Just for clarity and just in case, I'll post here a (kind of crudely) translated excerpt from an article that I wrote recently, covering the Unity fee and its potential impact on the gaming industry. I'll also attach the official Unity image with the fee prices. I'm doing this because, while I may be wrong, I feel like there's a bit of misinformation here.

• The fee is only applicable when a video game meets two requirements: it must exceed a minimum number of total installations (200.000 for basic subscriptions and 1.000.000 for premium plans) and generate an annual income in dollars greater than those amounts.

• If a game meets those conditions, the developer is required to pay between $0.005 and $0.2 for every new installation after that threshold.

• The fee is billed on a monthly basis.

• For an installation to count as such, the game must have been opened at least once.

• Every installation is only paid once, so the fee doesn't accrue from month to month.

• Only the first intallation per device is counted towards the total (note: the Unity team claimed the opposite at first, then backtracked).

• Installations of games obtained through charity bundles or subscription services such as Game Pass, as well as web and streaming games, are excluded from the total. And so do demos, as long as they don't include the whole game.

• Installations of early access games are counted towards the total.

• If a game is included on a bundle, it's up to the developers themselves to let Unity know.

• The Unity team encourages developers to contact them if they suspect of piracy or fraud, but it's not clear how they intend to check to what extent the game is affected.

• The installation count begins on January 1, 2024 and doesn't add up the number of installations the game had before that date (but they are taken into account in determining the total).

• Non-game applications are not affected.

• Products created with a Unity Industry subscription are also unaffected.

• The fee is significantly lower when the game is installed in an emerging market.

• Premium subscriptions include a reduction in the fee.

• The reduction in the fee works in ranges: the more the total number of installations increases, the lower the amount to be paid for each installation.

• Use of some Unity services may be accompanied by fee reductions.

Also, as a (semi)professional Unity developer, I want to say that, in my opinion, the only bad thing about this fee (apart from the fact that Unity hasn't given developers enough time to fully prepare for this) is that it's linked to installations, which is absolute and utter nonsense, and has the potential to cause many headaches and unfair situations. Other than that, I'm totally fine paying a well-implemented fee (although I'd rather not, because who wouldn't?) if that means that a game I created has reached over 200,000 lifetime installations AND generated 200,000 dollars in revenue. In fact, if that were the case, I would just spend 2,000 of my 200,000 dollars to update to the Pro license, which would mean that I wouldn't have to pay the fee until I reached ONE MILLION dollars AND ONE MILLION total installations.

I mean, Unity is a professional game engine, one of the only two publicly available engines holding that status (the other being Unreal). And, despite that fact, it's 100% free to use unless your game has reached more than 200,000 total installations and generated more than 200,000 dollars in revenue. And, if your game has generated one million dollars and reached one million installations, it still only costs you 2,000 dollars per year if you have upgraded to the Pro version. It's only when you've surpassed those humungous amounts when you actually need to pay the fee (which also means, by the way, that the smaller developers are the least affected —if at all— by this measure).

Again, I think that tying the fee to the new intallations instead of the monthly revenue is a terrible decision, and also the reason why I'M AGAINST IT in its current state. But I guess that what I'm trying to say is that this whole situation has been blown WAY out of proportion, mainly due to two reasons:

1. Unity wasn't clear at first and has then been making a lot of clarifications as they have arisen, which has made things even more confusing and hard to follow for everyone.
2. Many people around the web (most likely here too) are giving their opinion based on other people's opinions, without having actually read the Unity announcement or the FAQ (particularly the FAQ, which is the most informative of the two), and therefore many people actually don't know for sure what they're talking about.

And for the third time, I think linking the fee to the new installations instead of the monthly revenue is a garbage move, and I'm glad Unity is going to make changes, but, seriously, the majority of reactions on the internet are disproportionate.

Also, Unity is not going anywhere anytime soon. Not even close to that. People are focused on the public reactions of a number of companies that have made a name for themselves in the industry thanks to a beloved game or two, sometimes a few of them, but this industry is way, way larger than that.

