On Monday we reported on Unity’s new pricing plan which proposed among other changes, to add a Unity Runtime fee starting on January 1st to all Unity developed titles (ever) that met certain income thresholds. To say this was unpopular with developers would be an understatement.
Since the initial announcement from Unity more and more developers, including Red Hook Studio and MegaCrit have come out with public statements strongly condemning the changes. In fact there is a new Twitter account (warning: NSFW name) specifically tracking all of the developers upset with Unity and lets just say its a very lively Twitter feed.
There has been nothing but silence from Unity, other than a very poor attempt at clarifying details in the plan, ignoring the overwhelming awfulness of the entire thing. There was supposed to be an all-hands meeting at Unity on Thursday, but this was cancelled due to death threats according to widespread reporting. It was later revealed by Polygon that the threats originated from a Unity employee.
It was also revealed that Unity had this plan in motion for some time and silently altered their Teams of Service to make such a price change possible. Ironically the clause they removed from the TOS was added back in 2019 in response to another Unity blunder.
Then to make matters even uglier for Unity, it was reported that Unity was offering to waive the hated new Runtime fee if customers signed up for their IronSource acquired analytics and mobile tools, an attack on AppLovin, their direct competitor. You may recall that Unity merged with IronSource back in 2022 and AppLovin had proposed a counter merger.
It’s also interesting to point how how the stock market is responding to all of this. Here is Unity’s currently performance:
While here is AppLovin:
As well Sheridans, a leading UK lawfirm in the media and technology space have made the following post questioning the legality and/or enforceability of this entire scheme in the first place.
Suffice to say, Unity’s self inflicted wound continues to get worse and worse by the day. You can learn more in the video below.