Unity reintroduces the Runtime Fee through its Industry license

https://unity.com/products/unity-industry

by finnsquared • 11 months ago

214 113 11 months ago

pbarry25• 11 months ago

"What happens if I am distributing the runtime for commercial purposes?

According to our terms of service, the distribution of the Unity runtime for commercial purposes by Industry Customers requires explicit authorization from Unity and is subject to a fee ("Distribution License') which is generally equivalent to 4.0% of the revenue generated by the software product that incorporates the Unity runtime (discounts may apply). Please contact sales to discuss further."

For folks who didn't make the move to Godot the LAST time Unity pulled this, there's Godot... (not saying that move is easy for everyone, but am just sayin'...)

poly2it• 11 months ago

This shows once again that Unity is an unreliable option for new projects. The worst part is not the 4% fee, but the bluntness with which Unity has administered these changes. They show that any terms can change at any moment.

pluc• 11 months ago

If the US can do it, why can't everyone else

gamblor9563• 11 months ago

Godot is entirely unsuitable for the types of non-gaming commercial applications subject to this license (which has been around for over a decade in similar form).

Also...a 4% license for the underlying platform upon which your product is based is relatively cheap by historical standards. The numbers used to be well into the double digits.

pennomi• 11 months ago

What about Godot makes it unsuitable?

hiccuphippo• 11 months ago

What makes Unity suitable that can't be done with Godot? That might be an opportunity for someone to build it.

0cf8612b2e1e• 11 months ago

The last CEO lost his job over the backlash from the runtime fee. Guess you can try to boil the frog again at a lower temperature.

mushufasa• 11 months ago

They must have raised money based on this plan -- the board must be holding them to execute it again to hit the projected IRR. If they had full control of their own destiny, I think most operators would just focus on a different business model.

evanmoran• 11 months ago

Not a raise, they merged with ironSource in 2022 (adtech). A new business model was likely baked in:

https://kotaku.com/unity-ironsource-merger-ad-tech-layoffs-1... https://mobilegamer.biz/inside-unitys-troubled-4-4bn-ironsou... https://unity.com/news/unity-completes-merger-ironsource

ksec• 11 months ago

So somehow Unity gave away or sold part of its engine and now China has a different fork of Unity that has some of the Unreal features built in along with lots of work on Cel-Shading.

noname1202• 11 months ago

Can you give a link to learn more about it?

Nezteb• 11 months ago

Snippet from Wikipedia: "In August 2023, Unity China announced that it would soon launch a Chinese edition called Tuanjie Engine based on Unity 2022 LTS, which includes support for Chinese platforms like Weixin Mini Game, OpenHarmony and AliOS."

MangoToupe• 11 months ago

So somehow Unity gave away or sold part of its engine and now China has a different fork of Unity that has some of the Unreal features built in along with lots of work on Cel-Shading.

Surely "china" had access to unity this entire time, no? Isn't this the entire point of open source? "Unity" needs to provide some value if it wants to retain control of what code is being executed.

rozab2• 11 months ago

Unity is certainly not open source, although it is source available for certain plans. They are talking about the Chinese subsidiary of Unity itself

throwaway_7430• 11 months ago

While working at Unity I discovered my commits were being mirrored to a seperate github for china, where local chinese engineers hosted a fork of my teams service running on tencent cloud, re-engineering the DB etc to make it work with

Neither my product owner, tech lead, or skip-level knew about it and were surprised when I showed them

binarynate• 11 months ago

Clarification: Unity's "Industry" license is only for non-gaming and non-entertainment applications (e.g. automotive, architecture, etc.). So this doesn't impact developers developing games with Unity.

Lammy• 11 months ago

Until it's an established payment model for one product category, after which it fill feel more natural to extend it to others.

The worst part of it isn't even that devs would get their wallets shaken out but that it's really just surveillance in disguise. Those apps would “““have to””” spy on me as an end-user in order for them to know what to charge.

