Better late than never ? Unity backpedals and revises the copy of its economic model

After causing a real uproar by changing monetization, Unity is changing its music hoping to ease tensions.

As a reminder, a number of developers have carried out a real outcry in protest against a tax on the number of installations of video games developed under the famous engine. In order to save the furniture, the company promised to review its copy. It is as part of an “open letter to the community” on its blog that the team behind Unity shares its new economic model. A step overall in the right direction… but hasn’t the damage already been done?

Unity installs new monetization

It was Marc Whitten, director of Unity Create which includes the engine and the publishing teams, who had the difficult task of picking up the pieces with the community. The blog post begins with a message of pure damage controlthe man indicating that he is “ Sorry ” and ” we should have talked to more of you and included you in the process before changing our monetization “.

After other similar statements, Marc Whitten gets to the heart of the matter. First of all, the new “tax” will not affect users who subscribe to the Unity Personal plan, as long as their games do not bring in more than $1 million one year after release. Furthermore, the ceiling for having to move on to the next plan has been increased from $100,000 to $200,000.

“Small” development studios are thus significantly less affected than with the economic model previously announced by Unity. However, is this enough to regain their trust, when certain large independent studios have committed to supporting other engines? Only time will tell.

Taxation of the richest?

Where things will get slightly more complicated in the future is for creators subscribing to the Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise plans. Marc Whitten tells us that the much-maligned new tax will only apply in 2024. The year during which a new version of Unity’s Long Term Support (LTS) will be deployed.

Games developed before this new version with the two previously mentioned plans will not yet be affected, unless the creators decide to move to the new version of the LTS. From 2024, any game developed under the Unity Pro and Enterprise plans with the new LTS will be subject to the tax, the operation of which has been revised.

Instead of counting the number of installations, Unity will offer the choice between two taxes: taking 2.5% of the revenue from a game concerned, or “ an amount based on the number of users who launched the game “. In any case, this tax will apply every month and the studios will always pay “ the lower amount of the two “. Both of these data will be available to developers, and also of course held by Unity.

Overall, Unity’s new economic model appears on paper to be less invasive than the previous one, even if there remain some unknowns, such as the calculation based on the number of users per month. However, one cannot help but think that the first proposal was intentionally scandalous, to see the reaction of the community. It now remains to be seen how it will actually react and whether it will decide to continue working on Unity, or if, as they say, “ goodbye baskets, harvest is done “.

Source : Unity Blog