Unity plans to make changes to their proposed policy and apologizes to the community for the confusion caused. Read on to learn more about their announcement as well as other events that led up to it.
Unity Rescinds Policy Changes
Unity Plans to Make Changes to their Proposed Policy
Unity released a statement on Twitter (X) stating that based on the response given by the community including their own team members, they will be making changes to their proposed policy on the runtime fees. They also apologized for the confusion they caused regarding the announcement of the new policy and have said that there will be an update in a couple of days.
This was expected due to the overwhelmingly negative response they received for the decision, Unity will definitely have to rethink the whole policy and think of something to earn the trust of the developers, studios, and the players back. The apology made by Unity doesn’t seem to have been received well by the community at large either, as rather than clearing up “confusions,” the developers want Unity to fully rescind the decision.
There is no information from Unity about what exact the changes to their policy are yet, but a common suggestion is to apply something akin to Unreal Engine’s revenue share which is a 5% royalty which is only due when the game passes a lifetime revenue of $1 million USD, which means that the first $1 million USD is royalty-exempt.
Unity Boycott and Open Letter to Unity
On September 15, a boycott was organized by a sizable group of game studios and developers, including studios Voodoo Games and Azur Games, who are responsible for Helix Jump (800+ million downloads) and Stack Ball (468+million downloads) respectively. They have currently switched off all IronSource and Unity Ads in all of their projects until the changes are reconsidered.
Most of the studios included in the boycott are developers and studios creating hyper-casual games that generate a lot of downloads and make the most of their money on the ads that are being shown during gameplay. These studios are the most at risk for the change as the policy will punish these kinds of games for having an irregular ratio of downloads to revenue, despite Unity saying that they will only affect 10% of the customers that are using their engine.
This announcement is yet but another pressing issue among all the other consequences Unity has been facing for their decision over the past week, including the previous backlash Unity received from other major game studios, death threats that they received, and their stock price plummeting.
AppLovin CEO, Adam Foroughi, also sent out his support for the boycott, as well as an open letter to Unity’s CEO, John Riccitiello, recommending to "retract these changes and shift to transparent price increases…" regarding the price model. He also stated that "If you continue to go on the path you’re on, you’ll destroy the trust and credibility that you have spent years building and it’s going to tear our industry apart." Though according to some studios like Galvanic Games, it may already be too late.
Sources:
Twitter - Unity Apology
IGN - Unity Apology
MobileGamer - Unity Boycott
AppLovin Blog - Views on The Unity Price
