Unity has said it will be sharing an update on its Runtime Fee policy in the next few days.
A brief statement posted on Twitter last night reads:
“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.”
[Update: Blooomberg reports that “Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million” and “installations counted toward reaching the threshold won’t be retroactive”. It also says Unity will rely on “users to self-report the data.”]
The engine provider caused uproar last week with its plans to introduce a pay-per-install policy effective January 2024.
We later learned that behind the scenes Unity account managers have been offering developers a waiver on the Runtime Fee if they switched to Unity’s own LevelPlay ad products. Developers we spoke to suggested Unity simply wants to “kill Applovin” by leveraging its game engine in this way.
On Friday, a group of developers kicked off a Unity boycott in which they switched off all Unity ad products in protest. The group hoped to force Unity into retracting the Runtime Fee proposals.
Rival AppLovin even joined the debate with CEO Adam Foroughi writing a public letter saying that Unity should “retract” the Runtime Fee “and shift to transparent price increases”.
“Don’t make this about advertising,” he added. “Don’t make this an attack on indies. Go back and rethink the choices you’ve made.”
