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updated unity post AGAIN + new quotes

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will 2023-09-23 17:08:32 -06:00
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<id>unity_runtime_fee_and_proprietary_software</id>
<link rel="alternate" href="https://isopod.cool/blog/posts/unity_runtime_fee_and_proprietary_software/" type="html" title="The Unity Runtime Fee and Proprietary Software"></link>
<published>2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00</published>
<updated>2023-09-18T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
<updated>2023-09-23T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
<summary>Unity's new Runtime Fee is yet another data point on the pile against ever trusting for-profit software companies.</summary>
<category term="unity"/>
<category term="capitalism"/>

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<a href="../../../">home</a>
<a href="../../">blog</a>
</nav>
<h5><em>Updated on 2023-09-18</em></h5>
<h5><em>Updated on 2023-09-23</em></h5>
<p><a href="https://archive.ph/gBpXw">Well this fucking sucks.</a></p>
<p><strong>[UPDATE 2023-09-23]</strong> This policy has changed significantly for the better since this article was written, and I wanted to update this post for completeness, but I'm leaving the original article alone because I think it's important for people to know everything Unity <em>tried</em> to get away with, and not just what it ended up doing. I've added my thoughts on the changes to the end of this article.</p>
<p>The company behind Unity, an extremely popular game engine used to make <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/curator/39750107-Games-Made-With-Unity/">some games you may have heard of</a> (including about a fifth of my Steam library, for reference), has just announced a new fee for developers using their engine.</p>
<p>In essence, as of next year, developers will owe Unity a fee for every time their game made with the engine is installed after certain retroactive revenue and install base thresholds. There's various different tiers of this, but for the free plan you and I would be using it amounts to $0.20 per install after the first 200,000 installs and $200,000 of revenue.</p>
<p>Side note - How these installs are counted is left intentionally vague too, so it's unclear whether it's a severe violation of user privacy or vulnerable to abuse by maliciously performing repeated reinstalls of a game, or perhaps both. Plus, this also means that even pirated copies might count towards the total.</p>
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<p>In this particular case, I don't think this is gonna stick. Unity's runtime fee is absurd, and I think they know it just as well as all their moderately high-profile customers on Twitter do. Unity has already started to walk back some of the more extreme parts of the initial plan, as you can see on archived versions of the posts: <a href="https://archive.ph/gEckm">Blog post (Sep 12)</a>, <a href="https://archive.ph/gBpXw">Blog post (Sep 14)</a>, <a href="https://archive.ph/HYTq5">Forum thread (Sep 12)</a>, <a href="https://archive.ph/eByMm">Forum thread (Sep 14)</a>. Unity also has some customers that are bigger than them and notoriously litigation-happy, namely Nintendo (with Pokemon BD/SP and Go, plus a couple Mario mobile games) and Disney (also with quite a few mobile and console games). Unity's CEO also sold a bunch of stock in the company in the lead-up to this announcement, which, since the company's stock price dropped <em>significantly</em> after the announcement, might actually constitute fraud. You know, from federal crimes! Basically, this initial announcement was probably an attempt to see how much they could get away with, and Unity's probably fucked if they stick to their guns on this.</p>
<p>On the technical side, if you're a budding game developer, Unity isn't your only option. My top recommendation is <a href="https://godotengine.org/">Godot</a>, a free and open source game engine that's recently taken steps to increase its funding in a way that's actually sane and not cartoon villain behavior. It also supports C# by default, since you probably got used to that with Unity. There's also RPG Maker and Unreal Engine, the latter of which I imagine a lot of studios will be switching to soon.</p>
<p>Finally, if you've been eyeing a game that uses the Unity engine, you've got until the end of the year to install it without incurring that fee for the developer assuming this change goes through. So I'd check for that. By my understanding you'll have to run it at least once before then, too.</p>
<h2>Update as of 2023-09-23</h2>
<p>Good(?) news! Unity's responded to community feedback and it's actually... better than I expected. You can read the full post <a href="https://archive.ph/rLi8u">here</a>, but I'll summarize the changes:</p>
<ul>
<li>No more runtime fee for the free Personal tier</li>
<li>Revenue cap for the Personal tier doubled and mandatory splash screen removed</li>
<li>The runtime fee now only applies starting with the next LTS release in 2024</li>
<li>The runtime fee is now capped at 2.5% of total revenue, and all relevant data is now self-reported instead of a "proprietary data model"</li>
<li>Just like, a straight up apology at the beginning of the post</li>
</ul>
<p>This is all good. These changes remove all of the most devastating knock-on effects of the original policy, and I think this is actually a <em>better</em> deal for free users than before.</p>
<p>That said, my original point still stands. Unity is still squeezing more money out of its userbase in a way it hadn't previously, and it could pull some shit like this again at any time. Just because it caved this time, doesn't mean there's anything stopping Unity from making more horrible retroactive policy changes in future. Unity has destroyed a lot of the trust it's built with its community - a lot of developers won't trust Unity not to screw them over in the future, and in my opinion they'd be right not to.</p>
<p>It's my hope that a lot of game developers will take this opportunity to ditch Unity for something better. At the very least, I don't think we'll see many games de-listed like Cult of the Lamb <a href="https://archive.ph/4xyTO">threatened to do</a>, since existing games can just not update their Unity release. A lot of games may still be forced to move engines if they don't want to deal with this, though. For example, support for new consoles, OS versions, etc. probably won't be backported to old Unity versions. Games that continually add new content or aren't finished yet will probably eventually start encountering issues resulting from this.</p>
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