Unity could cap revenues it gets from its biggest game developer customers

There may be a new revenue plan from the embattled Unity game engine and development tool company. Unity hopes it will bring back developers who have vowed never to use the engine ever again after it unexpectedly changed its revenue model less than a week ago.

Unity first announced changes to its business model last week, stating that on January 1, 2024, it would begin will charge developers a per-install fee for its Runtime software after a certain number of installs and revenue levels have been reached. That plan was quickly slammed by the gaming development community in general, and Unity developer in particular.

Now, Bloomberg is reporting that a possible new plan may be officially announced soon. The company held an all-hands meeting Monday with its employees to discuss the plan, according to the report. It states:

Under the tentative new plan, Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million and said that installations counted toward reaching the threshold won’t be retroactive, according to recording of the meeting reviewed by Bloomberg.

The new changes are not yet official, as Unity executives are still getting feedback from their partners, in an effort to avoid the massive influx of protests that happened last week.

Another change in Unity's model will allow game developers to submit reports about runtime installs themselves. Previously, Unity said it would use its own proprietary tools to monitor the number of installs.

Even if these changes do go into effect, the truth is that Unity has lost a lot of trust from many game developers who have used its tools over the years. Some of them will likely never return, and other game developers who thought about accessing Unity tools might now think twice and then decide to use a rival game engine like Epic's Unreal Engine or something else.

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