Archive link: https://archive.ph/Ys676
Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.
No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.
The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.
For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available.
I think them getting royalties on products made by their customers is something that will be adopted by other software if it ends up successful, and that’s worrisome to me. Imagine if Crayola wanted a percentage of an artist’s earnings for use of their color pencils. We’re gonna be nickled and dimed in every aspect of our lives soon. Photoshop is now a subscription (which is bad enough), but imagine if they decided they want a percentage too. There needs to be even more pushback on this imo.
This has been the business model of game engines since at least the early 2000s and I think it’s fine. A significant portion of the code that you ship is theirs, after all. A flat fee would need to be quite high and it would scare developers/investors away since the income of a game is so hard to predict. Unreal and Cryengine work the same way.
I know this sounds like an internet edgelord, but it’s like they want us to build the guillotines.
That’s actually a very good point, especially with the number of EULAs that we encounter on such a regular basis. How hard would it be for Adobe to slip a clause in about royalties without us noticing?
Is there even a stated reason for this change beyond just simple greed? To my knowledge they aren’t maintaining any servers or other cost centers for the games developed on Unity.
As you said, hopefully there’s still enough of a negative reaction to this that it doesn’t take hold elsewhere.