I know people here and there like to talk about the benefits of going publicly traded, but in the many cases I've seen over the decades, I don't think it's worth it. 

You can work your ass off, but once you're public, there's nothing to stop a a bunch of people buying their way into the company you toiled to make, and simply smashing it into oblivion for short term gains, before said board jumps out the company with their golden parachutes, free from consequences. 

There really should be a law for public companies, where if a new board rolls in, and the company starts to nosedive, and shares start to shed fast, said board should be removed within the month and replaced. All these stories I'm hearing about companies imploding overnight and the like all have 2 types of boards: those that are insanely greedy and only want a golden parachute, or those who got into a company they know nothing about, don't know what it's making, let alone how to run it. 

I disagree

They should be forced to stay at the company without any option for a golden parachute and sink with the company they're scuttling for a quick buck, and be held liable for the losses they accrued with their practices. Only then would they think twice of even starting these practices, as this would then cost them lots of money instead, as if they were to be replaced like you said, they'd take a golden parachute and the next board possibly then too, and the next one, and so on. In short, it wouldn't solve the problems, and instead just increase the costs for multiple rounds of golden parachutes instead of just one.

We mostly agree when it comes to the reach of the change in a nutshell, however, the dissension in opinion isn't about the change in itself but rather the breach of trust that it brought with it and the clear picture of unity's unsettling current priorities. 

I really don't feel there's misinformation here, all the modalities you have posted were known. I believe that your view differs only because you don't weigh the gravity of the move the same as me/others and not because we lack some infos. 

The only bad thing about this fee (apart from the fact that Unity hasn't given developers enough time to fully prepare for this) is that it's linked to installations, which is absolute and utter nonsense, and has the potential to cause many headaches and unfair situations.

We agree it's the only bad if you take this change in a nutshell yet the fact that Unity CEO and board value their greed enough so that they implement such nonsense is really the crux of the issue. It's not like It's it can be treated as an oopsie to be forgotten as soon as it is reverted. 

Other than that, I'm totally fine paying a well-implemented fee

if it was a well-implemented fee there would not be such a pushback right now, but it isn't. It's a change that has been half-assed and half thought and yet still implemented against all logic. it's the same as if Java started charging companies for clients' installation of the Java runtime environment or MS started charging companies for clients' installation of .net clients.

Many people around the web (most likely here too) are giving their opinion based on other people's opinions, without having actually read the Unity announcement or the FAQ (particularly the FAQ, which is the most informative of the two), and therefore many people actually don't know for sure what they're talking about.

I didn't read all of this thread tbh but as far as I'm concerned and as far as what I've seen this is not the case here. You are just minimizing the implications of such, garbage move and utter nonsense, and has the potential to cause many headaches and unfair situations, to make use of your own words. 

Also, Unity is not going anywhere anytime soon. Not even close to that. People are focused on the public reactions of a number of companies that have made a name for themselves in the industry thanks to a beloved game or two, sometimes a few of them, but this industry is way, way larger than that.

There are already hundreds of those companies that have released statements against the recent change which this Twitter tracks: https://twitter.com/FuckedByUnity

Those are not just a vocal minority, they literally represent the vast majority of Unity's customer base.

@Verter: That's a good summary of the situation. I'd like to point out, though, that (semi-)retroactivity is also, pretty undeniably if you ask me, a serious issue here. It's not just the installation count that's the issue. Off the top of my head, that's the two major problems with the changes, and the rest is 'just' bad instead of draconian.

I wrote that post in this thread because this is the only forum I visit. But, to be honest, I don't remember every post here either and, since I've also read a bunch of opinions in other places, maybe I'm contaminated from those. I've actually seen a good number of people (even in real life) forming their opinion based solely on that of some developers or youtubers that they follow, without actually consulting the original sources, but maybe I was wrong when I assumed that that's the case here too. In general, I think the level in VGChartz is higher than in many other webs.

That said, I'll expand on some of my points (although I agree with you on several of them).

