A group of developers from 19 studios, mainly based in Europe and specializing in mobile games, released open letter, and called on Unity to reject the introduction of the new Unity Runtime Fee pricing model. And they weren’t just limited to words.
Image source: unity.com
“As an immediate measure, our game development team is forced to disable all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization for our projects until these changes are reviewed.”, the letter says. The authors of the letter include the studios Voodoo.io, Azur Games and SayGames, each of which has more than a hundred games. In other words, the letter was written by companies that have released thousands of games with billions of downloads, and they have blocked Unity from making money from their projects.
The conflict was triggered by a new pricing system that provides for license payments for the use of the Unity engine for each installation of the game – this system comes into force when certain thresholds for the total number of installations and revenue are reached. Unity says the innovation will only affect 10% of its customers, but the company hasn’t specified how it plans to track installs and differentiate between “valid” and “invalid” installs.
The developers were worried not only about the financial side of the issue, but also about Unity’s violation of the principles of transparency regarding its own terms of use. In 2019, the engine developer revoked Improbable Studio’s license, citing violations of its terms of service. Following public pressure, Unity subsequently reinstated Improbable’s license and promised to proactively notify customers of upcoming changes to the document.
In 2019, the company wrote on its blog: “If you receive a version of Unity and do not update your project, we believe you can remain with that version of the Terms of Service.”. Unity has enshrined the relevant norm in the Terms of Use, the latest version of which was published in March 2022 (entered into force in October 2022): If the new version of the document worsens the Licensee’s situation, he has the right to use the software version of the current year in accordance with the terms and conditions in effect before acceptance of the updated version. In 2019, the company announced that to ensure complete transparency, it would track the history of its terms of service on GitHub.
To date, the repository on GitHub has been deleted, and in April 2023, the clause that allowed the use of outdated versions of the document was removed from the Terms of Service. If this had not happened, developers would now have the right to use the previous version of the Unity engine and pay license fees according to the old scheme. But with the updated terms of service, they actually agreed to the Unity Runtime Fee fee by using the software before it was even announced.
Unity has already responded to the developers’ new initiative, the resource learned The edge. For apps whose developers have disabled monetization mechanisms, Unity has responded by disabling the user acquisition program.
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