Update: Unity’s CEO has now left the company’s employ, with immediate effect. The decision reflects the anger felt by developers about the original announcement.
Mobile game developers who rely on the Unity game engine have forced a rethink after the company announced changes to its pricing policy that would have proven a disaster for some. The company is now offering developers a choice of charging models.
What is the Unity game engine?
Unity aims to greatly simplify the work of creating both 2D and 3D game environments by taking care of a wide range of the graphics work. This includes creating realistic textures, shadows, and reflections. It also does a lot of the heavy lifting where animations are concerned, leaving developers more time to focus on the creative aspects of their work.
Unity first launched for Mac back in 2005, and is today widely used by game developers for everything from iOS and Android through game consoles like PlayStation and Xbox to VR headsets.
New pricing model
Unity currently charges developers a flat fee per user. However, in a blog post published last week, the company announced a new pricing model, under which developers would pay a fee every time their game is installed on a user’s device, once they hit a certain threshold.
Many developers were shocked by this, as it would dramatically increase their costs, with fees as high as 15 cents per install. This wasn’t even per user, so if you bought a game from a developer and installed it on both iPhone and iPad, the developer would pay twice. If you uninstalled the game and later reinstalled it, the developer would pay again.
The new fees would be especially problematic for those selling games at very low prices, and could make ad-funded games unfeasible. If someone tried out a free game, quickly decided it wasn’t for them and uninstalled it, developers could actually lose money.
Unity will be ‘making changes’ to the policy
The company has now tweeted that it has heard these complaints, and is rethinking things.
Mobile game developers in the thread, however, are not reassured.
“We have heard you. We have not listened to you. Here is a bunch of marketing talk to make you think we’re doing something when in actuality we’re just figuring out how to keep doing what we’ve already decided to do. Thanks for your honest and critical feedback. What? Seriously.”
“We already know they are just gonna rewrite everything in a way that means the exact same thing. Once a company makes a move like this, they typically don’t learn or try to just do what is right by their user base.”
“Watch them do the typical strategy; Announce an absolutely horrible policy, get everyone outraged, then walk back the policy only halfway when everyone is used to the really bad one.”
“There is no confusion, your greed was pretty upfront and even if you walk back everything you’ve potentially destroyed all goodwill and trust permanently. Unity is being abandoned by game developers in droves and there’s no going back.”
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