When engine specialist Unity announced in September that it was going to leverage a runtime fee, making a charge to developers every time one of their games was installed, a PR omnishambles ensued. Developers were quick to highlight scenarios where the fee would be unworkable, or even ruinous. What about free-to-play games? What about subscription services such as Game Pass? What about charity bundles? What if a single purchase was installed on multiple devices? What about uninstalling and reinstalling the same purchase? What if the runtime fee was used to target vulnerable developers, with malicious individuals reinstalling games multiple times to rack up fees? And how would Unity even track installs? That these problems hadn’t been considered before the announcement was met with disbelief.
Unity scrambled to address the issues. Uninstalling and then reinstalling a game would trigger a fee, it said, only to later backtrack and say it wouldn’t. Charity bundles wouldn’t count, but the developer would have to tell Unity if its game was appearing in such a deal. Distributors would be charged the fee instead if the game was on a subscription service such as Game Pass. But precisely how installs would be tracked remained mysterious, with Unity only saying that it would rely on its own “proprietary data model”.
The answers didn’t satisfy a frustrated development community, who were particularly annoyed that the fees seemed to be retroactive, with games released years ago still
