Developers fight back against Unity’s new pricing model

theverge.com:

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

The game developers affected by Unity’s new pricing model are striking back. A collective of developers across 19 companies, mostly based in Europe and mostly developing mobile games, has put out an open letter urging Unity to reverse course on its recently announced pricing model changes. The letter contains some of the same sentiments expressed by other developers this week but with one big twist.

“As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies is forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization across our projects until these changes are reconsidered,” the letter read.

Essentially, these companies, which represent thousands of games with billions of downloads, have blocked Unity from making any more money in their games. Some of the companies represented in the letter include Voodoo.io, Azur Games, and SayGames, with each claiming over 100 games.

There have been numerous messages from developers urging the company to reverse course. Others have threatened to never use Unity again or port their existing projects to other game engines. This collective action from developers represents the next escalation in the fight between Unity and its users.

At the heart of the matter is the news that Unity will update its pricing structure to charge developers for each installation of a Unity game after specific download and revenue thresholds are met. Though Unity asserts that only 10 percent of its users will be affected, it is still unclear how Unity intends to track installs and how it intends to differentiate a “valid” install from an