Text/Isaac

Yesterday (September 12th), Unity officially announced an important change: they have decided to completely eliminate the runtime fee for game customers - commonly known as running fees/installation fees, effective immediately (industrial customers in the non-gaming space will not be affected by this change). The article was signed by Matt Bromberg, the new CEO of Unity.

In addition to the elimination of operating fees, the article also mentions that after talking to many people over the past three months, Matt has heard their repeated expectations that Unity understands that it needs to increase prices, but that "price increases don't need to come in a new and controversial form", so Unity has decided to introduce new billing rules.

To put it simply, the main adjustments are: Unity Personal will remain free and the fee threshold will be lowered; Customers with more than $200,000 in annual revenue and funds need to use Unity Pro, with an 8% price increase; Customers with more than $25 million in annual revenue and funding will need to use Unity Enterprise, which increases by 25%.

Although the price will still increase, it can be seen from this adjustment that Unity's attitude has changed considerably.

Obviously, Unity does not plan to raise prices for the majority of teams this time, but has fully relaxed the charging standards for small and medium-sized teams; In contrast, they have concentrated the price increase on the medium and large teams of the climate. While a 25% price increase for Unity Enterprise may seem high, it is also mentioned that this type of customer is unique and that Unity will discuss customization with them in the future.

The most critical point is that after the abolition of the operating fee rule, the price increase is only clearly marked, which seems to be much more reassuring. The majority of small and medium-sized teams with insufficient funds no longer need to worry about being inexplicably charged a large amount of money every year because of the number of downloads.

Coincidentally, Unity first issued this operating fee rule exactly a year ago. At that time, after seeing the rules they released and learning that every time their product was installed in the future, it would incur fees ranging from $0.005 to $0.2, developers around the world were fried.

At first, due to the lack of clarity on how it was calculated, many people felt that the running fee would cost their team money. For example, the products I released before will also be charged, and there will be a lot of overhead out of thin air, why? Or I make a free-to-download hyper-casual mobile game, and I get millions of downloads in a small wave, but because the revenue capacity is not so strong, I may owe Unity tens of thousands of dollars in addition to channel sharing in a year...... It's kind of magical.

Of course, Unity has explained a lot about this. For example, there is a threshold for charging, and repeated installs will only be charged once for installation fees, and for pirated games, they also have relevant detection methods ......

However, due to the abstract design of the pay-per-use billing fee, it is absolutely difficult for most teams, especially those small and medium-sized teams that operate large DAU products and produce high-quality indie games, to accept this charging model.

So within a week of Unity's announcement of the new operating fee rules, developers around the world rebelled against Unity. The first is that well-known game teams that use Unity a lot have begun to band together to resist Unity's new rules, and even announced that they will abandon Unity. These include the R&D team of products such as "Baa Apocalypse", "Killing the Spire", "Crab Crab Treasure Hunt" and so on.

Second, more than 500 game manufacturers that originally used Unity's advertising and payment services have also protested against Unity by shutting down the advertising and payment interfaces. Sixteen mobile game publishers, including Voodoo, Homa, SayGames, and CrazyLabs, have also written a joint open letter to put pressure on Unity, saying that Unity's behavior is like a car manufacturer that charges a ...... on the car you bought a year ago based on mileage

In addition, Unity's CEO at the time, John Riccitiello, received death threats and was forced to close his offices in San Francisco and Austin...... More abstractly, the police later confirmed that the death threat was actually from Unity's own employees. Less than a month later, John Riccitiello announced his retirement as president, chairman and member of the board of directors.

Many suspect that John Riccitiello is the culprit behind the new operating fee rules. Because this big brother has repeatedly engaged in abstract behavior before, he has caused a lot of public opinion during the two periods when EA and Unity were CEOs......

In the face of this momentum, Unity had to apologize six days after the new rules were released, saying that they would change the rules and talk about it at a later date.

A few days later, on September 23, 2023, Unity released the revised rules — some of which (like the second one) are mentioned today. However, judging from the overall changes at that time, the core operating fee rules still did not disappear completely.

And the article also mentions that the operating fee is only for newly released products, so at least the old products will not be continuously charged for money. At this point, the matter has finally come to an end. It wasn't until now, a year later, that Unity has completely let go of the "robe" of running fees.

But just like what the old man of the land said in the first chapter of "Black Myth: Wukong" - the Guanyin Zen Temple can be rebuilt, but if the people's hearts are burned down, what is the use of repairing a broken temple......

Unity didn't burn out, but it did come at a cost. Within a day after the new rules were released last year, Unity's stock price continued to fall by 7.42% to $36.08 after the U.S. stock market opened, and as of Unity's first rule change, the stock price has fallen to $31.6, a total decline of nearly 16% during the period, which translates into a market value of about $2.3 billion.

That's an exaggerated number, right? But that's nowhere near what the stock price is today, a year later......

Of course, as an engine developer with huge R&D costs, Unity's original intention to seek growth and change its charging strategy must be understandable. After all, their operating costs have almost consistently risen since they went public in 2020, but the company has been in the red.

But as Matt Bromberg stated in his letter, Unity's core mission of "democratizing game development" will always be based on a partnership based on trust, rather than a conflict of interest with its customers.

As for how much this trust can be recovered, it will take Unity's continued efforts.

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