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.
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.
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.