Unity Shares an Open Letter To The Community Following Backlash Over Runtime Fees

Unity recently came under fire surrounding the announcement of new runtime fee’s going into 2024 that would effectively charge developers for every time their game was installed. Rightfully the community rained hell onto this idea and Unity was forced to backtrack leading to a letter today from Unity Lead Marc Whitten to share future plans for the runtime fee policy.

Unity’s Open Letter

Marc Whitten is the lead of Unity Create which includes the Unity engine and editor teams, he starts off this letter with “I am sorry”, are you really though… ARE YOU? Whitten follows off with how they should’ve discussed with the community rather than hitting developers with the runtime fee like a massive boulder covered in thumbtacks.

The runtime fee plan has now been altered which is good news as the Unity Personal plan will not be affected by the runtime fee at all and the revenue cap for using Unity Personal will be increased from $100,000 to $200,000 which then means you have to move to Unity Pro. Additionally, no game with less than $1 Million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.

For those using Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, the Runtime Fee policy will only be applied with the next LTS version of Unity in 2024 which means that current games won’t be affected unless they are upgraded to the new version of Unity. Additionally, this runtime fee will be self-reported based on either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month.

All in all these plans seem better though I’m not a game dev so I don’t know what is going on in their minds.