Great news to all Unity devs out there!
Yesterday, Unity published a new post on their blog titled "A message to our community: Unity is canceling the Runtime Fee."
You have to read it, to believe it. After what felt like a catastrophic fiasco of a business model change — initially relying on an install count metric, later revised and replaced with a "runtime" metric that would count the number of Unity-made app instances running on client machines — this change of direction both fills me with delight and sends my mind racing.
Why?
I'm sure you're well aware of just how unpopular their previous decision was. So much so, that many developers announced they'd be migrating to other engines like Godot or Unreal. What's even worse for Unity — many devs actually delivered on that promise! This is especially telling, considering how buggy, incomplete, and limited Godot is compared to Unity, particularly with its build platform support. Not to mention how complicated Unreal Engine development can be due to its reliance on C++, making it less small-team friendly.
Still, I can't help but wonder why the whole Unity team including their sizeable board of directors went with a terribly and obviously flawed and under-cooked proposal from John Riccitiello, and just... Implemented it. I understand that Unity is a business with business goals, but such drastic changes to the Terms of Service should be announced well in advance, such as to not shock and drive your existing users away.
It's not my business to try and estimate how many clients Unity lost during this period of turbulence, but I absolutely welcome the return to the original business model. I'm not a fan of Unity making their 6th version require phoning home at least once every 30 days, but you're free to stick with your previous Unity LTS branch if you're content with its ToS. At least until it reaches its EOS, after which you'll have to upgrade. Other than that — good job, Unity, with getting rid of John Riccitiello, and re-evaluating your strategy moving forward.
Here's a backup of the original blog post in case Unity decides to quietly change it sometime in the future:
