Question about the new Unity Runtime fee

[Zerobrine]

Context: Unity will start charging successful Unity Engine game developers a fee everytime their game gets installed by a consumer of their product. There's currently no way to opt out of it and it goes into full swing in January 1, 2024.

The big ominous question now is.. What's the plan for Phasmophobia?
I don't expect a big "Unreal Engine port announcement" or anything, I'm just curious where a game like Phasmophobia, developed by just a few people go from here.

[Jimmy Hunter]

Like most Unity games, they're waiting on more information before they make any real decision.

[Bob]

I am really worried about this.

[Artyriak]

Absolute wall of a post I don't expect anyone to actually read, but...

It's a bad situation and a very ♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing for Unity to do, but it's not the doomsday some are making it out to be. The fee will apply to installs of the title (in this case, Phas) after the activation date of the condition (Jan 1 '24), meaning the fee will only be applied to purchases and installs of the title after that date.

Phas has already had the bulk of its sales through the handful of peaks of relevance it has already had so far. Big swings in sales (and thus installs) generally coincide with big things happening with the game itself; so for example, a big upward trend in sales and installs would be predictable when the console release drops, and another one is predictable when the game finally hits 1.0/leaves early access, but like all peaks in sales those will be short term and isolated.

Since those peaks will coincide with sales of the game, the fee will be coming out of the devs profits - which is not good, obviously, but it's not money being taken from the devs in a vacuum; it's effectively a reduction on the profit the devs make from each sale, comparable to selling the game on a sale.

It's still not a good thing, but DK seems to have a pretty decent head on his shoulders when it comes to steering the company and planning ahead, so I very much doubt this isn't anything he can't plan around. That said, it does put an arbitrary limit on profits going forward (from Jan 1st onward), which is unlikely to impact the studio's ability to pay server costs but far more likely would effect the studio's capabilities to make their next game when Phas is eventually finished.

Having said -that-, I'd be very surprised if the studio was planning to use Unity again for their next game anyway, even if this policy change with Unity hadn't happened. Without making a long post even longer, Unity changed priorities years ago that has seen the engine steadily and consistently fall behind the other options on the market; not just Unreal (which is obviously lightyears ahead of Unity) but Godot for example is pretty rapidly coming up to a point where it could surpass Unity as it exists currently, and this policy change from Unity will only accelerate that process as small and independent abandon Unity for other options (like Godot).

[WolfLink0370]

Originally posted by Arlequis:

It's a bad situation and a very ♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing for Unity to do, but it's not the doomsday some are making it out to be. The fee will apply to installs of the title (in this case, Phas) after the activation date of the condition (Jan 1 '24), meaning the fee will only be applied to purchases and installs of the title after that date.

That information honestly makes it worse - they basically gave developers three months notice to change their core engine before they get fees for any upcoming downloads? That is simply not enough time for ANY development company to rewrite their entire game on a new engine without getting charges built up in the interim.

[Artyriak]

Originally posted by WolfLink0370:

Originally posted by Arlequis:

It's a bad situation and a very ♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing for Unity to do, but it's not the doomsday some are making it out to be. The fee will apply to installs of the title (in this case, Phas) after the activation date of the condition (Jan 1 '24), meaning the fee will only be applied to purchases and installs of the title after that date.

That information honestly makes it worse - they basically gave developers three months notice to change their core engine before they get fees for any upcoming downloads? That is simply not enough time for ANY development company to rewrite their entire game on a new engine without getting charges built up in the interim.

Basically, yes - unless there's information out there I haven't seen (always possible), I think they only gave bigger publishers a heads-up about this policy change, and no one else. The writing had been on the wall for years now that Unity was rapidly turning bad though - their main revenue source is actually their data scraping and ad-targeting technologies - not the game engine - hence why they've been steadily pulling resources from the engine branch for years now.

Various people far smarter than I (and with actual reach) had been trying to warn developers for years now to move away from Unity before something like this happened. But "told you so"'s aren't going to help any developer that's been put in a super ♥♥♥♥♥♥ position because of this crap, obviously.

[ Dovahbear ]

They charge for reinstalls too, so if enough people wanted to they can reinstall a game over and over to bankrupt the developers. It's actually insane. And this is not speculation, this is a question directly proposed in their QnA about the changes, and they give a resounding "Yes".

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by Arlequis:

Originally posted by WolfLink0370:

That information honestly makes it worse - they basically gave developers three months notice to change their core engine before they get fees for any upcoming downloads? That is simply not enough time for ANY development company to rewrite their entire game on a new engine without getting charges built up in the interim.

