“I want to start with this: I am sorry.”
The announcement came in an"open letter to our community"on the Unity site.
“I want to start with this: I am sorry,” writes Unity’s Marc Whitten.
“We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.”
Unityannounced last weekthat qualifying developers would be charged a fee, typically around $0.20, the first time a new player installed their game. Developers were immediately critical of the move, in particular the retroactive application of new fees to games made in Unity long ago, as well as for the ambiguous way in which installs would be tracked and of the risk of fraudulent installs - for example, by those pirated the game - costing developers money.
In the days following the announcement, Unity’s efforts toclarify the terms and process mostly just made things worse. Several developers announcedtheir intention to stop using the development platform, citing a loss of trust in a company that could introduce retroactive fees at any moment.
“We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version,” Whitten writes in the post.
They also clarify the issues around installs are counted, saying that the figure should be “self-reported from data” developers already have, and offering the option for them to switch from the runtime fee to a 2.5% revenue share instead. “You will always be billed the lesser amount.”
The way the fees were structured before, the vast majority of developers would never have had to pay. Developers were frustrated anyway that a change like this could be foisted upon them. Now, the developers who do need to pay are even fewer, and the manner in which they are billed is much clearer, but whether it’s enough to repair the trust for anyone, we’ll have to wait and see. Personally I wouldn’t go anywhere near Unity ever again.
