Unity’s new “per-install” pricing enrages the game development community

For years, the Unity Engine has earned goodwill from developers large and small for its royalty-free licensing structure, which meant developers incurred no extra costs based on how well a game sold. That goodwill has now been largely thrown out the window due to Unity's Tuesday announcement of a new fee structure that will start charging developers on a "per-install" basis after certain minimum thresholds are met.

The newly introduced Unity Runtime Fee—which will go into effect on January 1, 2024—will impose different per-install costs based on the company's different subscription tiers. Those on the Unity Personal tier (which includes free basic Editor access) will be charged $0.20 per install after an individual game reaches $200,000 in annual revenue and 200,000 lifetime installs.

Users of Unity's Pro and Enterprise tiers (which charge a separate annual subscription for access to a more full-featured Unity Editor) will pay slightly smaller per-install fees starting at $0.125 to $0.15 after a game reaches $1 million in annual revenue and 1 million total installs. The per-install fees for the paid subscription tiers are also subject to "volume discounts" for heavily installed games, going down as low as $0.01 per install for games that are installed 1 million times per month.

The new fee structure will apply in the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Outside of those countries, an "emerging markets rate" ranging from $0.005 (for Enterprise subscriptions) to $0.02 (for Unity Personal users) will apply after the minimum thresholds are met.

A full breakdown of Unity's new per-install fee structure

Credit: Unity

This is a major change from Unity's previous structure, which allowed developers making less than $100,000 per month to avoid fees altogether on the Personal tier. Larger developers making $200,000 or more per month, meanwhile, paid only per-seat subscription fees for access to the latest, full-featured version of the Unity Editor under the Pro or Enterprise tiers.

"There's no royalties, no fucking around," Unity CEO John Riccitiello memorably told GamesIndustry.biz when rolling out the free Personal tier in 2015. "We're not nickel-and-diming people, and we're not charging them a royalty. When we say it's free, it's free."

Now that Unity has announced plans to nickel-and-dime successful Unity developers (with a fee that is not technically a royalty), the reaction from those developers has been swift and universally angry, to put it mildly. "I can say, unequivocally, if you're starting a new game project, do not use Unity," Necrosoft Games' Brandon Sheffield—a longtime Unity Engine supporter—said in a post entitled "The Death of Unity." "Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted."

Sheffield was far from alone in the sentiment. "Gloomwood will definitely be my last Unity game, likely even if they roll back the changes," developer Dillon Rogers wrote on social media.

"If this goes through, we'd delay content and features our players actually want to port our games elsewhere (as others are also considering)," Among Us developer Innersloth wrote on social media.

"Stop it. Wtf?" the developer added pointedly.

The old bait-and-switch

Many developers expressed particular outrage over the idea that the new fee structure will apply to previously existing Unity games, not just those developed or released after the new fees go into effect next year. While installs made before January 1, 2024, will not incur any per-install fees, those previous installs will be used to help calculate whether a game meets the applicable "lifetime installs" threshold, according to Unity's FAQ.

That kind of bait-and-switch application of new rules was a tough pill to swallow for many developers who invested time and effort in Unity before Tuesday's announcement, based in part on its royalty-free structure.

"I already committed to their engine for my new game," Falconeer developer Thomas Sala wrote on social media. "Put years and years of work into my pipeline. I did so under a simple per seat license I am happy to pay. Now while I am close to release they spring something new on me. Not a price increase—a fundamental change in how we do business together. I have no options, cannot go back, can only bend and pay up. It's [a] form of blackmail."

"Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted."

Brandon Sheffield, Necrosoft Games

"Unity should not be able to retroactively change the terms & conditions on products or sales you've already made," longtime indie developer and consultant Rami Ismail wrote on social media. "Them making this move says they're willing to, and that should be terrifying."

That change in developer expectations is especially galling in light of a 2019 Unity blog post in which the company seemingly pledged that any changes to its Terms of Service would not apply retroactively to games made on older versions of the engine. "When you obtain a version of Unity and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS," the company wrote at the time.

A circa-2015 promotional slide stresses Unity's "no royalty" structure.

Credit: Game Developer

In a late Tuesday post on the Unity forums, though, a spokesperson clarified the company's legal position on the change after consulting with a lawyer, saying:

Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.

Legalities aside, the change in terms has permanently damaged the trust between Unity and many of its most longstanding users. "A partner who can and will change how much of your revenue you owe them *after* you've made and released your game needs to be avoided like the plague," indie developer Tom Francis wrote.

What counts as an “install”?

Beyond anger over retroactive changes, many developers also see the potential for player abuse and mischief in a world of "per-install" fees. Groups of gamers who are already liable to "review bomb" games they don't like could theoretically start "install bombing" Unity games by repeatedly installing and deleting a game, costing the developer money with each new install. Pirated copies could also be included in the fee calculations, imposing a direct cost for illicit downloads that don't provide any revenue for the developer.

Unity initially told Axios' Stephen Totilo that the "per-install" fee applies even if a single user deleted and re-installed a game or installed it on two devices. A few hours later, though, Totilo reported that Unity had "regrouped" and decided to only charge developers for a user's initial installation of a game on a single device (but an initial installation on a secondary device—such as a Steam Deck—would still count as a second install).

Meanwhile, in its FAQ, Unity made a vague promise to adapt "fraud detection practices in our Ads technology, which is solving a similar problem" to prevent developers from being charged for pirated copies.

"Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time."

Unity spokesperson

Unity Create Vice President and General Manager Marc Whitten also clarified to Axios that game demos and games distributed as part of charity bundles would not be subject to install fees. But many developers doubted that Unity could accurately track which installs came from such bundles and which came from other sales.

More generally, some developers worried about the privacy implications of Unity getting into the business of tracking their game installs, questioning the potential accuracy of the engine maker's counting methods. Unity's own FAQ gives some vague assurances that it would be using "our own proprietary data model" to track installs. Rather than requiring installed games to "phone home" after each install, that model will "collect data from numerous sources" to give an "accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project," Unity wrote.

So long, old business model

Even with perfect foreknowledge and fee calculations, Unity's new fee structure could severely impact what kind of business model is feasible for many games. Sheffield points out that a success story like Vampire Survivors—which leveraged a 99-cent price to help achieve viral liftoff—would be much harder to pull off under the new Unity structure.

"Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then Unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar," Sheffield wrote. "As a developer who starts a game under the personal plan, because you're not sure how well it'll do, you're punished, astoundingly so, for being a breakout success."

"If a fraction of [25 million Game Pass] users download our game, Unity could take a fee that... threatens the sustainability of our business."

Aggro Crab Games

Per-install fees could also be particularly damaging for games distributed using subscription-based business models like Microsoft's Game Pass. "Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for 25 million Game Pass Subscribers," developer Aggro Crab Games wrote on social media. "If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business."

For Unity-based games on services like Game Pass, additional subscriber downloads could soon come with massive unexpected fees.

Credit: Microsoft

Whitten told Axios the developers would not be directly responsible for fees from subscription services and that those costs would instead be incurred by the game's distributor (e.g., Microsoft for Game Pass games). But passing the per-install cost on to a separate company in the chain does little to lessen the impact of how deals for indie games could be structured across the industry.

"Hey Unity, our game The Fall was on the [Epic Games Store] as a free game—I was quite happy to sell them the rights for peanuts and the game was installed like 7 million fucking times," Over the Moon Games wrote on social media. "How do you propose this will work? I'd owe you more money than I've made in my life."