Basically, yes - unless there's information out there I haven't seen (always possible), I think they only gave bigger publishers a heads-up about this policy change, and no one else. The writing had been on the wall for years now that Unity was rapidly turning bad though - their main revenue source is actually their data scraping and ad-targeting technologies - not the game engine - hence why they've been steadily pulling resources from the engine branch for years now.

Various people far smarter than I (and with actual reach) had been trying to warn developers for years now to move away from Unity before something like this happened. But "told you so"'s aren't going to help any developer that's been put in a super ♥♥♥♥♥♥ position because of this crap, obviously.

Unfortunately, one additional caveat your post above and a lot of people seem to be overlooking, is that Unity is tacking installs PRIOR to Jan 1 2024 onto the pile, "but not really" as I'm sure they'd like to hand wave.

Specifically, Unity plans on Taking installs prior to Jan 1 2024 into 'consideration' when calculating the applied fees for existing titles.

Originally posted by Unity BS:

https://unity.com/pricing-updates
Q: Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024?
A: Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024. For more details on when the fee may apply to your game, see When does the Unity Runtime Fee take effect?

What this means is that on Jan 1 2024 while prior installs will not be billed to you, Prior installs DO affect whether or not you have to pay your fee going forward.

So a brand new game going onto market on Jan 1 2024 would have to meet a minimum revenue value/number of downloads before having to pay, depending on the plan (And go figure, the paid plans are 'better' for you with a lot more leeway, aka, ♥♥♥♥ the indie devs, all of you pay us more money)

Meanwhile, Any EXISTING project will have prior sales and installs counted against them in 'consideration', and if they meet the thresholds, and many will, they will immediately begin being billed on Jan 1 2024 for every single download from that point on.

Originally posted by  Dovahbear :

They charge for reinstalls too, so if enough people wanted to they can reinstall a game over and over to bankrupt the developers. It's actually insane. And this is not speculation, this is a question directly proposed in their QnA about the changes, and they give a resounding "Yes".

To be clear, not defending them- Just sharing what i've heard, I haven't seen the official source for this, but..

They have since, allegedly, walked this part back slightly, In that they realized after being flamed over the potential for this exact abuse that if they dont do something they're going to get roasted over a spit for it... So their solution is to say basically "Okay okay fine, We'll only charge for the First install on any New Machine".

...Without actually defining what constitutes a new machine, so it's very possible that changing any part in your PC might be good enough, or even something as simple as swapping OS's or running the install in a VM.

Edit: To note, the only official thing I've personally seen on this uininstall-reinstall to abuse the developer thing was a tweet they made along the lines of "We do already have fraud detection practices for our ads which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point"; which means they hadn't, at that time, had ANY protection against mass reinstalls.

Edit 2: Also, their alleged proposed 'solution' is still vulnerable to mass purchase->download->refund abuse by a large volumes of players; Though steam itself might curb that to some extent, the downloads will still get counted by unity's "Proprietary method of tracking download counts" and charge the devs anyway.

[Artyriak]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Originally posted by Arlequis:

Basically, yes - unless there's information out there I haven't seen (always possible), I think they only gave bigger publishers a heads-up about this policy change, and no one else. The writing had been on the wall for years now that Unity was rapidly turning bad though - their main revenue source is actually their data scraping and ad-targeting technologies - not the game engine - hence why they've been steadily pulling resources from the engine branch for years now.

Various people far smarter than I (and with actual reach) had been trying to warn developers for years now to move away from Unity before something like this happened. But "told you so"'s aren't going to help any developer that's been put in a super ♥♥♥♥♥♥ position because of this crap, obviously.

Unfortunately, one additional caveat your post above and a lot of people seem to be overlooking, is that Unity is tacking installs PRIOR to Jan 1 2024 onto the pile, "but not really" as I'm sure they'd like to hand wave.

Specifically, Unity plans on Taking installs prior to Jan 1 2024 into 'consideration' when calculating the applied fees for existing titles.

Originally posted by Unity BS:

https://unity.com/pricing-updates
Q: Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024?
A: Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024. For more details on when the fee may apply to your game, see When does the Unity Runtime Fee take effect?

What this means is that on Jan 1 2024 while prior installs will not be billed to you, Prior installs DO affect whether or not you have to pay your fee going forward.

So a brand new game going onto market on Jan 1 2024 would have to meet a minimum revenue value/number of downloads before having to pay, depending on the plan (And go figure, the paid plans are 'better' for you with a lot more leeway, aka, ♥♥♥♥ the indie devs, all of you pay us more money)

Meanwhile, Any EXISTING project will have prior sales and installs counted against them in 'consideration', and if they meet the thresholds, and many will, they will immediately begin being billed on Jan 1 2024 for every single download from that point on.

