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Unity has made the announcement the entire games industry was waiting for – it has announced that its Unity Runtime Fee has been cancelled, effective immediately, for all game makers. The news was announced with a blog post from current president and chief executive officer of Unity Matt Bromberg, who opened by saying that “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.” Bromberg continues to say that Unity’s “core mission” is “democratizing game development,” and that it can’t achieve that while “in conflict with our customers; at its heart, it must be a partnership built on trust.” Instead of this much-hated fee, Unity will be “reverting to our existing seat-based subscription model for all gaming customers,” including those on Unity 6. But it will also be raising costs on its subscription pricing, which will go into effect January 1, 2025. “An 8% subscription price increase to $2,200 USD annually per seat will apply to Unity Pro,” and developers who surpass an annual revenue of $200K USD will be required to use Unity Pro. The next step up, Unity Enterprise will see a 25% subscription price increase, which developers who surpass $25 million USD in annual revenue and funding will be required to use Enterprise. Exactly one year ago today, Unity announced it would begin to charge developers a royalty fee for game installs with a new policy called the Unity Runtime Fee. This meant that after a certain threshold, developers would have to pay a fee every time someone installed their game. It was met with immediate ire and push back from the entire development community. A week after the initial announcement, Unity was already working to change the policy following the backlash. Developers held strong and continued to push back, banding together against the game engine that prior to this wasn’t exactly perfect, but it also wasn’t a threat to their entire livelihoods. Unity then said that the fee would not apply to entry-level users, and would only be for those using the next version of Unity scheduled for release this year. This did very little to instill confidence in developers that they could trust Unity. A little less than a month after the initial announcement, leadership at Unity began to change. Former EA boss and man-who-thought-it-was-a-good-idea-to-charge-players-per-reload-in-an-FPS-game John Riccitiello left his role as president of Unity and retired, and the whole games industry was better for his departure. Unfortunately Riccitiello’s absence didn’t put an end to the fee then and there. Things actually got even worse with layoffs arriving little more than two months after announcing the fee, and then again at the beginning of 2024 with a staggering 1,800 people laid off. Since then Unity has seemingly staved off more layoffs and after today it finally got around to doing what it should’ve done immediately after announcing the Runtime Fee – doing away with it all together. It’s unfortunate that the fee is sticking around for non-game makers, but at the very least the entire games industry, specifically indie developers, can all let out a giant sigh of relief. The price increases on the subscriptions aren’t great either, but they’re a far cry better than a policy that had the potential to decimate indie development and the growth of the industry worldwide. As for Unity, while doing away with the Runtime Fee is what developers wanted, this entire ordeal has left a poor taste in their mouths. Whatever trust developers placed in Unity was forever fractured a year ago. We’ll see how Bromberg and co. continue to try and mend that break. Source – [Unity] The post Unity Has Officially Cancelled Its Runtime Fee Policy For Game Makers appeared first on PlayStation Universe.

Source: https://www.psu.com/news/unity-has-canc ... me-makers/