Unity Create’s president, Mark Whitten, has a open letter respond to the resists about the recent announcement of Unity Runtime Feeand has outlined a number of changes that will be made to the policy before it comes into effect in 2024.
“I want to start simply with this: I’m sorry,” Whitten wrote. “We should have spoken to more of you and incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee Policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure that we can continue to support you today and tomorrow and invest deeply in our game engine.”
Whitten explained the changes and first confirmed that the Runtime Fee no longer applies to Unity Personal and Unity Plus users. Aside from runtime costs, the annual revenue and funding limit for Personal will increase from $100,000 to $200,000, and it will no longer be a requirement to use the ‘Made in Unity’ splash screen – it will become optional.
Whitten went on to detail the further changes to the Runtime Fee: “No game with less than $1 million in revenue over a twelve-month period will be subject to the fee.”
While the Runtime Fee still applies to Unity Pro and Enterprise users, it will now only apply to games built with the next Long Term Support (LTS) coming in 2024, i.e. games that have already shipped and projects currently in the works will not. are affected unless upgraded.
Additionally, affected users will have the choice of paying a 2.5% revenue share or a calculated amount based on the number of “unique initial engagements” for their game(s). They pay the smaller amount, and both potential costs are calculated based on self-reported data.
Concluding the letter, Whitten added: “Thank you for being as committed as you are, and thank you for giving us tough feedback.”
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