A group of developers from 19 studios, mainly based in Europe and specializing in mobile games, have published an open letter calling on Unity to refuse the introduction of the new Unity Runtime Fee pricing model. And they didn’t limit themselves to just words.
Image source: unity.com
“As an immediate measure, our game development team has been forced to disable all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization for our projects until these changes are reviewed.”, the letter says. Among the authors of the letter are the studios Voodoo.io, Azur Games and SayGames, each of which has more than a hundred games in their possession. In other words, the letter was written by companies that have released thousands of games with billions of downloads, and they have cut off Unity’s ability to monetize their projects.
The cause of the conflict was a new pricing scheme, which provides for license payments for the use of the Unity engine for each installation of the game. This schedule comes into effect when certain thresholds are reached for total installations and revenue. According to Unity, the innovation will only affect 10% of its customers, but the company has not specified how it plans to track installations and differentiate between ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ installations.
The developers were concerned not only about the financial side of the issue, but also about Unity’s violation of transparency principles regarding its own terms of service. In 2019, the engine developer revoked Improbable studio’s license, citing terms of service violations. Following public pressure, Unity subsequently reinstated Improbable’s license and promised to proactively notify customers of upcoming changes to the document.
In 2019, the company wrote on its blog: “If you get a version of Unity and don’t update your project, we think you can stick to that version of the terms of service.”. Unity has established the corresponding standard in the Terms of Service, the latest version of which was released in March 2022 (entered into force in October 2022): if the new version of the document worsens the situation of the licensee, he has the right to update the software version of the current year in accordance with the terms in effect before acceptance of the updated version. In 2019, the company announced that to ensure full transparency, the history of its terms of service would be kept on GitHub.
To date, the repository on GitHub has been deleted, and in April 2023 the clause that allowed the use of outdated versions of the document was removed from the terms of service. If this had not happened, developers would now be entitled to use the previous version of the Unity engine and pay licensing fees according to the old scheme. But with the updated terms of service, they actually agreed to the Unity Runtime Fee fee by using the software before it was even announced.
Unity has already responded to the developers’ new initiative, The Verge has learned. For apps whose developers have disabled monetization mechanisms, Unity has responded by disabling the user acquisition program.
Source : 3D News
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