An open letter to our community

I’m Marc Whitten, and I lead Unity Create which includes the Unity engine and editor teams.

I want to start with simply this: I am sorry.

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.

You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust. We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.

Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.

No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.

For those creators on Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, we are also making changes based on your feedback.

The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.

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.

For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.

We want to continue to build the best engine for creators. We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.

I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions. In the meantime, here are some more details.*

Thank you for caring as deeply as you do, and thank you for giving us hard feedback.

Marc Whitten

Yup, even going so far as to rewrite the FAQ and pretend they never said the initial answer, it only being noted as "(Updated, Sept 14)"[0]

For full context, the original Q/A was

> Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?

> A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.

and has since been edited to

> Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game, will that count as multiple installs?

> A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs.

> (Updated, Sep 14)

> Q: Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs?

> A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs.

> (Updated, Sep 14)

[0]: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...

- $1,000,000 income floor for a trailing 12 months

- Doesn't apply to old versions

- Billed a lesser amount of 2.5% revenue if available, so low-cost indie games don't get destroyed

Not to mention, removing the requirement to have "Made with Unity" on the free version? Surprised they would change this - it wasn't really a problem for most people, and afaik getting rid of the "Made with Unity" was one of the main reasons people would buy the non-free versions of Unity.

I think this is probably the best they could have done for indie devs. As it turns out, pushback works. They did destroy a lot of trust with developers with this move though. Going to be hard to get any of that back.

By lying about the situation so transparently, it's clear to me that this is nothing more than damage control, and that the loss of trust does not deserve to be earned back.