An open letter to our community | Unity Blog
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An open letter from Marc Whitten to the Unity community in September 2023.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/Ys676

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.

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.

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.

  •  upstream   ( @upstream@beehaw.org ) 
    15•9 months ago

    At best they did, at worst this somehow comes off as “better”, because they anchored the “worse” alternative first.

    https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/dealmaking-daily/dealmaking-grappling-with-anchors-in-negotiation/

    Likely this price model is worth a lot to them anyway, because there likely some big fish that are stuck in, and who are better off just paying Unity than sinking all that development cost to switch to a different engine.

    The small projects that go under or jumps ship is probably not worth that much to them anyway, but probably generates an ongoing support cost neither way.

    Thus, cynically speaking, Unity is probably better off like this, and they even got some PR out of it. Wether good or bad.

    •  greenskye   ( @greenskye@beehaw.org ) 
      3•9 months ago

      They’re good for the short term possibly. But longer term, people will be wary of getting in too deep with them and will seek out other alternatives. A game engine like unity thrives on large numbers of skilled users and lots of games using the engine. One of those users or games could’ve been the next big win. Now that might go to unreal instead.