Unity has announced updates to their pricing policy changes they introduced on 12 September, 2023. We are positive with the decision they made not to include games made with prior versions of their 2023 LTS version of their engine. However, this should have been the case at the first announcement. Their intensions were very clear then. We do not buy their efforts on softening this, and we still do not agree the main logic to invent a fee over the usage of our games.
To state it again, when a subscription fee is paid for Unity Engine, its 2 components (Unity Editor and Unity Runtime) comes with that subscription. Charging developers a separate fee for Unity Runtime (that runs on players’ computers) is actually taxing. You can increase the subscription fees, you can even invent a separate subscription fee for Unity Runtime, if you want, but you can not charge taxes on our games no matter what the amount is. This is the core of our logic. Within the boundaries of this logic, you can still ask for a percentage of revenue share, but then, you should cancel all subscription fees.
No taxes, first; then, if revenue share, no subscriptions, if subscription fees, no revenue share. Anything goes beyond this indicates a suspicious intention for us.
For that reason, we are definitely continuing to migrate all of our projects to Unreal Engine. But, now, since we have a clear statement from Unity for exclusion of the editor version that we are currently using in our title Create Your Own Universe, we decided to continue the Steam Early Access release process of this title. And, we are still porting this project to Unreal for a future update.
Finally, we want to thank the community for standing against what Unity was trying to do initially. We believe, as long as they try to charge so-called “Runtime Fee” (what we are naming as tax), the developer community should hold their stance. For this reason, we will not be doing any other projects with Unity after Create Your Own Universe.
Dr. Murat Yakin
Unpredictable Games