About the well-implemented fee, what I meant was that, if the Unity Runtime Fee were well-implemented (which it isn't), I wouldn't mind it. That was probably bad wording on my part (because it was too late when I wrote my post and I was quite sleepy), but, yeah, I don't think this fee is well-implemented (rather the opposite, and I think that's something we strongly agree on).

Anyway, what I consider a well-implemented fee is one that is based on monthly revenue instead of monthly installations. If the Unity Runtime Fee was implemented like that, then all of its problems (but one) would magically disappear, in my opinion:

• No more worries about bundles, subscription services, demos or whatever. And no need for the developers to inform Unity when their games are included in a bundle.
• No more worries about piracy or frauds that would affect the recounting of installations.
• No more worries about potential situations where a high number of installations wouldn't translate directly into revenue.

The only problem that would still be left with a fee like that is that the companies that already have successful games in the market would have to pay from day one without having much time to fully prepare for that. And the solution, in my opinion, is to delay the fee to 2025 in order to give them enough time. Other than that, I think that the other aspects of the fee are not actually bad. I mean, they are bad for the consumers in the sense that we have to pay for something that was previously free, but nothing else.

So, regarding that and the other services that you mentioned (JRE and .NET), those are free because they are provided by companies that have other offers as their main source of revenue: Oracle sells cloud subscriptions for businesses, and Microsoft... well, tons of things. But Unity Technologies, apart from some occasional deals that they may have with some other company, only has one reliable source of income, which are the premium Unity subscriptions. For the sake of comparison, their main competitor (and the only one in the professional space), Epic Games, has a fee that applies from the very first dollar that you make using their engine, and that's despite them having other stable sources of income (particularly Fornite). So, in spite of this fee, Unity is still more user-friendly than its main competitor in terms of how much money it takes from its users, and therefore I wouldn't say that this measure is particularly greedy in this case.

That doesn't mean that the people behind it aren't greedy, because in some way part of their job is being greedy. But that's not a problem of Unity alone, but of the society as a whole, because this and other negative behaviours and ways of acting are deeply rooted in the way we've built our modern economical and sociopolitical systems. They just become more evident when we see them in certain scenarios where their reach is bigger, like when some big fishes decide that their company is not making enough money and want to find a solution for that.

But I'm digressing. Back to the topic in question, those hundreds of developers that you shared that are uniting against Unity are indeed a vocal minority. You're severely underestimating how HUGE Unity is: according to the figures provided by Unity themselves in a report from 2022 (which is the last one in which they provide those figures), they get their data from 230,000 users. Even if one tweet from the Twitter account that you posted would equate to one developer (which is not the case), that's still less than 600. Of course, I know that the number of tweets will keep increasing over time, so let's say that it reaches 10,000 in the end... That's still less than 4.35% out of 230,000.

And, from that little percentage of developers, only a portion of them is actually going to switch to another engine, because the reality is that switching to another engine is not that easy: not only it takes time (and in many cases money) to learn how to use a different engine from scratch, but it's also likely that you've created your own extensions for it, or you've bought assets from the Unity Store (which are optimized for the Unity engine and in some cases exclusive to it), or you already have a list of professionals who you've worked with and who you know you can trust, and who are of course Unity specialists, etc. So, yes, there are many developers who have lost trust in Unity, and of course Unity is going to lose some market share after this, but I believe that the actual impact is not going to be as big as many people think.

And that's without taking into account the fact that there are only two trully professional game engines, Unity and Unreal. People are talking about Godot and other engines like GameMaker, but the reality is that all those are mostly out of the professional circuits. Good luck finding companies that are hiring Godot or GameMaker developers.

Which leads me to another point: most of the developers who are united against Unity are independent solo devs or small teams (of about 10-20 people at most) making their own games, but those are not representative of the industry at all. In reality, the vast majority of Unity developers are wage earners who work for big or midsized companies and therefore are not going to be affected by these measures in the slightest, because at the end of the month they're going to get paid no matter what. And those companies where they work, which have tens or even hundreds of Unity developers working for them, are not going to switch to another engine, because that would be really expensive for them. What they're going to do instead is increase a bit the price of their future games, or add a couple more microtransactions here and there, or charge a bit more for the MTX that they already plan to implement, or put one or more ads in their games... In summary, thinking of ways to make their games more profitable. So, in the end, they're not going to pay for the Unity fee —they're going to make their customers pay for it instead, and their customers aren't even going to notice.

