Game devs say Unity’s big change puts studios at risk

polygon.com:

Unity Technologies, the company behind cross-platform game engine Unity, announced a new pricing model on Tuesday — and it’s been almost universally condemned by the video game developer community on social media since the announcement went live.

Unity is widely used by both AAA studios and indie developers — and everybody in between. It’s the foundation for games like Pokémon Go, Hollow Knight, Rust, and Hearthstone, among plenty others. Unity’s new pay structure ties a fee to game installs, when the Unity Runtime code is booted up on a player’s device, rather than a revenue sharing model.

“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” a Unity representative said in a blog post detailing the fee. “We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.”

There is no way Unity talked to a single developer before launching this: developing in Unity is now straight-up a financial risk for:

— subscription services
— charity bundles
— piracy
— being f2p/going f2p
— malicious installs
— giveaways

Unity’s runtime fee will be collected once a game “has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months” and “has passed a minimum lifetime install count.” Those install fees vary based on Unity pricing plans. Unity Personal and Unity Plus customers must pay $0.20 per install after reaching $200,000 of revenue in the past year and having more than 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise users will pay $0.15 and $0.125 per install, respectively, after