Last week, Unity caused a major stir among the community with its intended Runtime Fee policy. The controversial fee received a near-universal negative response, largely from angry developers. This could be why the company has since issued an apology.
Is the damage too far gone?
In a recent post on Twitter, Unity assured people that the team had been listening to feedback. The post goes on to say it apologizes for the “confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused.”
As a result, the company has now said that it will be “making changes to the policy,” with updates being shared “in a couple of days.” At this stage, we can’t say what Unity has in store, but it’s the hope of many that it will go back on its new pricing plan.
For those who don’t know, last week Unity announced it would be introducing additional fees for developers. Commencing January 1, 2024, this new policy would make it so that studios who have built a game using the toolkit would have to pay an additional cost each time their game is installed.
While it did try to counter immediate backlash by insisting that this would not affect the majority of developers, it was a unanimously unpopular decision as far as the community was concerned.
Further updates from the tech firm backpedaled a little bit by insisting that the new fee would only be applied to new installations. This means that studios would not be charged if someone uninstalled and reinstalled a game, for example.
However, by this point, the damage was already done. Many developers have now sworn off using Unity in the future, but we’ll see whether the upcoming changes to the proposed Runtime Fee can somehow make amends.
