Charts to visualize how much you owe Unity for their per-install Runtime Fee
Unity Technologies has announced a new Unity Runtime Fee that charges developers a fee of up to $0.20 per installed game above certain thresholds. According to my calculations, it can be a bankruptcy death-trap, at least in certain cases.
Shockingly, the owed percentage is unbounded to the point that the owed amount can exceed gross revenue, since it depends on installs, not sales.
Update 1: Unity since backtracked and apologized for the announced changes. With the new updates to the terms, Unity will clamp the install fees to be at maximum 2.5% of revenue. And the changes will not be retroactive after all. Furthermore, John Riccotello is stepping down as CEO. There are more details in the linked blog post.
Update 2: About a year later, Unity canceled the runtime fee altogether. Good.
Nevertheless, Unity has suffered a tremendous decrease in trust and goodwill, which already was not great before. With the cancellation, there is less urgency for developers to switch to a different engine, but the whole situation has highlghted the importance of being prepared for such a scenario and have eyes and ears open towards other engines as well.
The original post continues below.
You can check out the specifications in their blog post. Based on those, I've made two charts where you can look up how big a percentage of your gross revenue you would owe Unity, based on the number of installs and on how much revenue you make for each of those installs. The fee specifications are different for Unity Personal and Unity Pro, so there is a chart for each.
Behind the design of Eye of the Temple, out on Quest 2
My VR adventure Eye of the Temple, that I've been working on since 2016, has landed on the Meta Quest 2! It was released last week on April 27th.
Get Eye of the Temple for Quest 2 on the Oculus Store
Originally released for SteamVR in October 2021, so many people have asked for it to be brought to the Quest 2 as a native app, so I'm happy it's finally a reality. The Quest 2 version was co-developed with Salmi Games and it took all our combined and complimentary skills to bring the game to life at target framerate on the Quest 2 mobile hardware.
We also made this new trailer:
The game got a fantastic reception! UploadVR called it "A Triumphant Room-Scale Adventure" and has labeled it an essential VR experience, and it got great video coverage by Beardo Benjo, BMFVR and many others. It also got great user reviews and a high review score on the Oculus Store.
Behind the design
To mark the Quest 2 launch of Eye of the Temple, I've written no less than three articles - published elsewhere - about different aspects of its design.
The Origins and Inspirations of ‘Eye of the Temple’
To celebrate the launch, I spoke with Meta about the origins of Eye of the Temple and the wide variety of inspirations (from classic platformers to Ico and Indiana Jones) behind the game.
Read the article on the Meta Quest blog
