Game engines are the bedrock on which the game industry is constructed. What happens when cracks emerge?
When engine specialist Unity announced in September that it was going to leverage a runtime fee, making a charge to developers every time one of their games was installed, a PR omnishambles ensued. Developers were quick to highlight scenarios where the fee would be unworkable, or even ruinous. What about free-to-play games? What about subscription services such as Game Pass? What about charity bundles? What if a single purchase was installed on multiple devices? What about uninstalling and reinstalling the same purchase? What if the runtime fee was used to target vulnerable developers, with malicious individuals reinstalling games multiple times to rack up fees? And how would Unity even track installs? That these problems hadn’t been considered before the announcement was met with disbelief.
Unity scrambled to address the issues. Uninstalling and then reinstalling a game would trigger a fee, it said, only to later backtrack and say it wouldn’t. Charity bundles wouldn’t count, but the developer would have to tell Unity if its game was appearing in such a deal. Distributors would be charged the fee instead if the game was on a subscription service such as Game Pass. But precisely how installs would be tracked remained mysterious, with Unity only saying that it would rely on its own “proprietary data model”.
The answers didn’t satisfy a frustrated development community, who were particularly annoyed that the fees seemed to be retroactive, with games released years ago still subject to fees as of January 1, 2024. It felt like changing a deal long after the ink had dried. Faced with an increasingly untenable position, Unity revised its position weeks later, announcing a revised plan in which fees would only be applicable to games created with the forthcoming 2024 version of Unity, and that charges wouldn’t be applied to games made with a basic Unity Personal account. Perhaps most importantly, developers would selfreport their own figures, and had the choice of either tracking installs or opting for a 2.5 per cent revenue share.
THE META GAME Rami Ismail acknowledges that, following the layoff of 830 staff at Epic, some developers are worried that Unreal Engine might be facing the same travails as Unity. “But I think what Unreal did feels less like desperation, and more like misguided megalomania on Metaverse nonsense,” he says. “[Epic CEO] Tim Sweeney is known as a particular person who’s set his eyes on the Metaverse: he had to apologise that that didn’t work out the way he wanted to, but he’s going to do it anyway. So the layoffs are less like, ‘This company is going out of business’ and more like, ‘No, Tim really wants the Metaverse, and he’s willing to sacrifice 16 per cent of his company to chase this dream’.”
The new plan was more a
