Unity’s plans to charge per game install have developers begging gamers not to download their games
Yesterday (Tuesday, September 12) it was announced that game engine Unity will soon start charging developers a monthly fee based on the number of installs of their games, a move that has left many indie studios upset and frustrated.
The ‘Unity Runtime Fee’ will go into effect on January 1, 2024 and will affect games that have exceeded certain thresholds. For anyone using Unity Personal or Unity Plus, the game must have earned at least $200,000 in the last twelve months and also have at least 200,000 lifetime installs. Meanwhile, games created by Unity Pro and Unity Expertise users must have exceeded at least $1 million USD in the last twelve months and had more than one million lifetime installs before the charges take effect.
Assuming a game meets that criteria, the monthly fee will be calculated based on the additional number of installs per month, with variations in costs based on the Unity subscription developers have and which countries games are installed in. Frequently asked questions about Unity section: ‘Standard fees apply to app installs in the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea and the United Kingdom. App installations in all other countries are subject to emerging market fees.”
As a Eurogamer reports, it has since been clarified that Unity charges for new installations made after January 1, 2024, and not for installations that have already occurred. However, it was true confirmed to Axios the fee will be charged every time a game will be installed even for something that has been uninstalled and then reinstalled. This means that developers can be charged even if a user has not spent more money on their game.
Many indie developers and others within the games industry have expressed their anger about the situation on Twitter. Indie studio Aggro Crab has a rack on the impact of Unity’s decision: “This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we may not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes are not reversed, we will strongly consider abandoning the wealth of Unity expertise we have built up over the years and starting from scratch with a new engine.”
Indie developer SomeHumbleOnion (the developer of Smushi Come home), wrote: “I’m now afraid to make games in Unity.” Meanwhile, Henry Hoffman, the founder of Newfangled Games (which developed and published Paper trail), pleaded: “If you buy our Unity game, don’t install it.”
Geoff Keighley, the host of The Game Awards, Summer Game Fest and Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, simply responded to Unity’s final announcement: “What a joke.”
Speaking to TRG, an anonymous Unity source tells us that people at the company are “furious,” and that the internal pushback leading up to the announcement “basically exposed every hole and problem that developers are talking about right now.”
On Twitter, Unity declared that it is “actively listening to and following your questions closely.”
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