Developers respond to Unity’s new pricing scheme

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.

Earlier this week, Unity, the company that makes the Unity video game engine popular with indie developers, announced that it was changing its pricing model. The changes included a pricing scheme that sought to charge developers on a per-install basis for games that met specific download and revenue thresholds.

Unity wanted to charge developers for game installs without seemingly taking into account the many reasons a game might be installed without being purchased. Unity’s new model could theoretically result in situations where developers would be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees without the revenue to pay for it.

Once the news broke, the video game developer community reacted strongly and negatively to the news, citing Unity’s poor communication, lack of clarity, loss of trust, and what they saw as a naked attempt to squeeze money out of small developer teams. Many developers and even publishers took to social media to register their anger and to call on Unity to reverse its decision.

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“This decision puts studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles,” read a post on X (formerly Twitter) from developer Aggro Crab. “If these changes aren’t rolled back, we’ll be heavily considering abandoning our Unity expertise.”

Many developers shared a similar sentiment, explaining they were considering abandoning Unity as a game engine. Other game developers, like Massive Monster, were more drastic, which, via the official account for its game Cult of the Lamb, threatened to delist the game entirely.

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