Imustaskforhelp5• 11 months ago

Now thinking about it, its so valid point, how would that even work though if I am being honest

like I am pretty sure that the only way that they can do this is via giving it internet access and if that's the case, I wonder how much spying it does on our computer before sending it to unity headquarters in the name of this industry fees

Please, someone create a #usegodot or some twitter thing to just get it trending. We need to use goodot (I tried typing godot but I wrote goodot TWICE which is so funny and ironical so I am keeping it here)

Also I wonder how it might stand in eu / gdpr

m463• 11 months ago

I think phoning home is the platform for data collecting ("advertising") revenue.

gamblor9563• 11 months ago

Unity has always had a separate license for the other types of applications, so it's a slippery slope argument without a slope.

The issue here is the surveillance aspect.

jncfhnb2• 11 months ago

I switched to unreal several years ago because Unity had written hundreds of gigabytes of log files complaining that it could not phone home and filled up my hard drive

KerrAvon• 11 months ago

It does, though, because it means you don't have the freedom to pivot to other industries, or to fork for use in industry, which is a thing that can happen. It's definitely a reason to consider avoiding Unity.

noname1202• 11 months ago

*for now

runevault• 11 months ago

Thank you. I really do not understand why anyone trusts Unity to keep this for only non-entertainment if it proves successful. They only backed off before because the backlash was so bad. Assuming that means they won't try to find ways to slowly bring it back in the future is dangerous to me.

estimator72923• 11 months ago

That sounds well and good, but Unity forced my last company into the more expensive license unilaterally and with no discussion. They doubled our costs just because they can.

At this point, we should all treat Unity like we do Broadcom. Utterly toxic and should be avoided at all costs because they will shake you down and leave you with a lesser product for no reason other than blind greed.

Nothing Unity does will ever recover the goodwill they nuked for money

diffuse_l• 11 months ago

I would expect no less from a company that acquired/merged with IronSource...

nickserv• 11 months ago

Did you change to another engine? If so, which one? If not, what prevented you from doing so?

Genuinely curious.

poemxo• 11 months ago

It makes less sense in automotive or architecture than games. Games scale incredibly well and practically for free, cars not so much.

webdevver2• 11 months ago

the entire games industry is reminiscent of cryptocurrency. hundreds of thousands of completely worthless "titles". sole purpose in life is to grab unwitting customers money and run.

in this case, unity grabbing a percentage seems like a trading exchange taking a cut. is the exchange really the 'bad guy' in this interaction?

its the 2020s: We're All Trying To Make Money.

bogwog• 11 months ago

Games are art. Some people do it for money, some do it to express themselves, some do it for fun. What's worthless to you is very valuable to someone else.

webdevver2• 11 months ago

this is 1:1 what i hear people say about solana memecoins

phendrenad23• 11 months ago

Yes but it's undeniable that the industry has changed recently. It used to be, someone would make a game to express themselves, it would be picked up by a major studio, it would be expanded and polished until it had mass appeal, and became the next "blockbuster" game. Now, it's, someone makes a game to express themselves, and they eke by on a trickly of income, they fight for placement among the sea of shovelware on the game store sites, and they never get picked up by a big publisher. Meanwhile, the big 3 game companies are creating the same formulaic game over and over and, through massive advertising campaigns, have captured all of the customers.

Imustaskforhelp5• 11 months ago

Lets discuss. I genuinely hate memecoins with a passion but not indie games

Honestly, memecoins are just ponzi schemes. They are created on hype and people buy memecoins with the idea that it would trade higher and so on.

Noone in their goddamn right minds would just pay for an app showing some image of something. No, it is the idea that you can sell it for higher price, or if you can't, then why not just donate to them in the first place??

like if you think pepe is cool, just mail matt fury (I think he's the creator, just searched) some money and email him thanks on why pepe matters to you.

But nope people buy these shitty ass things just so that they can sell it to some other person believing the same dream as them.

