Update: The Verge reports that the company has now delivered on its promised rethink and is offering developers a choice of payment model.
Mobile game developers using the Unity game engine are being forced to rethink this after the company announced changes to its pricing policy that for some …
What is Gaming Unity engine?
Unity aims to greatly simplify the work of creating both 2D and 3D gaming environments by taking on a wide range of graphics work. This includes creating realistic textures, shadows and reflections. It also does most of the heavy lifting associated with animation, leaving developers more time to focus on the creative aspects of their work.
Unity was first launched for Mac back in 2005 and today is widely used by game developers for everything : From iOS and Android to gaming consoles like PlayStation and Xbox to virtual reality headsets.
New pricing model
Unity currently charges developers a flat fee per user. However, in a blog post published last week, the company announced a new pricing model in which developers will pay a commission every time their game is installed on a user's device, once it reaches a certain threshold.
Many developers were shocked by this as it would dramatically increase their costs, as installation fees could be as high as 15 cents. It's not even per user, so if you bought a game from a developer and installed it on both iPhone and iPad, the developer will pay twice. If you uninstalled the game and then reinstalled it, the developer will pay again.
The new fees will be especially problematic for those who sell games at very low prices, and could make ad-funded games impossible. If someone tried a free game, quickly decided it wasn't for them, and deleted it, the developers could actually lose money.
Unity will “make-changes”’ politics
The company tweeted that it had heard these complaints and was rethinking the situation.
We heard you. We apologize for the confusion and concern caused by the execution fee policy we announced on Tuesday. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers and partners, and will make policy changes. We'll share an update in a couple…
— Unity (@unity) September 17, 2023
However, mobile game developers are not sure about this topic.
&# 8220; We heard you. We didn't listen to you. Here's some marketing talk that will make you think we're doing something, when in fact we're just figuring out how to keep doing what we've already decided to do. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback. What? Seriously.”
“We already know they'll just rewrite everything to mean the same thing. When a company makes a move like this, it usually doesn't learn or try to simply do what's right for its user base.”
“Watch how they do typical things. strategy; Announce an absolutely terrible policy, piss everyone off, and then only half-retreat from that policy once everyone has gotten used to the really bad policy.”
“There's no confusion, your greed was pretty blatant, and even if you go back, you will potentially destroy all goodwill and trust forever. Game developers are abandoning Unity en masse, and there is no turning back.
