Unity scraps Runtime Fee plan but it may be too little, too late

In a surprise turn of events, Unity has confirmed that it's scrapping all "runtime fee" plans in the works. This comes after the company behind the popular game-development software shocked studios around the globe last year after announcing that teams using the engine would need to pay a fee for every game install.

This policy adversely impacted smaller studios, leading to a massive boycott of the Unity software package within the game development scene. While this backtracking of plans is a step in the right direction, it may be too late.

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Unity has learned its lesson, but will developers forgive them?

Company CEO Matthew Bromberg had the following to say via an official statement on the Unity Blog:

"After deep consultation with our community, customers, and partners, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee for our games customers, effective immediately. Non-gaming Industry customers are not impacted by this modification."

He recounted the company's journey over the past two decades:

"Over the last 20 years, we’ve partnered with brilliant designers and developers, artists and engineers, publishers and platforms, to build a world where great games could be built by anyone, for everyone. We called it “democratizing game development,” and it remains our core mission today."

Bromberg listed the reasons for a price increase:

"However, we can’t pursue that mission in conflict with our customers; at its heart, it must be a partnership built on trust. I’ve been able to connect with many of you over the last three months, and I’ve heard time and time again that you want a strong Unity, and understand that price increases are a necessary part of what enables us to invest in moving gaming forward."

Understanding the backlash, he emphasized the value of delivering a fair price:

"But those increases needn’t come in a novel and controversial new form. We want to deliver value at a fair price in the right way so that you will continue to feel comfortable building your business over the long term with Unity as your partner. And we’re confident that if we’re good partners and deliver great software and services, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what we can do together."

To no one's surprise, Unity is officially executing damage control since elaborating on these policies. However, the bridges may have already been burned. Game makers may fear that if the company's top brass were willing to throw away their well-earned goodwill once, nothing would stop them from repeating the same.

Furthermore, certain studios have already shifted to other engines such as Godot and Unreal Engine in the wake of the boycott. This adversely affected both the teams and project development, with the former needing to spend time and effort to learn new engines while the latter resulted in the delayed release of their games. One example is Slay the Spire developer switching to Godot for its new project:

That said, it remains to be seen how things will change moving forward. While some may forgive the company, many like Mega Crit Games will opt otherwise, simply because this policy negatively affected so many studios and caused unnecessary hassle. With more than half of the games on Steam using Unity, the impact of the runtime fee plan would have been disastrous for many.

To top it off, Bromberg also discussed plans for how things will move forward, which include a hike in subscription prices for Unity Pro and Enterprise editions by 8% and 25% respectively.