In an exciting bit of industry news today, Unity Technologies, the company behind the popular Unity game engine that powers many great games, has decided to cancel the Runtime Fee that was announced this time last year.

The news came in a form of a brief email which linked to a blog post on the company's website. The email read as follows:

Quote From Unity

Hi there,
 
After months of consultation with our games community and customers, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee, effective immediately. We’re keeping our existing seat-based subscription model, and we will not be charging any revenue share.
 
We are also updating Unity subscription plans in 2025. We’ll be increasing the price of Unity Pro subscriptions for the first time in over two years, and we’re offering a new, customized plan for Unity Enterprise customers.
 
We are committed to supporting the millions of creators who are just starting out. Unity Personal will remain free, and as announced last year, we’re raising the revenue limit to $200,000 USD so more people can access these tools.
 
Learn more about these changes and what they mean for you on the blog. Thank you for creating with Unity.

Going through to the full blog post, we see additional details which specifically calls out that adopting Unity 6 will keep gaming customers on the existing seat-based subscription model. This was a big issue with game developers so it's great to see that Unity is resolving it in favor of them, with some additional perks of an increased revenue ceiling to make Unity Personal even more available to developers, with the splash screen being optional. 

Quote From Unity

So we’re reverting to our existing seat-based subscription model for all gaming customers, including those who adopt Unity 6, the most performant and stable version of Unity yet, later this year.

Here’s what you can expect: 

  • Unity Personal: As announced last year, Unity Personal will remain free, and we’ll be doubling the current revenue and funding ceiling from $100,000 to $200,000 USD. This means more of you can use Unity at no cost. The Made with Unity splash screen will become optional for Unity Personal games made with Unity 6 when it launches later this year.
  • Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: We’ll be modifying subscription pricing and the qualifying annual revenue thresholds, effective January 1, 2025. These changes will apply to all new and existing Unity Pro and Enterprise customers when you purchase, upgrade, or renew a subscription on or after this date.
    • Unity Pro: An 8% subscription price increase to $2,200 USD annually per seat will apply to Unity Pro. Unity Pro will be required for customers with more than $200,000 USD of total annual revenue and funding.
    • Unity Enterprise: A 25% subscription price increase will apply to Unity Enterprise. Unity Enterprise will be required for customers with more than $25 million USD of total annual revenue and funding. A minimum subscription requirement may also apply. Because this set of our largest customers have unique needs and use many of our products and services, we’ll be contacting everyone in the days ahead to discuss customized packages.

Price increases are arriving for the Pro and Enterprise subscription tiers, which sees 8% and 25% increases respectively in annual licensing. A very minor increase for developers who have made over $200,000 USD from their games, or the larger corporations who have made more than $25 million worth of revenue / funding.

Overall this seems like a win for developers, though the development pace of Godot has picked up considerably and is seeing more developers flock to the free engine than ever before. Godot just celebrated their 3.6 release which took 2 years of development and includes 2D physics interpolation, hierarchical culling, 3D mesh merging, LOD, and so much more. Will Unity be able to regain trust in developers or has it been lost for good? The more great engines out there the merrier, competition brings innovation to the industry.