue well above the thresholds,” a Unity representative told Polygon. “This means that developers who are still building their business and growing the audience for their games will not be charged any compensation.”

Many game developers on social media and elsewhere don’t see it that way; A specific pain point, aside from gobbling up revenue, is how the model will impact subscription services like Microsoft’s Game Pass, as well as free demos, charity bundles and “other models that have been very successful for smaller developers,” Mike Wuetherick, Chief Technology Officer at Blinkmoon , said Polygon. Wuetherick and Blinkmoon just now changed engines from Unreal to Unity for the company’s new project; Tuesday’s news means the project will be paused until more information is available.

“The only good news is that we just started development, so we’re only losing a month of work by resetting,” Wuetherick said. “Without further clarification of this information from Unity, I will be forced to reset and switch to Unreal. We’re a small developer, and the fact that such a big financial uncertainty hangs over our heads basically guarantees that we’ll return for this and all future games we make.

Wuetherick explained that the genre Blinkmoon works in “relies on a low price per game with high install numbers” and that the changes risk a “huge” amount of income. “It is extremely unclear how Unity will track installations,” Wuetherick said. “Overall, the uncertainty about what this will cost in any given month makes the decision to use Unity extremely risky.”

CEO and co-founder of Newfangled Games, Henry Hoffman, is working on a game called Paper trail, expected in 2024. The demo is currently available for download, but when Unity’s price change goes live it could cost the studio. Newfangled Games was launched specifically to work with subscription services like Netflix Games, Apple Arcade and Game Pass, Hoffman told Polygon, a strategy that helps small-team development “de-risk.”

“As a small team, these licensing deals provide us with the financial stability needed to build a sustainable studio for the long term – but it means we may see millions of downloads without long-tail revenue,” said Hoffman. “This new Unity pricing model makes this completely unfeasible and would most likely mean replacing the engines completely in the longer term.”

Paper trail has been in development for four years, and the licensing agreements were signed some time ago and “used to fund further development,” Hoffman said. “It is entirely possible that we will owe Unity significant pay-per-install costs, despite the revenue threshold being used to fund development, and new installations not generating new revenue,” he said. Developers with games on Xbox Game Pass, which has millions of subscribers, face a similar problem.

A Unity representative told Polygon that the “installation and initialization of a game via streaming or web browser is considered an install.” They continued: “We use our own proprietary model, and although PC and console installation data is less publicly reported. Our data model charges a fee for all platforms. With each program or product launch, we will refine this over time and subject to changes in the future. Those contacted by Unity will provide proof of installations on those platforms.” According to the representative, the fee does not apply to installations of charity games or bundles.

Co-founder of Studio Pixel Punk and Invisible developer Tiani Pixel told Polygon that counting installs is difficult – “the numbers are rarely accurate,” she said. Counting means privacy issues for players and extra work for developers to implement Digital Rights Management (DRM) where they might not otherwise have it. “Will indies be forced to add such DRMs to their games so they can track installs?” she asked. “Again, Unity doesn’t make it clear.”

Studio Pixel Punk supports DRM-free games on sites like GOG, meaning the player can have as many copies of the game as they want. “With this new policy, we may be penalized for such distributions of our games,” Pixel said. “Not to mention piracy (and we don’t blame the pirates, especially if they live in Brazil where many people can’t afford games), this could force a situation where pirated copies start hurting small developers. ”

These developers aren’t alone: ​​People on social media are raising concerns about costs and a perceived lack of clarity in Unity’s original announcement. What happens when a game is installed and played, if it is downloaded without purchase? Several developers have mentioned the danger of a malicious installation campaign: a continuation of a review bomb, but designed with financial consequences.

“It is not uncommon for stories from marginalized developers to be bombarded and harassed on social media,” Pixel said. “Depending on how this policy is implemented, people could create some sort of ‘install bomb’ of a game, and suddenly your studio finds itself in debt to Unity. These may seem unrealistic situations, but these kinds of things happen.”

She continued: “And Unity was extremely vague in their wording, so there’s not much we can do except expect the worst, especially when it concerns our livelihood.”

The Unity representative said the company has fraud detection for its ad technology that it can use as a “starting point” to address the problem of malicious installs. “We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will provide a process for them to bring their concerns to our fraud compliance team,” the representative said. However, they added that “each new installation, per device, counts toward the threshold.” To put it simply, if you have to uninstall a game to make room for another, and then reinstall it later, that will result in two copies of the developer’s fee.

Update: This story has been updated with comment from a Unity spokesperson, as well as comment from Tiani Pixel of Studio Pixel Punk.