After more than a week of controversy, Unity Technologies posted an apology letter to its community and promised to undo or roll back many of the changes it had planned to make to the licensing agreements for its game engine Unity.
San Francisco-based Unity is the most commonly used engine in modern video game production, particularly in the mobile and indie spaces. Roughly 70% of all currently and recently developed games used Unity’s tool set, including roughly 80% of mobile games.
Unity, which has an office in Bellevue, Wash., last week announced that it planned to make several updates to the pricing and packaging of its licenses. This included the introduction of a “Runtime Fee,” which would’ve seen developers charged for each end user installation of a product made with Unity that had reached a specific revenue threshold.
The initial announcement was immediately controversial, with dozens of studios criticizing Unity’s new policies on social media and beyond. The Runtime Fee, as originally written, could have easily bankrupted smaller studios, and many companies who work in Unity aired concerns that Unity felt comfortable revising its existing terms of service without notification or discussion.
Unity reacted with several clarifications, followed by a Sept. 17 promise to reverse course.
On Friday morning, Unity Create president Marc Whitten offered an open letter of apology on the Unity blog, along with a new set of changes that replace the original.
“I want to start with this: I am sorry,” Whitten wrote. “We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy.”
Whitten is a Microsoft veteran and one of the founding members of the Xbox design team. Before moving to Unity in Feb. 2021, he spent nearly five years at Amazon as a vice president of entertainment devices and services, including a leadership role on Amazon’s cloud-gaming service Luna.
“You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust,” Whitten continued. “We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.”
This includes continuing to offer Unity Personal, the free hobbyist version of the software, for free; waiving the Runtime Fee for games built in Unity Personal; and ensuring that no game with “less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue” will incur the Runtime Fee.
The Runtime Fee policy is now only planned to apply to the next long-term service version of Unity, which will ship next year. Games that are already complete or which are currently in development will not be subject to the fee, unless their developers choose to update the game to the 2024 Unity build. Studios will also have the option to switch from the Runtime Fee to a deal where Unity would be granted a 2.5% revenue share.
“We want to continue to build the best engine for creators,” Whitten wrote. “We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.”
As of Friday afternoon, the changed Unity policies have been greeted with tentative enthusiasm by game developers.
“This is about the best outcome we (game developers who use Unity) could realistically hope for,” said Patrick Morgan, studio head at Seattle-based Galvanic Games, in an email to GeekWire. “They listened to the industry’s major concerns and responded with appropriate changes.”
He continued, “At Galvanic, we still plan to explore other game engines for our next game, as this whole mess emphatically reminded us of the risks of depending on one engine.”
