The company behind Unity, an extremely popular game engine used to make some games you may have heard of (including about a fifth of my Steam library, for reference), has just announced a new fee for developers using their engine.
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.
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.
I won't mince words: this absurd pricing change has the potential to sink a lot of small game development studios, especially those working on games that are extremely popular or not aggressively monetized.
For example, Among Us has over 500 million downloads on the Google Play Store alone. Under this pricing scheme, that would cost its developer, Innersloth, $100,000,000 on the free plan, or a paltry $5,000,000 if they're using the if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it Enterprise plan. I don't have access to Innersloth's financial data, but that's probably at least a year or two of pay for all of their employees at the absolute minimum, more if they're on a cheaper plan. I seriously doubt they can afford this.
That's an extreme example, but I think it gets the point across. If you don't believe me, take it from developers on Twitter (via u/Sparky2199):
As angry as I am about this, I do feel kind of vindicated, because here's the thing: something like this was always going to happen. Not because Unity in particular is a bad company (although it is), but because it's a for-profit company. This isn't just the behavior of a few corrupt execs, this is corporate greed. This is appealing to shareholders. This is infinite growth in a finite system. This is the fundamental machinery of capitalism in motion, and while the details vary, things going broadly this way was inevitable the moment Unity went public, and it was structurally incentivised from the beginning.
Videogames can take years and cost huge amounts of money to make, and a change like this forcing you to either pay more than your company makes in fees or toss all that work and rebuild the entire game from scratch with new software can easily kill a project, if not financially then just from simple loss of motivation. Becoming dependent on anything that might do this to you is a huge risk, and that risk is starting to seem a lot more real now that it's happened so suddenly.
I've seen tech companies do this countless times before, but normally the frog gets boiled a lot slower in ways that are a lot subtler. Google results have slowly been getting less relevant and more ad-infested for years now, and some of the shit Microsoft is doing in Windows 10 and 11 would have lost them that antitrust case in 2001. Unity's just tossed a grenade into the pot. This system was never sustainable, and across the industry we're seeing it reach its conclusion, as companies become desperate to squeeze every last cent out of their customers (and in some cases, everyone else) that they possibly can.
Looking at this, there's one question I'm forced to ask: How much longer are we going to keep letting companies do this to us? Blindly hoping the next for-profit, proprietary solution will be good to us forever hasn't worked yet, and it clearly never will. So what's left? After all the corporations with paid licenses and ad-supported monetization schemes and suspiciously high marketing budgets wither and die, we're left with open source. We're left with the software that isn't trying to make a profit and so doesn't need to grow its userbase and constantly monetize itself to survive, that can survive even being abandoned by its devs because anyone can find and keep maintaining the code, that doesn't have every fucking financial incentive to hurt you, and that coincidentally costs absolutely nothing to use. We're left with the only things that were ever truly sustainable.
What's it gonna fucking take for people to figure that out?
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: Blog post (Sep 12), Blog post (Sep 14), Forum thread (Sep 12), Forum thread (Sep 14). 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 significantly 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.
On the technical side, if you're a budding game developer, Unity isn't your only option. Depending on the type and complexity of your game, RPG Maker might be better for you, and Unreal Engine is also a strong competitor. If you want something open-source, though (and you should), there's Godot, a free 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.
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.