Controversy at Unity seems to be the story that never ends at the moment. Though today it appears that the owners of the popular game engine may be about to concede, at least a little, on the Unity Runtime Fee announcement that set the developer world on fire last week.
An Apologetic Tweet
On Sunday, the official Unity Twitter released a fairly contrite statement, acknowledging that the Unity developer community was very unhappy with their policy changes.
“We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.”
So this begs the question, what changes are in the works? Well, apparently there’s evidence out there to suggest what it might be.
A Meeting Discussing Changes
According to a report from Bloomberg, access to a recording of a meeting at Unity revealed plans to cap the runtime fee to 4% of a game’s revenue, though in the article it only mentioned this regarding ‘customers making over $1million’.
Whether this means that Unity is doing away with fees for lower earners, or whether this means it will only be applying that limit to its richer developers isn’t completely clear.
Also mentioned in the Bloomberg article, Unity executive Marc Whitten apparently walked back the prospect of Unity’s use of proprietary data models to determine the number of times users installed games. Instead, this may change to relying on developers to self-report to Unity on their figures.
None of these changes have yet been formally announced or confirmed by Unity itself. Take everything as a ‘maybe’, though it implies that the company genuinely realizes they have made a poor move.
If these proposed measures become policy, it remains to be seen if they’ll be enough to win back any of the developers alienated by the Runtime Fee plans. Trust is hard to regain.
Want to read up on the whole sordid saga so far? Check out out previous new pieces on the Unity Runtime Fee, and the continuing developer revolt.
