The End of Unity – the Day We Resigned from This Engine

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Dear Community,

As a software house, we created a lot of our games and applications on Unity. We also did make and plan to support you with paid/free plugins for this engine, as we thought it could use some more add-ons.

Unity has so far been cheap, with plus, while pro and enterprise options offer additional features for a fee. The base itself was ideal for one-person projects or small development studios.

Unfortunately, because of recent changes in Unity’s Game Engine policy on how to pay for delivered games and applications, we decided that we will no longer support this game engine moving forward. 

Unity declared that in a new model, starting next January – developers of games that earn more than $200 thousand will have to pay Unity 20 cents per game installation. Such a news was met with significant backlash from developers, who see it unfair. In fact, games that were released before January 2024 are also affected. In original, announcement says that every install would mean a fee – so players could delete and install the game once again causing higher payments for developers.

A pinch of theory regarding payments and related nuances:

• F2P model / 10-20 million downloads / revenue per user <$0.1, Unity fee $2

Since Unity is expected to charge per download in the new model, games that are based on the “free to play” mode don’t make money for 99,9% of players. The average F2P game has 10-20 million downloads, where the developer earns $100-1000 on one user and $0 on the next 999.

• Game pass / 3-5 million downloads in the first month and the game is almost free (subscription only for the platform)

Game pass is a subscription where you pay for access to a library of games (about $10) and you have access to around 200-300 titles. You can download and play any of them within the subscription. This means that when a new game is released, a lot of platform users download and play it, but the developer doesn’t see a profit because the cost of the subscription is divided by all the games someone has played in a given month.

• Pirated games

There are doubts about how Unity plans to verify which installations are from a purchased game and which are illegally downloaded. In addition to this, there is also something called “install bombing” where someone deliberately installs and deletes a game just to add cost to the developer.

• Free games/demos/pre-releases

Free games don’t make money. If a game has a paid version and a demo version, the developer pays to download the free demo just like the full paid version. The demo is often downloaded 100x more times than the full version, because it’s free.

The fact is that even if Unity was to withdraw from the new system, and there is no indication that it will, the situation at hand is a serious breach of user trust and is already prompting many developers to stop using this engine.

This change is effective, regardless of future changes that Unity will make to its policy. We reach this conclusion now, but it was obvious to us that this day would come. Half baked features, never ending development/beta features cycle, closed-source and now runtime fee. The new solution leads to the downfall of many developers. 

So, as of today, we decided to no longer support this engine and promote Unreal Engine, Godot and Flax Engine instead of Unity. These three will be our choices for the future projects. Our existing assets will be ported to other game engines.

If you need help with moving your game or application to other engines, at Prographers we have multiple developers that know how to port a game to other technologies, believe it or not we did it in the past!