After deep consultation with our community, customers, and partners, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee for our games customers, effective immediately. Non-gaming Industry customers are not impacted by this modification.
This is the right direction.
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My question is, wasn’t the whole point of the runtime fee to punish people who didn’t follow the subscription model guidelines? For example, it was much cheaper to get Unity Pro than pay the runtime fee, but the runtime fee was unavoidable otherwise.
Unity has long had issues getting people to pay the fee, and it’s been a point of controversy before like when people would get emails saying unity thought they needed it. Even further back, they tried to get people to pay by restricting engine features which became impossible in order to be competitive on the graphics front.
So, with the removal of the runtime fee the problem remains, but now you might not see devs use plus to get around pro, since plus is gone.
So how does Unity plan to enforce it’s subscriptions going forward? Since it was a big enough problem to create this whole runtime fee thing to begin with?
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I commend this decision
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This is great news.
I’d like to advocate 1 thing, although I’m likely part of a very small minority : I’m publishing 1 game on consoles, but make significantly less than $200k per year.
In the future, if the sales lower too much, I may have to cancel my Pro license and won’t be able to support my game on consoles anymore.
Before, I could use the Plus subscription.
I understand it was too cheap to get support for the consoles, but it’d be neat to get a 50% discount or even just a 30% one from the Pro license in such a case.
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finally some common sense. too bad you needed one year and going nearly bankrupt to figure out what was obvious for everyone and what I’ve told you for free one year ago.
Now if you can tell your staff to stop censoring and abusing critical users in the community from now on, that would be a great step. If you want to know why most have gone away that is one of the reason, I’ve stuck around just to see how deep this abuse goes. Got banned from multiple subforums, had posts deleted because I was criticizing the changes you now have reverted, got staff personally sending threatening messages because I’ve dared reminding that their colleagues got fired while you have TWO CEOs earning millions, and because I was angry the game unity was working on was cancelled. And on and on, one year of this abuse towards me. Reported comments, blocked comments, I will see how much time this comment stay on actually.
So some changes in this area would help
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There seem to be restriction by law and I guess they can make unity stop working remotely like other application. Currently now people hardly able to work with internet anymore. Unity might also open branch in major country to enforce the law locally
Surely it not very forceful enough and may not be replaceable for profit they could reap from fee model, but seeing the controversy and people leaving unity, the bleeding never stop and godot are rising should be so clear that the fee model will give no money in the long run
I bet the engine percentage statistic in game jam this year is the last straw that too hurt to be tolerated
Bravo. Thank you for being human and thanks for all the hard work you do for us all who are trying to make it.
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No. It was because companies were making smash hits but only paying for basic subscriptions.
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Good move!
But even better would be to scrap the increased Industry fee and treat all developers equal - that was also unwelcome.
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nice!
Imagine how much money and customers would had been saved/kept,
if they had only asked, even just few people outside unity, before rushing the runtime fee out…
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Isn’t that exactly what sacb0y said? People weren’t upgrading when their income exceeded the limits.
I thought they did ask a few, it was let known that some few were summoned to a meeting to discuss it…
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No, Unity saw small teams making mega hits earning tens of millions if not hundreds of millions in the case of mobile and wanted a piece of that. A solo developer can make the biggest hit of gaming history but Unity still gets 2k/year from them no matter how successful the project is. The runtime fee would tap into the revenue of all successful projects past the subscription fee, something Unity haven’t been able to do before.
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This is a wise but belated decision.
I hope the value of your shares will go up after that!
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I think back of the wall of businesses who were paid unity customers who left because of the runtime fee… who in the last year ported out.
Heres to our fallen comerades, we got the right decision, but sadly they fell for our freedom.
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Any plan to bring back the Plus subscription or remove the splash screen on older unity version?
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It’s not that they weren’t upgrading. It’s that they were only upgrading to Unity Pro. Companies with AAA budgets, smash hits, etc were only paying $2K per developer per year but were making hundreds of millions of dollars. Companies like Epic Games were making off with up to 5%.
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Yes, that’s definitely part of it, which is also a concern.
While this is the right move I kinda also hoped that a specific other change would also happen:
- the requirement of Unity Pro for console development
I do console ports for other companies every now and then and I do way less than 200k a year, but for some arbitrary reason you have to buy the Pro license still.
Paying 2k a year just for the ability to build for consoles is quite a lot and feels unfair.
This has to change as well.
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