Key Takeaways:

Unity Blog

An open letter to our community | Unity Blog

An open letter from Marc Whitten to the Unity community in September 2023. 

Key takeaways:

-Unity Personal remains free

-Any game making less than $1mil in revenue over the previous 12 months won’t be subject to the fee

-Games made using versions of Unity prior to the next LTS release will not incur the fee

-Games made prior to 2024 will no longer incur the fee unless they update to using a version of Unity released after the fees are introduced

-Devs effected by the fee will be given the choice between a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated runtime fee, both of which will rely on self-reporting, rather than some invasive means of recording user data

I’d call this a win, and I think anyone working on current projects in Unity are safe to continue doing so, but the biggest issue remaining is how this really showed their hand in how they consider their business decisions and disregard their clients in that process.

I’ve made little progress in learning how to use Unity over the ~6 years I’ve worked with it, so I can comfortably say I’m going to switch to feebly trying to figure out an open source engine, and while I do think leave-if-you-can is the safest option in the long term, I can deeply appreciate the effort and time it takes to gain proficiency in even a single engine for a lot of people.

If devs choose to stick with Unity either because it’s what they know or because their projects lock them into committing to it, don’t harass them or badger them into switching engines — I’ve already seen this happening with people with little actual skin in this game turning using Unity into some sort of moral wrong and that’s deranged!