UNITY NEWS - PRICE CHANGE, BACKLASH...

[DerVVulfman]

TWO stories this time...

OVER 500 DEVELOPERS JOIN UNITY
PROTEST AGAINST RUNTIME FEE POLICY
Magic Tavern, Lion Studios, and Machine Zone are among
the latest studios to sign a collective letter against Unity's
proposed changes

More companies and developers have joined a protest against Unity by switching off ads and monetisation.

Last week, 16 studios cut off all Unity-based monetisation in protest of the company's proposed Runtime Fee policy.

More than 503 developers (and counting) have now signed the collective letter to turn off all IronSource SDK and Unity Ads monetisation "until new conditions are reviewed."

Studios that have joined the collective include Tap Nation, People Fun, Magic Tavern, Lion Studios, Belka Games, Machine Zone, Clipwire, Mindstorm Studios, and more.

"As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies are forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetisation across our projects until these changes are reconsidered," the letter read.

"We urge others who share this stance to do the same. The rules have changed, and the stakes are simply too high. The Runtime Fee is an unacceptable shift in our partnership with Unity that needs to be immediately cancelled."

Unity executives informed employees of planned revisions to the proposed plan on Monday. According to Bloomberg, these changes include a maximum fee cap of 4% of a game's revenue over $1 million, a non-retroactive installation threshold, and for users to self-report install numbers.

This followed an apology from Unity in response to the ongoing backlash, in which the company acknowledged the "confusion and angst" caused by the proposed changes. Changes to the policy will be shared in "a couple of days."

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And...

UNITY TALKS OF PRICE CAPS AND FEES
FOR ONLY LARGEST GAMES DEVELOPERS
That sound? It's the screeching noise of a massive U-turn
as games engine biz admits mistakes

Unity is backtracking on commercial Ts&Cs for developers using its games engine, claiming that as part of a new tiering system under consideration fees will be capped and will apply only to top tier customers.

In what could be a business school case study on how not to introduce drastic changes to a pricing plan, Unity last week shot itself in the foot by telling software engineers it was, from January 1, to charge a fee per game after they'd reached a specified annual turnover and runtimes.

It set minimum thresholds for developers for the past 12 months: $200,0000 in revenue and 200,000 installs for Unity Personal and Unity Plus, or $1 million in sales and 1 million installs of Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise. The news went down as well as could be expected.

Management were forced to about turn and yesterday said: "We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy… caused." Top brass vowed to report on updates in due course.

At a town hall later in the day – a recording of which was accessed by Bloomberg – Unity said it will limit fees to 4 percent of a game's revenue for developers generating $1 million in sales, and install counters won't be retroactive.

CEO John Riccitiello is quoted as saying the updated policy will be designed to produce more revenue from Unity's biggest customers, and more than 90 percent of users won't feel the impact.

Garry Newman, who created Garry's Mod for Half-Life 2, had said at the weekend that if the tracking had worked out, and it was 10 pence ($0.12) a sale, he'd be fine with that because "if that's what it costs, then that's what it costs."

"But that's not why we're furious. It hurts because we didn't agree to this. We used the engine because you pay up front and then ship your product. We weren't told this was going to happen. We weren't warned. We weren't consulted. We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity's engine. We've paid them every year. And now they changed the rules."

Unity exec Mark Whitten said at the town hall meeting the company is still talking to customers and partners to prevent a re-run of last week's showdown.

Asked by employees if the company can emerge from this low point in its existence as a stronger entity, Riccitiello said Unity could have handled the communication better but that any price rise is a bitter pill to swallow.

"I don't think there's any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened…. It is a massively transformational change to our business model."

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Perhaps I should point out that we have a GODOT prefix icon for projects: