Hero.EXE

Unity appears hell-bent on destroying the indie and small studio developer. The introduction by Unity of a Runtime Fee – which would, in their own words, appear to be a levy on copies installed based on an install threshold - comes after a slate of price creeps, engine neglect, obsession with AI tools, and labelling their own customers as "the biggest f*cking idiots". The structure of the Runtime Fee, as they describe it, is cynical, seemingly being designed in a way to deliberately push developers to introduce microtransactions and live services into their games in order to offset install-based fees (in a crushing irony, gambling apps are exempted from the fee – as per their own website’s FAQ). The Unity Plus tier of subscription is being retired, which was previously a modestly priced package which allowed serious but small-scale users to get more functionality from the engine than was possible on the Personal tier. This means that on top of now being penalized for every copy installed - many smaller studios will now have to pay out thousands a year (PER SEAT) with no intermediate plan available. Wording and structure of Unity's plans is unclear and lacking in detail, but the implication is that these Runtime Fee levies will apply universally, to all games/apps built in the engine. We're not exaggerating when we say this has potential to destroy the indie developer and hobbyist developer: who can afford to make a charming, small game priced very low just for fun, have it go viral, only to then be charged by Unity for every copy installed? You'd be left with crushing debts for something you never made to make money. It's clear that Unity executives failed to think about this from any angle other than the AAA F2P, live service and/or mobile market. This is short-sighted, unstructured, unprecedented, and extremely brazen. Plus, how does Unity intend to enforce this? The implications are worrying, as despite their wording being inconsistent and internally confused in places, Unity states they will “automatically” bill game/apps monthly for install activity, alongside the invoicing in the "same method" of how people pay for their Unity plans. What’s the plan here? The wording suggests that Unity is integrating invasive, always-online DRM into the runtime to report install activity for each copy installed, allowing Unity to generate the monthly billing. How will Unity deal with pirated games? Will having your game pirated will genuinely mean you lose money as a developer, because Unity will still recognize the copy as an install? How are they intending to deal with this? How are they dealing with multiple installs, will they be remotely harvesting data from end-users to track hardware IDs? The notion is beyond absurd, and it’s more absurd they’re making YOU pay for it. Unity themselves seem to be clueless around the Runtime Fee policy, as the worked examples they give to reassure developers that they're not getting screwed is nonsensical. The worked example gives a random example of a set amount of revenue and the corresponding install levy, yet revenue isn't the key KPI, as the fee is levied based on installs, and not revenue. On top of this, the example is absolutely absurd, with them taking almost 15% of the overall revenue in their best case worked example. As both a game publisher and engineering/porting studio – no less with one with a professional relationship with Unity itself - this is perhaps the most unwelcome news we've ever heard in the game development space. Unity seems hell-bent on destroying everything except AI, and micro-transaction focused F2P games. Games are great, because anyone can sit down at a computer and with enough learning, create something. All they need are the tools to allow that to happen. Unity just made a significant portion of those tools inaccessible for the grassroots section of the game development community. In response, we are considering prioritization of tools development for alternative engines that will become available to our partners, and encourage engine providers to remain considerate of their end-users – the people actually USING and PROMOTING their software – rather than faceless investors. blog.unity.com/news/plan-pri…

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