Originally posted by  Dovahbear :

They charge for reinstalls too, so if enough people wanted to they can reinstall a game over and over to bankrupt the developers. It's actually insane. And this is not speculation, this is a question directly proposed in their QnA about the changes, and they give a resounding "Yes".

To be clear, not defending them- Just sharing what i've heard, I haven't seen the official source for this, but..

They have since, allegedly, walked this part back slightly, In that they realized after being flamed over the potential for this exact abuse that if they dont do something they're going to get roasted over a spit for it... So their solution is to say basically "Okay okay fine, We'll only charge for the First install on any New Machine".

...Without actually defining what constitutes a new machine, so it's very possible that changing any part in your PC might be good enough, or even something as simple as swapping OS's or running the install in a VM.

Edit: To note, the only official thing I've personally seen on this uininstall-reinstall to abuse the developer thing was a tweet they made along the lines of "We do already have fraud detection practices for our ads which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point"; which means they hadn't, at that time, had ANY protection against mass reinstalls.

Edit 2: Also, their alleged proposed 'solution' is still vulnerable to mass purchase->download->refund abuse by a large volumes of players; Though steam itself might curb that to some extent, the downloads will still get counted by unity's "Proprietary method of tracking download counts" and charge the devs anyway.

You're correct about the point regarding VM's. While Unity are trying to save face, only a few companies behind certain DRM/cheat protection systems have demonstrated the ability to detect if they're running in a VM. I'm not going to pretend to have special insider knowledge, but I don't believe Unity has ever bothered or ever will bother to make that check.

Creating scripts to spin up new VM's and install a game, then destroy the VM and do it again is pretty trivial if you know what you're doing, and while I prefer to air on the side of not fear-mongering, I absolutely do not believe for a moment that Unity will make any effort to avoid that.

Now to be fair, just playing devil's advocate, if a game suddenly gets a gigantic amount of installs in a very short period of time for "no apparent reason", it should be pretty obvious to anyone what's happening there and Unity -shouldn't- send the developer/publisher a bill over it...but that relies on Unity being honest and ethical. I make no claims or assertions on that point.

The whole thing is an utter mess that didn't need to exist.

[Kou]

Originally posted by Arlequis:

Absolute wall of a post I don't expect anyone to actually read, but...

It's a bad situation and a very ♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing for Unity to do, but it's not the doomsday some are making it out to be. The fee will apply to installs of the title (in this case, Phas) after the activation date of the condition (Jan 1 '24), meaning the fee will only be applied to purchases and installs of the title after that date.

Phas has already had the bulk of its sales through the handful of peaks of relevance it has already had so far. Big swings in sales (and thus installs) generally coincide with big things happening with the game itself; so for example, a big upward trend in sales and installs would be predictable when the console release drops, and another one is predictable when the game finally hits 1.0/leaves early access, but like all peaks in sales those will be short term and isolated.

Since those peaks will coincide with sales of the game, the fee will be coming out of the devs profits - which is not good, obviously, but it's not money being taken from the devs in a vacuum; it's effectively a reduction on the profit the devs make from each sale, comparable to selling the game on a sale.

It's still not a good thing, but DK seems to have a pretty decent head on his shoulders when it comes to steering the company and planning ahead, so I very much doubt this isn't anything he can't plan around. That said, it does put an arbitrary limit on profits going forward (from Jan 1st onward), which is unlikely to impact the studio's ability to pay server costs but far more likely would effect the studio's capabilities to make their next game when Phas is eventually finished.

Having said -that-, I'd be very surprised if the studio was planning to use Unity again for their next game anyway, even if this policy change with Unity hadn't happened. Without making a long post even longer, Unity changed priorities years ago that has seen the engine steadily and consistently fall behind the other options on the market; not just Unreal (which is obviously lightyears ahead of Unity) but Godot for example is pretty rapidly coming up to a point where it could surpass Unity as it exists currently, and this policy change from Unity will only accelerate that process as small and independent abandon Unity for other options (like Godot).

This is false. Unity themselves said it's retroactive to previous installs. Not sure how they'll collect that data, but everyone spying on us like crazy so...

[Artyriak]

Originally posted by Kougeru:

Originally posted by Arlequis:

Absolute wall of a post I don't expect anyone to actually read, but...

It's a bad situation and a very ♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing for Unity to do, but it's not the doomsday some are making it out to be. The fee will apply to installs of the title (in this case, Phas) after the activation date of the condition (Jan 1 '24), meaning the fee will only be applied to purchases and installs of the title after that date.

Phas has already had the bulk of its sales through the handful of peaks of relevance it has already had so far. Big swings in sales (and thus installs) generally coincide with big things happening with the game itself; so for example, a big upward trend in sales and installs would be predictable when the console release drops, and another one is predictable when the game finally hits 1.0/leaves early access, but like all peaks in sales those will be short term and isolated.

