Unity is a game engine (cross-platform) developed by Unity Technologies. It was first announced and released in June 2005 as a Mac OS X game engine. Unity later expanded to support various PCs, mobile, console, and virtual reality platforms.
This game engine is mostly popular for iOS and Android mobile game development and in Esports. Beginner developers prefer to use Unity to develop games because of the ease of using it. Unity is also popular among the indie game development community.
The game engine, one of the major game development tools used by independent studios and game developers has introduced a developers fee. Unity Engine will charge developers each time a game using the engine is downloaded starting from January 1, 2024. Unity has called this fee a “Unity Runtime Fee”.
The fee will only begin when the game sale reaches $200,000 in revenue over 12-months and 200,000 in total installs. For the Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise licenses, the fee will start after a title earns $1 million over 12 month period and passes 1 million installs.
Charges will also vary depending on the license the developer has with Unity. The charges can be up to $0.20 per install.
Game developers aren’t happy with a new policy from Unity that will cost developers a small fee every time someone installs a game built on Unity’s game engine. https://t.co/HDmLxSBpc9 pic.twitter.com/SriVP0MMVq
— IGN (@IGN) September 12, 2023
The Unity Runtime fee has not been received well within the gaming community. People have become furious by this move by Unity. Garry Newman, the creator of Garry’s Mod, tweeted, “Unity can just start charging us a tax per install? They can do this unilaterally? They can charge whatever they want? We have to trust their tracking?!”
Unity Technologies started receiving death threat because of introducing the Runtime fee, Bloomberg reported. “Today, we have been made aware of a potential threat to some of our offices. We have taken immediate and proactive measures to ensure the safety of our employees, which is our top priority,” a Unity spokesperson said in a statement to IGN.
Because of these threats, Unity was forced to close its offices in San Francisco and Austin. These threats come after many days of intense criticism against this move by Unity Technologies.
List of major game titles that run on Unity
Almost a decade after its release, Unity Game Engine from its release has been very popular among the developer community. It was initially designed for the development of 3D games but has also been used for 2D game creations.
Here is a list of some of the most popular, brilliant, and breathtaking games developed with the Unity Engine since its release a decade ago:
- Disco Elysium developed by ZA/UM
- Genshin Impact develoved by miHoYo
- Honkai Star Rail developed by miHoYo
- Narita Boy developed by Studio Koba
- Mundaun developed by Hidden Fields
- Lost in Random developed by Zoink
- Metal Hellsinger developed by The Outsiders
- GTFO developed by 10 Chambers
- Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout developed by Mediatonic
- Oddworld: Soulstorm developed by Oddworld Inhabitants
- Morbid Metal developed by Felix Schade
- Pillars Of Eternity developed by Obsidian Entertainment
- Ori And The Blind Forest developed by Moon Studios
- Pokemon GO developed by Niantic
The games that come under Unity China such as Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail may also get affected by the “Unity Runtime Fee”.
This fee could harm the developers if their game has a spike in installations due to big sale events. The developers would also have to pay the fee to Unity in case their games get included in popular subscription services like Game Pass.
The developers would also have to pay the fee when players install the game, delete it and then re-install it again. Downloads of pirated versions of games can also hurt the developer as they will have to cash out the runtime fee.
This fee can also potentially impact installs made via services like Game Pass, as Unity is planning to include the runtime fee for installations done via subscription fees.
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