Unity Decides To Screw Over Developers With A Fee The First Time Their Game Is Installed

This week Unity is in the stocks having rotten veg tossed as they’ve introduced a new charge to completely screw over their developers and the gaming industry is having none of it.

Unity Game Installation Fee

Two days ago Unity made a blogpost titled “Unity plan pricing and packaging updates” which has sparked up a lot of furore in the gaming community from both developers and gamers. This new change will introduce a “Unity Runtime Fee” from January 2024 to games that have passed a revenue threshold in the past 120 months as well as a minimum lifetime install count. The threshold depends on whether the devs are using Unity Personal or Unity Plus which makes the threshold $200,000 and 200,000 lifetime installs whilst devs with Unity Pro or Enterprise that number increase to $1,000,000 or 1,000,000 installs. This change will apply to both new games and existing games which will be instantly hit with the fee on January 1st if they reach the thresholds. This fee will require developers to pay up to $0.20 per new install monthly and less for those using Unity Pro or Enterprise.

It’s not hard to see how this will screw over developers many of which are already releasing statements which have been conveniently compiled on the r/unity subreddit by u/Sparky2199. This is a disgusting move by Unity that takes the revenue directly from developers’ pockets and when developers would normally be celebrating hitting 200,000 installs, from January they’ll be dreading it. Its moronic and Unity have shot themselves in the foot.