Unity plans to change its disastrous new pricing program
By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.
Unity plans to change its forthcoming pay-per-install program following widespread criticism from game developers.
“We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused,” Unity posted on X (formerly Twitter). “We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days.”
This new communication from Unity comes after nearly a week of clarifications, retractions, and a growing force of upset developers who threaten not only to remove their games from the engine but also a potential class action lawsuit.
Though Unity said an update on the pricing model will likely be out sometime this week, a new report from Bloomberg may outline the shape of the changes.
“Under the tentative new plan, Unity will limit fees to 4 percent of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million and said that installations counted toward reaching the threshold won’t be retroactive,” wrote Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier.
Under the new plan, it seems like Unity will still charge per installation, but it will cap the charge at 4 percent for games making over $1 million. For now, we do not know if there’s a cap on fees for games making under that amount. It also seems like Unity will only assess installs made after January 1st instead of retroactively applying the fees to games already released that have met the install threshold.
Additionally, Bloomberg’s report included that instead of Unity using what it called proprietary software to track a
Read more on theverge.com
