Mobile developers protest new Unity price change

Mobile game developers and publishers, with hundreds of games and millions of installs, are protesting Unity’s new controversial install-based pricing model by turning off ad monetization services for their games. In an open letter published on Azur Games’ blog, the companies are turning off all ironSource and Unity Ads features, two services Unity offers to developers to monetize their games. They’ll turn these services back on when Unity reviews and reverses its new policy, which has developers across the entire industry upset.

“We urge others who share this stance to do the same,” a representative of the studios wrote. “The rules have changed, and the stakes are simply too high. The Runtime Fee is an unacceptable shift in our partnership with Unity that needs to be immediately canceled.”

Unity, the developer of the game engine with the same name that runs on multiple platforms, unveiled the new structure for payment earlier this week. It ties a runtime charge to each game installation. Initial reactions from studios and developers were angered and confused. The fees they said would be a huge financial burden for their company. Game developers pay subscriptions tied to different levels for the use of engine. Several concerns have been raised by game developers: how are the installs tracked and accounted for? What can studios do to ensure that privacy is met? What are the steps to change terms of service easily? To put it bluntly, it’s been a mess; Unity ended up closing its offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas over an alleged threat to the company.

The letter has been signed by more than 18 studios since its publication on Friday: Azur Games, Voodoo, Homa, Century Games, SayGames, CrazyLabs, Original Games, Ducky, Burny Games, Inspired Square, Geisha, Tokyo, tatsumaki, New Story, Playgendary, Supercent, KAYAC, TapNation, Matchingham Games, Moonee Polygon reached out to a few of these studios to confirm that they signed the letter.

Unity reportedly responded to the removal of ad monetization by pausing access to one company’s user acquisition features, which help market the mobile games that use it, according to an email obtained by Polygon. A Unity ironSource rep acknowledged in the email that the suspension of ad-monetization may be related to a Unity price change, before notifying the developers that their user acquisition features had been disabled. Nikita GIMZ Guk of GIMZ Agency, who represents the developers that signed the letter, stated the Unity move could threaten the growth of businesses affected.

“In the world of mobile games, advertising is the key driver to get your game into gamers’ field of view,” he said. “Unity’s new rules will impact all projects that don’t have enough revenue from one user and will force developers to switch to other game engines or focus even more on monetization rather than creating engaging gameplay.”

With ad monetization turned off in protest of the change — something that’s designed to attempt to hurt Unity financially, too — the lack of user acquisition tools becomes a problem for these studios. But the pushback against Unity overshadows that, for now: “We strongly oppose this move, which disregards the unique challenges and complexities of our industry,” the studios’ representative wrote. “To put it in relatable terms — what if automakers suddenly decided to charge us for every mile driven on the car that you bought a year ago? The impact on consumers and the industry at large would be seismic.”

Mobile game developers have the potential to get hit with major fees when the runtime structure gets implemented next year; according to Azur Games’ website, the majority of its games have well over 10 million downloads — that’s a lot of fees to rack up. These fees will vary depending on which subscription plans each studio uses. Companies paying for Unity’s top-tier subscriptions would pay less per install. However, Unity is offering “qualifying customers” credit toward the runtime fee should they implement Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPay, which supports mobile ads in games.

Unity made more than one billion dollars of revenue in 2014, even though the company was not profitable. This runtime pricing strategy is designed to help the company increase its profits.