Since those peaks will coincide with sales of the game, the fee will be coming out of the devs profits - which is not good, obviously, but it's not money being taken from the devs in a vacuum; it's effectively a reduction on the profit the devs make from each sale, comparable to selling the game on a sale.

It's still not a good thing, but DK seems to have a pretty decent head on his shoulders when it comes to steering the company and planning ahead, so I very much doubt this isn't anything he can't plan around. That said, it does put an arbitrary limit on profits going forward (from Jan 1st onward), which is unlikely to impact the studio's ability to pay server costs but far more likely would effect the studio's capabilities to make their next game when Phas is eventually finished.

Having said -that-, I'd be very surprised if the studio was planning to use Unity again for their next game anyway, even if this policy change with Unity hadn't happened. Without making a long post even longer, Unity changed priorities years ago that has seen the engine steadily and consistently fall behind the other options on the market; not just Unreal (which is obviously lightyears ahead of Unity) but Godot for example is pretty rapidly coming up to a point where it could surpass Unity as it exists currently, and this policy change from Unity will only accelerate that process as small and independent abandon Unity for other options (like Godot).

This is false. Unity themselves said it's retroactive to previous installs. Not sure how they'll collect that data, but everyone spying on us like crazy so...

Not false. As the post below mine pointed out as well, what Unity said is that the number of previous installs will be counted against you to trigger the threshold after which you will be charged for all future installs. Unity literally cannot retroactively charge developers for installs made before they introduced the policy, literally no legal system on Earth would allow them to do that.

Edit: This is precisely why I said in my first post "it's not the doomsday people think it is". I'm not defending Unity, this policy of theirs is absolutely deplorable. I don't blame anyone for thinking the worst of Unity, either. But there is nothing to gain from claiming that every developer who has ever made a game on Unity is going to suddenly get a massive bill for every install of their game ever; that's nonsense fearmongering.

[WolfLink0370]

Originally posted by Arlequis:

Originally posted by Kougeru:

This is false. Unity themselves said it's retroactive to previous installs. Not sure how they'll collect that data, but everyone spying on us like crazy so...

Not false. As the post below mine pointed out as well, what Unity said is that the number of previous installs will be counted against you to trigger the threshold after which you will be charged for all future installs. Unity literally cannot retroactively charge developers for installs made before they introduced the policy, literally no legal system on Earth would allow them to do that.

Edit: This is precisely why I said in my first post "it's not the doomsday people think it is". I'm not defending Unity, this policy of theirs is absolutely deplorable. I don't blame anyone for thinking the worst of Unity, either. But there is nothing to gain from claiming that every developer who has ever made a game on Unity is going to suddenly get a massive bill for every install of their game ever; that's nonsense fearmongering.

I think the bigger issue is that said bill should not exist to begin with... but I digress - there's not a lot that we can really do except make our voices heard on social media and drill it into Unity's head that this is something nobody wants.

[Artyriak]

Originally posted by WolfLink0370:

Originally posted by Arlequis:

Not false. As the post below mine pointed out as well, what Unity said is that the number of previous installs will be counted against you to trigger the threshold after which you will be charged for all future installs. Unity literally cannot retroactively charge developers for installs made before they introduced the policy, literally no legal system on Earth would allow them to do that.

Edit: This is precisely why I said in my first post "it's not the doomsday people think it is". I'm not defending Unity, this policy of theirs is absolutely deplorable. I don't blame anyone for thinking the worst of Unity, either. But there is nothing to gain from claiming that every developer who has ever made a game on Unity is going to suddenly get a massive bill for every install of their game ever; that's nonsense fearmongering.

I think the bigger issue is that said bill should not exist to begin with... but I digress - there's not a lot that we can really do except make our voices heard on social media and drill it into Unity's head that this is something nobody wants.

You're not wrong, this should never have happened. But for what it's worth Unity's stock price is steadily going down in real-time thus far and a whole lot of studios have expressed sentiments they won't be using Unity any more, both of which hurt Unity far more than telling them they're idiots.

[Han Daimond]

Easy fix for Unity: Fire John Riccitiello, he ruins everything he touches.

[Noelle]

Hey, here's a fun nugget I just read:

Blizzard used Unity for Hearthstone.

Microsoft owns Activision-Blizzard.

Something tells me Microsoft isn't going to take this one laying down.

[WolfLink0370]

Originally posted by Noelle:

Hey, here's a fun nugget I just read:

Blizzard used Unity for Hearthstone.

Microsoft owns Activision-Blizzard.

Something tells me Microsoft isn't going to take this one laying down.

I've been following that deal - it hasn't closed yet as far as I'm aware. Regardless - that's a bit unrelated to the discussion at hand.