And no, every cryptocoin is like this unless stablecoin in this sense but some coins have some utility that I can understand but still, if they have utility, just buy them when you want the utility man, but memecoins are the worst of the worst, just leeches on gullible people.

Indie devs are more like clippy (louis rossman, lets go, I am doing my deal spreading clippy) Once you bought them, 99% don't want anything else from you. They don't want you to sell it to an higher fool. they want you to play. they want you to give them feedback (both critisicm and praise) they want you to recognize the work they put in and they are proud of what they created which is why they created it.

Indie devs making games usually also take a lot more time and effort and that can only happen 90% of the time when you love the project than memecoins

But also I will admit that there are games that are not like that (think mobile ad games) and yes they are as much an evil/scummy as memecoins. Maybe a little less since trading factor and selling to others is gone but still some apps target little kids so they are worse in that. Maybe those apps take some time to develop but that's it. In my opinion yes shitty mobile games are comparable to memecoins, they are both (scams?), one might take more effort than other but honestly that varies but yeah even then they both are scams.

But doing the disservice of even comparing every indie game to memecoin might make you A) completely wrong, doing a great disservice while basically spreading lies that basically ragebaited me man B) the most downvoted person

You kinda ragebaited me no offense and I know you might be a good person. And its okay, misunderstandings happen. I may be wrong too, I usually am and that's why lets discuss if you think there is something wrong with what I said

kg2• 11 months ago

Noone in their goddamn right minds would just pay for an app showing some image of something

Not to necessarily disagree with anything else you argued, but there's a small relatively profitable genre of games for consoles that are just a unity template with an image of a turtle or whatever, and you mash a button to pet the turtle. The reason these exist and people buy them is because you get trophies for pressing the button.

So "an app just showing an image of something" is not very far from what those games are, and a bunch of them exist and do make money. It's tremendously weird.

There are also games like that Banana steam game that exist as part of a weird microtransactions economy instead of existing as what most people would consider a game.

add-sub-mul-div• 11 months ago

The thing about whether they're a good person or not is that it doesn't matter because they're not worth replying to either way. You don't have a moral obligation to steel-man absolute stupidity, whether it's meant sincerely or trollingly.

xandrius6• 11 months ago

Say you don't play games without saying you don't play games.

ApolloFortyNine• 11 months ago

Most of the outrage was over it applying retroactively and that it was by download, which is quite frankly just a horrible idea and probably why it's not in this rendition.

A percentage of revenue is already what their biggest competitor (Unreal) does, and if they had announced that new versions had it they would have had backlash but not nearly to the extent that occurred.

Unity hasn't been profitable in 5 years, the revenue percentage doesn't even sound unfair, though the download fee was obviously exploitative.

pnw2• 11 months ago

Unity has had different licenses for non-gaming for at least a decade. E.g. gambling has always required a special license. See this Reddit thread from 2015.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/35xt2r/unity3d_gam...

rozab2• 11 months ago

Based on job adverts, gambling is huge for Unity, even casino cabinets. It surprises me, you wouldn't think there'd be room for so many players in that market.

biggestfan• 11 months ago

I would guess it's because of regulatory compliance. You really don't want to release slots with a major payout but, and if you do, you want to be able to throw the blame at Unity.

gamblor9563• 11 months ago

Unity is the de facto engine for a number of the interactive gambling machines you find in U.S. casinos.

pnw2• 11 months ago

From my experience, the gambling companies aren't particularly good at engineering, so using an off the shelf engine is a given. And you can be 100% sure they aren't going to use anything with a revenue share model.

zerr• 11 months ago

That's why Cocos engine is still popular (in gambling). Godot is also getting popular in this field.

i_niks_86• 11 months ago

Unity’s always had special terms for gambling stuff. It’s not about squeezing more money out, it’s just that slot cabinets and VLTs have to be locked down and audited. Platforms like 2WinPower, SoftSwiss, and Slotegrator usually treat Unity as just the visual layer - all the math and payout logic sits outside in certified modules. That’s why you don’t see revenue-share deals with engine vendors, just flat licenses to keep regulators off your back

FredPret2• 11 months ago

Unity has been losing money for years, not sure I would incorporate them into anything business critical.