In fact, that's one of the shittiest parts of this Unity fee, more that the retroactivity (in my opinion): if the fee is tied to installations instead of revenue, the amount of revenue you get doesn't affect how much you pay for the fee, so to compensate... you just increase your revenue. If you charge 20$ for your game instead of 19, and one million people install your game, that means that, by the time you've got to actually pay the fee, you've earned one extra million dollars. You can pay a lot of Unity fees with that money... And how many customers have you actually lost in the process of adding that extra dollar to the price? Maybe a chunk, but not as big an amount to make it not worth it. Of course, this is just a theoretical example, but I believe things like this are actually way more likely to happen that the fall of Unity or a generalized loss of trust in the company. Do you remember Netflix and the password sharing outrage, for example? Well, I'll let you guess which company has increased its number of users in the last quarter and its revenue year-on-year. And in a few months from now many people will not even remember or care about what happened.

Of course, this is not the same situation, but there may be some similarities. My guess is that Unity will initially lose some market share (nothing huge, maybe not even two digits), but increase its revenue when the fee starts rolling. And, after enough time has passed, most developers will get accustomed to the new status quo and just accept it as the norm. Unity has already said that they're willing to lower the fee for those who are retroactively affected by it, and the rest of developers will start to plan their games with that fee already in mind. So, once the dust settles, most of its users won't care that much, except for a few annoyances. And, if Unity decides to make something that is not actual crap and link the fee to the revenue instead of the installations, then even less users will care about it, because those unnecessary annoyances won't be there.

Also, there has been no shift in priorities, like the developers united against Unity are saying, because, in the end, even if the implementation of the fee is quite shitty (which it is), the fee itself is only a natural step in the common cycle of a business: attract customers, retain customers, exploit customers, repeat. We just happen to be in the "exploit customers" phase with Unity. But the vast majority of companies in the industry are run by people who actually share that bussiness-oriented mentality, and they themselves are most likely applying those same principles to their own businesses, so those people won't mind much about this issue, because, as I said, they will just find ways to pass the fee to their own customers. And, as for those other developers who don't share the same mentality and actually think that there has been a shift in priorities for Unity, they are either working for the former or complaining on Twitter. That's quite sad (and a bit raw), but mostly true, I'd say.

The most positive scenario, in my opinion, is that this controversy gives enough impulse to Godot (or any other engine, for that matter) to eventually become a relevant actor in the professional space, because that would mean more competition, which is good. I'm not sure how likely that is to happen, however. And, in any case, most of what I said is just an opinion and I could be wrong (I kind of hope I'm wrong, actually).

Kind of also a catastrophic move towards the VR community since the prime and better engine so far used for most VR games is Unity. UE doesn't have a comparable easy tool sets for devs to use with VR. Meaning this could also impact a lot of the smaller VR software pipeline we were getting.

Thankfully, Godot has gotten better and better by day and there's prolly going to be a migration to that engine for smaller time devs

I agree with some and disagree with others but damn that was a huge post so I'd only make a few highlights.

About the fee implementation, I would not mind either if something actually thought true and fair was implemented but it's simply not the case as we agreed to. There are also some reposts that worker at Unity voiced their opposition and highlighted many of the shortcomings prior to the announcement they were simply ignored.  The problem is that describing the move as shitty does not come close to actually rightfully describing it. it was easy to see the issue, the issue reportedly had been identified but ignored and they went through with it against basic logics.

