Instead of tanking your Metacritic with a mass review campaign they can now straight-up tank you financially by organising a mass install campaign.” Will developers be charged each time a player re-installs the game on a new piece of hardware? And how will this affect developers whose game ends up on a subscriptions service such as Xbox Game Pass or charity games collection such as Humble Bundle, where they will suddenly be liable for many thousands of downloads? As veteran game developer and consultant Rami Ismail put it on X, “If you’re a Unity developing studio, good luck if you ever piss off your userbase. Several developers have pointed out logistical problems with the charge. Later in the interview Whitten stated, “We want to make more money so that we can continue to invest in the engine.” Speaking to the industry news site Game Developer, Unity Create’s president, Marc Whitten, said the company was aiming to “better balance the value exchange” between itself and developers. “An install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement,” the company stated in its blogpost. Unity announced the new charge on its website, referring to it as the Unity Runtime Fee, a reference to the Unity Runtime code that executes each game on player devices, and which until now has not been monetised. That after 2 years of dev they can just add this back-end tax if our game happens to be successful? Nah.” Garry Newman, creator of the hugely successful Garry’s Mod, tweeted, “Unity can just start charging us a tax per install? They can do this unilaterally? They can charge whatever they want? We have to trust their tracking?!” Indie developer Tony Gowland responded, “We pay for our Pro licenses up-front knowing that any revenue then is ours.

The fee has been met with anger and incredulity within the game development community.

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