Business A message to our community: Unity is canceling the Runtime Fee

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https://unity.com/blog/unity-is-can...ce=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=RTF (https://archive.ph/Mes2e)

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. Non-gaming Industry customers are not impacted by this modification.

Over the last 20 years, we’ve partnered with brilliant designers and developers, artists and engineers, publishers and platforms, to build a world where great games could be built by anyone, for everyone. We called it “democratizing game development,” and it remains our core mission today.

However, we can’t pursue that mission in conflict with our customers; at its heart, it must be a partnership built on trust. I’ve been able to connect with many of you over the last three months, and I’ve heard time and time again that you want a strong Unity, and understand that price increases are a necessary part of what enables us to invest in moving gaming forward. But those increases needn’t come in a novel and controversial new form. We want to deliver value at a fair price in the right way so that you will continue to feel comfortable building your business over the long term with Unity as your partner. And we’re confident that if we’re good partners and deliver great software and services, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what we can do together.

So we’re reverting to our existing seat-based subscription model for all gaming customers, including those who adopt Unity 6, the most performant and stable version of Unity yet, later this year.

Here’s what you can expect:

  • Unity Personal: As announced last year, Unity Personal will remain free, and we’ll be doubling the current revenue and funding ceiling from $100,000 to $200,000 USD. This means more of you can use Unity at no cost. The Made with Unity splash screen will become optional for Unity Personal games made with Unity 6 when it launches later this year.
  • Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: We’ll be modifying subscription pricing and the qualifying annual revenue thresholds, effective January 1, 2025. These changes will apply to all new and existing Unity Pro and Enterprise customers when you purchase, upgrade, or renew a subscription on or after this date.
    • Unity Pro: An 8% subscription price increase to $2,200 USD annually per seat will apply to Unity Pro. Unity Pro will be required for customers with more than $200,000 USD of total annual revenue and funding.
    • Unity Enterprise: A 25% subscription price increase will apply to Unity Enterprise. Unity Enterprise will be required for customers with more than $25 million USD of total annual revenue and funding. A minimum subscription requirement may also apply. Because this set of our largest customers have unique needs and use many of our products and services, we’ll be contacting everyone in the days ahead to discuss customized packages.
From this point forward, it’s our intention to revert to a more traditional cycle of considering any potential price increases only on an annual basis. Our commitment remains that if we change the Editor software terms in ways that impact you, you may continue using your current version of the software under the previously agreed terms as long as you keep using that version. We updated this commitment last year on our GitHub repository and at unity.com/legal. You can read more about all the details of our 2025 pricing changes here.

Canceling the Runtime Fee for games and instituting these pricing changes will allow us to continue investing to improve game development for everyone while also being better partners. Thank you all for your trust and continued support. We look forward to many more years of making great games together.



– Matt
 
Smart choice.

Probably because it's a pain to track every download and install. Not sure if the executables are already set up to tracks stats (and even the person who built it)
 
Smart choice.

Probably because it's a pain to track every download and install. Not sure if the executables are already set up to tracks stats (and even the person who built it)
They are only doing it out of backlash and every developer immediately started looking at other options. If you put it on the table, you admit it's a possibility, and will eventually do it again.
 
Smart choice.

Probably because it's a pain to track every download and install. Not sure if the executables are already set up to tracks stats (and even the person who built it)
To me the sudden fees seemed more like a desperation move to slow down the mass layoffs than anything else. This is despite their numbers being unusually high for engine development, was somewhere in the thousands last I checked when most of their competition is usually more in the three digit range. Even now I bet they could continue to trim more fat off their employment if they really needed to.
 
Smart choice.

Probably because it's a pain to track every download and install. Not sure if the executables are already set up to tracks stats (and even the person who built it)
at one point they claimed they were going to count unique hits to WebGL apps towards the limit, as well as reinstalls of desktop apps

the idea was always crazy and was never going to work
 
Smart choice.

Probably because it's a pain to track every download and install. Not sure if the executables are already set up to tracks stats (and even the person who built it)
They are bleeding people to other engines. I don't think they had a choice.
 
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