Last Updated on 2024年10月30日 by Alice
Unity updated the Unity Terms on October 10, 2024 to reflect the withdrawal of the Runtime Fee.
This means that the series of uproar that started with Unity’s price increase announcement on September 12, 2023 has been brought to an end.
Due to this revision of the terms, Unity’s subscription fee has increased by about 8% to 25%, but I think it has settled down to a fairly reasonable level.
Now, the root of this problem is Unity’s poor management, but I think it is quite difficult to say whether this price increase will stabilize Unity’s management.
As a service, Unity provides game engines and advertising network services, and the main source of revenue is the latter advertising business. However, competition in the advertising business is fierce, with major global companies such as Google, Meta, and AppLovin competing.
Unity has a nearly 80% market share as a game engine, and we have adopted a strategy of leveraging this advantage to have our own advertisements incorporated into games, but as the market shifts from the mobile market to PC and CS, , we’re having a tough time, partly due to improvements in the quality of our competitors’ advertising services.
In terms of quality, my honest opinion is that Unity is a little weaker than Google, AppLovin, etc., and it is unavoidable that it is struggling here.
Under such circumstances, it was only natural that they focused on monetizing the game engine, which has an overwhelming market share, and considered introducing a runtime fee that charges an amount according to the number of downloads of the game. If it were to be realized, I think it would have generated huge sales.
However, the attempt to implement the Runtime Fee too abruptly and without prior explanation sparked a backlash from Unity users, and in the end the introduction of the Runtime Fee was postponed.
During this time, a debate arose in the game developer community about whether they should trust Unity or whether they should move to another game engine.Also, due to a large-scale restructuring of Unity, all the key members of the Japanese branch resigned. As a result, Unity’s brand has suffered some damage, at least in Japan.
In announcing the withdrawal of the Runtime Fee, Unity emphasized that this decision is part of their efforts to democratize game development and will continue to do so.
That is exactly the important point; Unity has been supported by the user community, and I think that neglecting that aspect has led to this situation.
As for Runtime Fee, I think it’s possible that we could have found a good compromise and introduced it if we followed the steps, but in any case, we settled on raising the subscription price this time.
Unity has made a significant contribution to the game industry, especially since anyone can start developing games for free, making it possible for anyone with a computer and motivation to release their games to the world.
Unity is an essential part of the game industry, so I hope that in the future it will regain trust, provide better services, and achieve its goal of democratizing game development.
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