It was the biggest talking point of last week’s newswire, with Unity revealing drastic changes to its payment plans that included an all-new runtime fee policy. It caused an immediate uproar on social platforms, with developers far and wide coming together to snap back against the potentially harmful changes.
Basically, Unity’s proposed runtime policy would see a ‘tax’ applied when a customer installs a game built with Unity’s engine. It was stressed by Unity that this would only apply to installs completed after the policy goes into effect in January 2024 and that it would only apply after a certain amount of installations.
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For the last week, Unity’s PR team has been working to mitigate the damage done by the news regarding its runtime fee policy. It was highlighted by the firm that the new changes would ‘only’ impact around 10% of its users – but even that would include around 23,000 developers.
Now, Unity has stepped up to the social platforms once again to both apologise and promise an update in the near future to the runtime fee policy.
Everyone from the biggest content creators to the hobby game developers has a vested interest in these updates – even Geoff Keighley responded to Unity’s message with a request, ‘Let’s see the changes.’
At this point, the damage has basically been done, and an air of distrust hangs heavily over Unity’s product. It’ll be interesting to see what changes are announced in the coming days regarding the runtime fee policy, but at the moment, it seems like only an eradication of the new rule will help the situation.
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