Thoughts on Unity’s Runtime Fee
What if money did grow on trees?
I intended to draw today, and perhaps I’ll still find time, but I couldn’t help but get wrapped up in the controversy over Unity’s pricing changes. Long story short, they included a new runtime fee, seemingly with the intention to scale a revenue share with studios. Naturally, this caused a ton of confusion and outcry, and it really didn’t look like it would work. The Unity brand really took a hit, and influencers claimed it was the end of the world for the little engine that I had spent so much of my time with as a student.
Personally, I thought it was a poor attempt at revenue sharing, but perhaps studios with enough revenue should be able to incorporate such a cost. In my mind, the fee they initially introduced scales per user similar to how pay-by-usage typically scales with products based on AWS (including online games). The distasteful thing about it is that an instance of a Unity runtime isn’t incurring any cost to Unity. Unlike AWS, it isn’t using services for it to work. Your game could be using services for metrics or multiplayer, but those are separate products with their own pricing. The end user’s device and the app distribution (App Store, Google Play, Steam, etc.) do all the work for that runtime to be deployed and running.
So to take a step back, this really just boils down to… Unity sees I made more money, so maybe Unity should get more money too, right? In that case, I would’ve been far less concerned with a basic royalty no different from many other engine licenses out there (ex. Unreal Engine or CryEngine).
Well, today they announced an overhaul of that plan on their blog, in addition to releasing a pricing calculator that they call the “Runtime Fee Estimator”. As my friend pointed out to me, this calculator doesn’t include Unity’s cost per seat for the professional licenses, so it’s good to remember that the calculation is not the overall cost of building with Unity. With that in mind, I still put in some aspirational but plausible numbers and I got a charge of $0.
So after poking around with the numbers and listening to other people, I think I understand it, and I think there’s nothing to really worry about with this pricing structure. For me, this new fee wouldn’t change anything, and it helps that they threw in the removal of the “Made with Unity” splash screen requirement (this wasn’t a good look before, and I suppose it could be even worse now!).
For the industry at large, it looks to me like this really just squeezes the big studios. Hobbyists to mid-size studios won’t incur any fees. Because of the fee cap based on revenue, the bottom line is that, at worst, the big studios are looking at a 2.5% royalty compared to Unreal Engine’s 5% royalty. I’m guessing Unity didn’t intend to compete with engines like Godot in terms of pricing, and it seems they’ve adjusted accordingly. Unity likely will remain a competitive and compelling option across the spectrum.
So would I go back to using Unity with their new runtime fees? Well, at the very least, the pricing wouldn’t stop me.