They're going to feel all kinds of pressure to monetize users harder, and if they fail at that, they go bankrupt.

https://valustox.com/U

Wowfunhappy2• 11 months ago

Wow! Do you have a sense why it's not a profitable business for them? Just on the face of it, they have they have what is arguably the dominant product in this category, and they charge a reasonable license fee to use it.

I find it worrying if "make good software and sell it to people" isn't sufficient to have a profitable business.

And of course, Unity doesn't merely sell licenses, they also run an asset store and take a cut from every transaction, a business model that has been gold for other technology companies. Of course the market for Unity assets is smaller than mobile apps, but this is in addition to actual Unity licenses.

bcrosby95• 11 months ago

Is the fee reasonable if the company charging it has trouble making a profit?

I have no clue how profitable Unreal Engine is for Epic Games or if its subsidized by Fortnite. I believe their pricing structure only became favorable after that smash hit.

FredPret2• 11 months ago

I do not have any insight into Unity besides looking at that plummeting profit graph.

But if they have a great product and a high price, then maybe they're just using way too many resources as input. It's easy to see that happening with bloated org charts / massive cloud bills / lots of overhead of some sort.

imtringued3• 11 months ago

They are like the angry birds company rovio entertainment, which had a whopping 500+ employees in 2022. The amount of bloat is insane and they had to enshittify their entire franchise as a result of this.

juntgar• 11 months ago

You can see their earnings announcements. They are making money across the board. Not losing it like you've stated

vorpalhex• 11 months ago

GAAP net loss was $107 million, with a margin of (24)%.

https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2025/Unity-Rep...

b_e_n_t_o_n2• 11 months ago

The title of this post is just straight up wrong and should be changed or this post flagged. They didn't reintroduce the "Runtime Fee" nor is it called that anywhere on the Unity site. It's an entirely different pricing setup that is virtually identical to Unreal's, just a bit cheaper.

CreepGin• 11 months ago

Yes what the hell is wrong with this title. Where on the pricing page does it say the Industry plan require a runtime fee?

b_e_n_t_o_n2• 11 months ago

It doesn't. It mentions their runtime because that's what they licence out on all their plans. This way you can maintain ownership of your projects assets and code, the runtime is what they licence and in the industry case, they charge 4% of earnings. Which is 20% less than what Epic charges for Unreal.

Stevvo• 11 months ago

Just go ahead and flag it. Hundreds of comments of manufactured outrage later and nobody bothered.

bob1029• 11 months ago

I've been building with unity for some time now and the only thing that actually registers for me is the steam cut. I don't care about the historical drama or per seat licenses if we "make it". Valve is a much bigger mouth to feed in any reality.

Making games is hard and worrying about stuff like this is virtually guaranteed to ensure your failure. Having 100% of $0 isn't gonna take you very far.

In terms of tooling experience, Unity does provide a very compelling blend. If you have any Java or C# background at all, it's very easy to get productive quickly. I think the integration between VS and the unity editor is exceptional.

reactordev4• 11 months ago

Their tooling is starting to show it's age, meanwhile competitors are advancing. I understand you were sold the dream that Unity will be your partner but they won't, ever, as you are their customer.

If you want to make a game, go for it. If you want to make one that works well into the future, I would question going with Unity. (fmr creator of Reactor 3D, contributor to UnrealEngine, donator to Godot, grand-uncle to MonoGame, I know this space).

arminiusreturns• 11 months ago

Stuff like this is why I chose to refactor my project into Godot. It lacks many of the UE/Unity features, so I am building many things myself, but the freedom I get feels worth the work. I have also been working on "commercial" subparts (like a digital twin system for things like datacenters), which this would apply to. I'm increasingly assured my decision was correct.

qoez• 11 months ago

This is the standard strategy with these things it seems. Claim to remove the unpopular new idea, wait like 6 months and then secretly reintroduce it hoping the second wave have saturated the energy people feel like spending on it or that it goes under the radar.