So, regarding that and the other services that you mentioned (JRE and .NET), those are free because they are provided by companies that have other offers as their main source of revenue: Oracle sells cloud subscriptions for businesses, and Microsoft... well, tons of things.

they are still products maintained by Oracle and MS for the sole purpose of making code written and compiled for java/.net respectively work on intended hardware/OS. Those are supposed to be the investments you make so that your tools actually work. Without it, Unity simply has no value and it is actually already monetized by the value it procures to unity. Now Unity can charge for it if they but it's a very uncommon practice to do so and again we come back to how shitty they intend on doing so. As you mentioned there are other ways to monetize it, another way would have been to include an ad spot for a first boot after installation. But that is another part of the issue, anyone can though of better solutions in a few minutes than the one a supposedly experienced and stable entity brought to the table.

Those hundreds of developers that you shared that are uniting against Unity are indeed a vocal minority

Disagree on this, one thing that I haven't seen is any form of support from a third party on this. You are free to see them as a vocal minority but they appear to be more akin to a representative sample.

You're severely underestimating how HUGE Unity is: according to the figures provided by Unity themselves in a report from 2022 (which is the last one in which they provide those figures), they get their data from 230,000 users

I think you are severely underestimating how many of those are simple hobbyists using the free tier without any real intention to commercialize a product out of it. The Twitter feed I linked is to the contrary mostly constituted of serious actors that are actually paying license and revenue to Unity. And even for the hobbyist the move is still crappy if they ever had any hopes of maybe... That is why Godot exploded in usage overnight and I understand them, I used to also geek out with Unity now I'll be doing so on Godot or another when I'm doing so again.

Which leads me to another point: most of the developers who are united against Unity are independent solo devs or small teams (of about 10-20 people at most) making their own games, but those are not representative of the industry at all.

As said just above it's much more about hobbyists and while they are not impacted they don't bring Unity any revenue either. But I disagree about the last part, those 10-20 people or fewer teams are very representative of Unity customers as it's currently constituted.

In fact, that's one of the shittiest parts of this Unity fee, more that the retroactivity (in my opinion): if the fee is tied to installations instead of revenue

Yes that's why people have been reacting that much any other way and we would not be exchanging whatsoever.

common cycle of a business: attract customers, retain customers, exploit customers, repeat

Whether or not the cycle is natural or not, I find it quite natural that customers will push back when they are at the being exploited phase and more so when it's as blatant and illogically done as this time around.

The thing is Unity started it was good but they were inexperienced and unstable, I remember geeking out with it just to see updates wreaking havoc in what I managed to do, even updates that broke things like meshes collision detection. Unity has stabilized since and the addition of Riccitiello and his experience was supposed to be a warrant of that stability. Yet this happened and Unity just showed how inexperienced, disconnected, illogical, and jumping the gun they are as soon as they smell money. It's one thing to want more revenue quite another if you want it so badly you lose all logic in the process without taking time to think things through. 

Sorry about the huge post. That was one reason why I stopped posting in VGChartz: I usually ended up writing (a lot) more than I initially wanted, and so I spent more time here than I wanted.

"Those are supposed to be the investments you make so that your tools actually work. Without it, Unity simply has no value and it is actually already monetized by the value it procures to unity."

But where do those investments come from? That was my point: Oracle and Microsoft can afford to offer JRE and .NET (respectively) for free precisely because they have other products that aren't free. Also, Unity isn't exactly the same kind of product than JRE or .NET, so I don't think it's a 1:1 comparison (Unreal Engine is). In any case, Unity Technologies doesn't have other products or services that aren't linked to Unity, so it has to make money from it if it wants to keep existing. The reality is that the value that the company gets from Unity becomes totally useless if Unity doesn't generate enough profit to be sustainable and remain competitive both on the short and long terms.

And let's not forget that Unity is the David of the professional game engines, with Unreal being Goliath. Epic Games is the one company that could easily afford to offer Unreal Engine entirely for free, with no taxes whatsoever, and yet they still decide to charge a fee right from the first dollar you make using its engine. On the other hand, Unity Technologies, which doesn't have anything else to hold onto if Unity fails, still give you 1,000,000$ for free. And as you said, Unity is more stable now (and has more and better features and services), so it's clear that the money they've being making so far has being well spent (at least partially).

"The Twitter feed I linked is to the contrary mostly constituted of serious actors that are actually paying license and revenue to Unity. And even for the hobbyist the move is still crappy if they ever had any hopes of maybe..."

