Very little news in recent memory has rocked the gaming sphere quite like Unity’s Tuesday announcement of brand-new runtime fees for games built into its engine. Now, almost a week after the initial policy change and after some very heavy backlash from the wider community, Unity is moving to walk it back.
To say that the first announcement was controversial is certainly true, but it fails to truly grasp the scope of what exactly the policy encompassed.
The proposed policy, which would have gone into effect on January 1, 2024, would have attached a developer-paid fee to any installation of any Unity game past the 200,000 mark on top of the monthly subscription fee charged for access.
The problems with this were quickly pointed out by users—free games dependent on microtransactions to survive, for instance, would quickly be swamped by install fees. In addition, Unity’s promise of “proprietary tools” to detect fraudulent installs (as a botnet or even a group of dedicated users constantly reinitializing installs could bleed developers dry) was taken as somewhat dubious, especially given Unity would be monetarily incentivized to allow as many installs as possible.
The consensus was it was an act of brazen corporate greed on behalf of Unity chief executive John Riccitiello, who was previously a proponent of similar monetization tactics at Electronic Arts and was met with near-unanimous backlash—as well as some free marketing for Unity’s competitors, such as Epic’s Unreal Engine.
Now, after a week of being put on blast and with their public perception having tanked, Unity has taken to X (formerly known as Twitter) with promises to make changes.
While it’s vague, the allusion to “changes to the policy” does sound promising. It’s likely we’ll have to wait until that update in a couple of days to find out what exactly that entails, but a cancellation of the policy entirely sounds like a bit too much to hope for.
It’s possible there will be a reduction in the fee, or perhaps a higher threshold to meet before the fee is implemented, but neither of these is likely to satisfy many of the policy’s detractors or regain Unity’s goodwill any time soon.
Ultimately, it’s still an ongoing situation, it’s entirely possible for Unity to pull a complete 180 eventually. Given Riccitiello once proposed charging a dollar per reload in Battlefield, though, expectations from fans aren’t high, with many memes at Unity’s expense still being shared in the account’s X replies.
