The newly announced Runtime fee from Unity, a wildly popular game engine, has drawn massive backlash from the community. Unity’s Runtime fee, explained in a recent Unity blog post, will charge developers a fee based on certain thresholds unique to Unity’s various memberships will be charged a fee based on the number of installations and revenue gained starting January 1, 2024.

According to Unity, the fee is necessary due to Runtime being one of the two “substantial software components” of the Unity Engine and it being installed whenever a game is downloaded. That said, game developers and others within the gaming community were quick to disagree.

Hey @unity , our game “The Fall” was on the @EpicGames as a free game – I was quite happy to sell them the rights for peanuts and the game was installed like 7 million fucking times. How do you propose this will work? I’d owe you more money than I’ve made in my life.

— Over The Moon Games (@OverTheMoonGms) September 12, 2023

Various independent developers, large and small, urged Unity to not go through with the Runtime fee due to the potential negative financial impact it would have on them. Worse, as noted by indie developer Rami Ismail, the fee could be used by malicious actors to hate brigade developers with massive install campaigns, in a similar vein as review bombing.

Hey but seriously, if you’re a marginalized dev at risk of hate brigading and your Unity game is available on any DRM-free platform, basically you’re utterly fucked at this point unless this gets reversed. There’s a moral imperative to tell Unity leadership to get fucked here.

— Rami Ismail (رامي) (@tha_rami) September 12, 2023

Innersloth and Aggro Crab, the developers of Among Us and Another Crab’s Adventure, echoed the outcry within their own statements on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“We use Unity to make our games. This would not only harm us, but fellow game studios of all budgets and sizes,” wrote Innersloth. “If this goes through, we’d delay content and features our players actually want to port elsewhere…But many developers won’t have the time or means to do the same.”

“…This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles,” wrote Aggro Crab. “…On behalf of the dev community, we’re calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product’s actual users.”

The rage towards Unity’s Runtime fee has only grown since its announcement. If things aren’t to change soon, the game engine will likely see an unfortunate number of developers parting ways with its service.