Unity Engine runtime fee

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Unity Software Inc. (aka: Unity Technologies), a publicly traded software company known for their Unity game engine, implemented sweeping changes to its pricing model for Unity that would affect all users of the engine, forcing users to either adopt their per-download fee or de-list their games.

Background

Unity is a well known game engine used by studios of all sizes, and very widely across the indie space due to its accessibility, capacity for both 2D and 3D development, and C# support. Prior to the runtime fee, Unity had multiple subscription tiers:

Unity Personal

Costs nothing and allows you to the Unity game engine to produce commercial works up until your revenue from the product created using the Unity game engine reaches 100,000$ at which point you're required to change license to one of the higher tiers.

Unity Pro

Costs [TBD]$ yearly per seat, and allows you to continue working on your projects past the 100,000$ revenue limit and gives additional features.

Unity Enterprise

[TBD]

Runtime fee

On September 12th, 2023, Unity announced a "Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs," which fundamentally altered their monetization model. This runtime fee aimed to charge developers a small amount every time an end user installed their application. To qualify for the fee, games must have passed a minimum revenue threshold within the past 12 months and a minimum lifetime install count threshold. The following table (taken directly from the original announcement) lays out specific thresholds and install costs that the new model would impose on engine users.

	Unity Personal and Unity Plus	Unity Pro	Unity Enterprise
Unity Runtime Fee thresholds to be met
Revenue Threshold (USD)	$200,000 (last 12mo)	$1,000,000 (last 12mo)	$1,000,000 (last 12mo)
Install Threshold	200,000 (life to date)	1,000,000 (life to date)	1,000,000 (life to date)
Installs over the Install Threshold	Standard monthly rate
1–100,000	$0.20 per install	$0.15 per install	$0.125 per install
100,001–500,000		$0.075 per install	$0.06 per install
500,001–1,000,000		$0.03 per install	$0.02 per install
1,000,001+		$0.02 per install	$0.01 per install
Installs over the Install Threshold	Emerging market monthly rate
1+	$0.02 per install	$0.01 per install	$0.005 per install

These fees were to be applied retroactively to any product using the unity runtime, including those released prior to this change.

This announcement also removed the popular unity plus plan, forcing developers to the more expensive Unity Pro plan if they wanted to remove the baked in unity splash screen.

To ensure adoption of this change Unity quietly changed their EULA to allow for such a change and never notified their users, going as far to private their EULA Github repository which was created as a result of a prior incident where Unity Technologies changed quietly their EULA quietly.

Consumer impact

What the repercussions of the incident are for consumers in the context of "new" consumer protection (privacy,right to ownership,right to say no).

Consumer response

The yearly GMTK Game jam released a series of statistics on engine usage within the jam, both in 2023 before the runtime fee announcement and in 2024 afterwards. The 2023 results showed 59% of jam entries were made in the unity engine, while the next largest engine, Godot, (a free & open source competitor to unity), took a 19% share. The 2024 results see unity's share drop by 16% to an overall 43%, and Godot's more than double to 37%, Illustrating a significant exodus of talent from the unity platform correlating with the release of the runtime fee.