Unity Drops Its Controversial Per-Install Pricing Plan Entirely

It was almost exactly a year ago to the day that Unity updated its pricing program for its game engine in a way that seemed perfectly designed to piss everyone off. Whereas Unity was once a subscription-based game engine, rather than one which collected royalties, suddenly Unity went in the opposite direction, with per-install fees that amounted to royalties. And, worse, the company decided that this wasn’t merely a go-forward plan, but one that would be retroactive, meaning that gamemakers who built their games on Unity under one pricing structure would suddenly be forced into the new one. For gamemakers that chose very small dollar amounts at which to sell their games, the new pricing structure could literally mean that every purchase of a game could result in net-negative dollars for the creator.

The fallout was widespread, with angry developers and those in the developer ecosystem rebelling and going elsewhere for their game engines. Unity’s CEO resigned a few weeks later. The competition began marketing their own engines by using the woes of Unity. Several months after the pricing change, things got bad enough that Unity laid off a quarter of its workforce.

All of which got us to today, one year later, with Unity scrapping the new pricing structure entirely and putting things back the way they were.

Unity, maker of a popular cross-platform engine and toolkit, will not pursue a broadly unpopular Runtime Fee that would have charged developers based on game installs rather than per-seat licenses. The move comes exactly one year after the fee’s initial announcement.

In a blog post attributed to President and CEO Matt Bromberg, the CEO writes that the company cannot continue “democratizing game development” without “a partnership built on trust.” Bromberg states that customers understand the necessity of price increases, but not in “a novel and controversial new form.” So game developers will not be charged per installation, but they will be sorted into Personal, Pro, and Enterprise tiers by level of revenue or funding.

On the one hand, it’s good the company has recognized the mistake this was and has rolled it back. But one does have to wonder aloud about just how many developers will return now that the trust has been broken. The rollout of the new plan was done fairly suddenly without nearly the level of communication to customers that is needed when you have changes as drastic as these were. Sure, now the company appears to be focusing more on its customers’ desires rather than merely scraping for every last penny… but if the company can misbehave once, it can do so again.

And in this kind of business, there aren’t a lot of chances to rebuild trust once its gone. Which is probably why Unity is certainly making even more efforts towards luring developers back in.

Instead of ramping from there, the Runtime Fee is now gone, and Unity has made other changes to its pricing structure:

• Unity Personal remains free, and its revenue/funding ceiling increases from $100,000 to $200,000
• Unity Pro, for customers over the Personal limit, sees an 8 percent price increase to $2,200 per seat
• Unity Enterprise, with customized packages for those over $25 million in revenue or funding, sees a 25 percent increase.

That new structure is obviously geared directly towards the smaller indie developers who were so angry about the runtime fees previously in place.

Again, that’s good! But it’s not clear that it’s going to be enough to win back the very customers who had their trust violated in the first place.