999900000999• 11 months ago

Unity's failure to communicate will be studied for decades.

They really should of straight matched Unreal's revenue cut from the start, and maybe offer a deduction for site licenses.

Instead they announce something like a 20 cent fee per "initial interaction" which they track via embedded spyware. You had a massive backlash from indie developers who realistically weren't Unity's target in the first place.

People who never programmed or made a commercial product already complaining Unity is coming for them.

That said, Godot is often good enough for what most new programers can actually do.

It's also OK for certain non gaming projects. No need to worry about Unity deciding your not making a game and hiking your fees.

pqtyw• 11 months ago

something like a 20 cent fee per

They announced it, but based on their actual pricing tables effectively nobody outside of a tiny extremely unlucky proportion of users would have paid that much. The effective fee was several times smaller and they also switched to a per project instead a per company revenue limit for personal tier (which would have resulted in a significant price cut for a quite a few people).

Yet nobody noticed any of that because their announcements were incomprehensible .

Not that I am a fan of the whole pricing model but they were so exceptionally bad at communicating it. Like it's hard to even fathom what sort of incompetent idiots they had running their marketing department (I mean an average intern would have had handled it better). IMHO it would have been hard to bungle it more even if they tried doing it on purpose...

hinkley2• 11 months ago

Herd safety comes from sticking together.

reactordev4• 11 months ago

I heard really great things about Godot...

sosborn2• 11 months ago

I've been playing around with Godot for the past few months and as someone new to gamedev, it's been a really good experience. Wrapping my head around some gamedev-specific concepts has been tough, but that would be true regardless of the tooling.

reactordev4• 11 months ago

Spend some time learning blender too, you’d be surprised at how much overlap in concepts there are. Texture mapping, models, camera, positioning, it’s all the same.

xandrius6• 11 months ago

And yet, it's not that good (yet).

AlexeyBelov• 11 months ago

Can you be more specific? Your two comments on this post are essentially "Godot is not good."

Waterluvian• 11 months ago

I am fully against this approach, but I do wonder what impact this kind of model might have on the absolute garbage shovelware/adware games that litter app stores, and subsequently the countless ads that try to push people towards those games.

sovietmudkipz• 11 months ago

Thank goodness I went full tilt into Godot (and became a donor) after Unity’s last controversy.

Godot is much more hacker friendly than Unity, IMO. Ymmv

xandrius6• 11 months ago

I always hear that and I wonder how you used Unity before, as godot does absolutely nothing that Unity doesn't excel or does better.

The only thing is editor speed but given how few features godot has, it's not surprising.

I wish someone just took what Unity does and made it a copy with better editor performance and open source.

pjmlp5• 11 months ago

Unfortunately this kind of stuff will eventually kill C# adoption in gaming.

With Unreal on one side, and Godot on the other, where while C# is supported, it is mostly for Unity refugees, there are very few other options left.

Yes there are MonoGame, FNA, Stride and so on, but they lack the same kind of mindshare across the industry.

TremendousJudge• 11 months ago

Why do you see C# adoption in gaming as desirable? Honest question. I think it's a good enough language, but why would it be a good fit specifically for building games?

jasperry2• 11 months ago

I'm not the parent poster, but to me it's not about C# in particular, but that there is basically no other well-supported gamedev framework in a language that's 1) statically typed, 2) garbage-collected for safety and productivity, 3) has decent performance, and 4) has good tooling/IDEs. JavaScript, C++, and Python/GDScript are all missing at least one of those. Java could possibly fill the gap, but it's still clunkier to program in than C#, and no Java game framework has much traction.

