Developers Remove Unity Ads In Protest Of Plans To Add Runtime Fees

September 16, 2023 Marc Marasigan Comments

Unity Technologies’ continues to feel the backlash of its decision to charge “runtime fees” for games that run on the Unity game engine. In protest, several development studios have also decided to cut off the company’s ad revenue by turning off Unity ads in their respective games.

These studios include Azur Games, Century Games, Homa, and Voodoo, among others, all of whom have removed IronSource and Unity ad SDKs from all of their games and are urging other developers to do the same. “The Runtime Fee is an unacceptable shift in our partnership with Unity that needs to be immediately canceled. The rules have changed, and the stakes are simply too high,” reads the group’s open letter to the video game community.

Other developers, however, have simply decided to drop Unity altogether, granted that these could only be done for games that were still in the early stages of development. One of those studios is Slay the Spire developer Mega Crit, who up until recently was developing a new title on the platform.

“The retroactive pricing structure of Runtime Fees is not only harmful in a myriad of ways to developers – especially indies – it is also a violation of trust,” Mega Crit said. “We believe Unity is fully aware of this, seeing as they have gone so far as to remove their TOS from Github.”

“Despite the immense amount of time and effort our team has already poured into development on our new title, we will be migrating to a new engine unless the changes are completely reverted,” the studio added. “We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up.”