The Unity Fees Rollercoaster

Hoo boy, if you wanted to see a master class on how not to announce product and service changes, just look at what happened to Unity this year.

In September, Unity announced new and very disliked “runtime fees” that seemed set to charge developers and publishers every time a person installed a game. Worse, it appeared that this would be applied retroactively and would count even for free-to-play games. Developers, as you might have expected, were very upset about this sudden change and the backlash started instantly.

About a week later, Unity had walked back most of the worst changes, saying it would not charge people the runtime fee if they used the free version of Unity for smaller games with little to no revenue. Unity also walked back the original plan to charge these fees for all versions of the engine, confirming that only the latest edition would be charged runtime fees and that devs could continue to use those older copies of Unity without updating to avoid extra fees.

These changes were far from perfect, but they did help calm a lot of the anger. However, in October, following the disastrous rollout and then the panicked walkback of all this nonsense, Unity’s CEO John Riccitiello stepped down from the company. You might remember him as that guy who called developers “fucking idiots.” Unsurprisingly, his departure was seen by many developers as a good thing.