Unity Plans to Charge Developers a Fee for Game Installs

[Tsing]

Unity has announced that it will be charging many studios, developers, and other creators a "small, flat fee" for every game install. The Unity Runtime Fee, as it's called, is applicable to Unity Personal and Unity Plus subscribers who have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months and have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs, while Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise subscribers are affected as well, with those who have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months and have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs needing to pay some sort of fee. Unity Technologies is launching this new policy on January 1, 2024, and according to a breakdown that the company shared, fees can go up to $0.20 per install depending on the plan.

See full article...

 

[MadMummy76]

Does nobody have a brain at unity?

1. What is a download? Does updating a game counts as a new download? If not how do you differentiate a fresh install from a patch? This surely incentivizes devs to never update their game.
2. What about copies given out for free like in bundles or review copies, or promotions? Those can't happen now.
3. Hope if your game is pirated then the crackers have the courtesy of disabling the install count tracking spyware as well.
4. Have you heard about this small thing called review bombing? Now you've just given the tools for review bombers to really financially hurt the devs by just uninstalling then re-installing the game 5 times every day. Imagine that 50.000 people does this for a week...That would cost the developer $350.000
5. Not to mention unity investors starting to pay chinese bot farms to just install unity games.

They might as well put up a banner: Hey don't use our game engine.

 

[Grimlakin]

They clearly didn't release enough details for anyone that wanted to question the minutia...

 

[MadMummy76]

They clearly didn't release enough details for anyone that wanted to question the minutia...

When a company is being vague you always have to assume they are being vague for a reason.

I don't think my questions are about minute details. They are everyday practices that a spyware which only counts downloads is likely unable to differentiate between.

 

[MadMummy76]

As it turns out they are not even going to count installs, just somehow magically infer the install base, on a trust me bro basis. Absolutely insane.

 

[Brian_B]

I could see a per license thing, and I’m pretty sure Unreal and other engines charge along those lines - but per install is a different metric than that.