Inside the spoiler tag, there's a list with the last 70 developers (no cherrypicking) mentioned by that Twitter account (with 632 posts at the moment of searching). Among them there are only 4 midsized companies and 8 other devs that seem more or less serious. The 58 remaining are either starting, or hobbyists, or small unsuccesful or not-too-succesful "companies" (sometimes they are actually constituted as such, sometimes they're just a bunch of friends working together), or just not developers (simply people or small associations supporting them). So your claim about which actors constitute this Twitter account doesn't seem to be true.

And, about the hobbyists part, they will have gained 1,000,000$ (minus 2,000 for the Pro license) before they have to actually pay the fee, so this doesn't affect their hopes in the slightest. And, if there are actually some hobbyists claiming that the fee will crash their hopes (which funnily there are), either they haven't given it much thought (at all) or they are just being overly dramatic in order to make it look like the situation for them is worse than it actually is. I mean, seriously, one million dollars (minus 2,000) before you start paying? And you gain that as a hobbyist? Please, where do I have to sign?

You're right, however, that among the 230,000 stated by Unity there's probably a lot of hobbyists too.

Also, about what is actually representative of the industry or not, there is a huge number of midized and big companies that make casual, hypercasual or casino games for mobile devices, which means that they make the most played games in the biggest segment of the industry, despite being mostly unknown or "invisible" for the majority of people. I could name you dozens of these companies (probably close to 100, because I have them written down) from Spain alone (which is an emerging market), and those are just the ones I know and the ones that had an open offer for a Unity developer job in the last couple of months or so. If on top of that we start counting those that didn't have open jobs lately and from all over the world instead of a single country, we'd probably get thousands of them (perhaps even tens of thousands). And most of them have between 10 and 50 employees, some of them even more, with the bigger ones having thousands.

So even if there are more solo developers and small companies in the world than there are these midsized and big companies, the sheer amount of developers working for them is probably way higher than the developers working for the smaller ones. And these are all serious companies, while in the other group there are many who really aren't professional. So, about which is more representative of the industry, maybe both are, but one group has certainly a lot more economical impact than the other, and that is the group that is less likely to abandon Unity and start using other engines that aren't used in trully professional circuits, like Godot.

"I find it quite natural that customers will push back when they are at the being exploited phase"

Overall, my point was that Unity would not be as negatively affected by this controversy as a lot of people think. Thus, as I said before, the best scenario here is not one in which Unity is severely affected in a negative way, but one in which a different engine (mainly Godot) is positively affected in a sufficient degree. If Godot, for example, starts making its way into the professional space, that's good, because it means more competition. For that to happen, that explosion that you mentioned in the use of Godot should eventually translate into successful games from successful teams of developers, leading them to grow and therefore hire more Godot developers. If that amount of Godot companies is high enough, then this engine could get a few portion of market share in the professional circuits, which is what it is lacking now. And all of that is only possible thanks to people pushing back, so I totally agree with what you said above.

I disagree about to what extent the retroactivity would affect existing developers, however, but that doesn't matter now, because Unity has already released its new fee and it's way better than the previous one (not that that was hard to improve anyway): https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

Unity finally made a new plan public:

To our community:

I’m Marc Whitten, and I lead Unity Create which includes the Unity engine and editor teams.

I want to start with this: I am sorry. 

We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.

You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust. We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.

Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.

No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.

For those creators on Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, we are also making changes based on your feedback.

The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.

We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version.

For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.

We want to continue to build the best engine for creators. We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.

I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions. In the meantime, here are some more details.^*

Thank you for caring as deeply as you do, and thank you for giving us hard feedback.

Marc Whitten

So the fee per install garbage and all related issues are obviously gone, and it's now revenue share or some fee per new unique player count.

They will host an AMA apparently, I hope someone asks something akin to "Was it so hard to come up with something with basic logic?".

Will the trust come back, will unity be left with an associated stigma, time will tell, still want Riccitiello to be shown the door though.