I'd be ecstatic if there were something checking those boxes that wasn't owned by Microsoft.

pjmlp5• 11 months ago

Because I am firm believer in managed languages, and while I am also big into C++, I would like to still see the Xerox computing vision become reality on my lifetime.

Game developers usually are the last ones to move, and tend to do so due to external factors, mostly pressed by platform owners.

It was like that when we moved from Assembly in 8 and 16 bit platforms, slowly into Object Pascal (Mac/PC) and C.

Then it took until Watcom C/C++ on PC, and PlayStation 2 SDK, for C++ to finally start being taken seriously by game devs, then XBox did the rest on console space.

C# had a first victory in 2004 with Arena Wars, in OpenGL

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_Wars

Managed DirectX was already around, then XNA on XBox Live Arcade was the needed push.

When Microsoft killed in name of C++ and replaced it with DirectX TK, as usual in Windows in their territorial attitude, Mono project came up with MonoGame as rescue.

This is what enabled them to eventually join efforts with Unity, when they were rewriting the engine to be cross platform, and go beyond OS X.

Eventually Unity alongside C#, use to have a certain Flash like vibe, and for many, the entrypoint into the .NET ecosystem.

So it is kind of sad see this go away.

I don't believe in the one true language for everything, other than Timex BASIC, the moment I learned Z80, I have been a polyglot ever since.

A cool designed game, even in PyGame, has probably more entertainment value, than yet another remake in Unreal running on a PlayStation 5 Pro.

xandrius6• 11 months ago

Typed, great std lib, managed memory, one of the most usable languages, C-like and fast.

It's such a pleasure to write in C# and you know that you won't get dumb ninja issues because of pointers or types.

Rohansi3• 11 months ago

I disagree. I believe there are enough game developers out there who enjoy using C# that would look for it in their next game engine. If Unity is gone it would leave a large hole to fill.

The upside is Unity's C# support is the worst available in any game engine. It's stuck on an old C#/.NET version, .NET (Core) runs C# code 2-5x faster than Mono (and IL2CPP) [1], and its garbage collector is slower than the one Mono ships with (which is also slower than .NET).

[1] https://xoofx.github.io/blog/2018/04/06/porting-unity-to-cor...

pjmlp5• 11 months ago

I have been long enough around, not to be as hopeful, however I loved being proven wrong on this one.

Note that Native AOT doesn't do consoles, and Godot can't target them with C#, it is also why they've problems with targeting Web.

Also Native AOT, and proper C# still lack some of Burst (HPC#) capabilities.

zg94• 11 months ago

There's no mention of a fee similar to the infamous Runtime fee (which charged per install) here; instead, the closest thing on this page is a mention in the FAQs about how if the Unity runtime is included in a commercial product, then not only do you need permission from Unity to do so but you also will give Unity a fee that is roughly equivalent to 4% of the software's revenue.

This license appears to be intended for users using Unity to augment their business' operations; creating a commercial product with the runtime is treated as an edge case under this license.

imtringued3• 11 months ago

In a situation where the software is only used internally, it sounds like it would be very easy to game what "4% of software's revenue" means in both directions.

E.g. Unity argues that the entire production plant is the result of the software, therefore charges 4% on the revenue of the factory, meanwhile the customer argues that the software produces no revenue, because it is not being sold and therefore the bill is $0.

A fixed monthly fee solves this problem.

wkat42422• 11 months ago

I'm honestly thinking of moving to Epic. I'm a hobbyist and started with Unity because I thought it was easier. But all this stuff makes me reconsider.

Also it's super annoying they have several different rendering pipelines, they all have different ways of doing something and they haven't chosen one to rule them all, that will be the one going forward. I hate this ambiguity.

I think it makes more sense now to learn epic instead of diving into whatever pipeline is unity's current baby knowing it'll probably change again.

wkat42422• 11 months ago

Note: By Epic I meant unreal engine, sorry.

Unity reintroduces the Runtime Fee through its Industry license

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