For anyone following game development, this past week has been an absolute rollercoaster. For those who may not be up to date on the following game dev news, here's an update and timeline about what has been going on:

Unity Technologies, the creators of the Unity game engine, announced that they were going to start charging a new fee to developers who use their platform to create games. The fee would charge developers $0.20 per install, regardless of where that install came from. According to The Gaming Report 2022, there are 230,000 developers who make and operate over 750,000 games using the Unity Engine and the Unity Gaming Services portfolio of products. That's a lot of developers and game studios that are going to be affected with the changes that were announced.

But that's not really the bad part... The truth is, game studios want Unity to be profitable so that they can continue to build on its technology, which in turn brings us new features and a stable platform. The real problem is how they delivered the news and how they are trying to implement the changes. We're not going to cover everything that has happened in this blog because this post is more about our decision going forward but for those who want to be looped in, Unity's twitter has been on fire lately.

September 12th:

• Unity posts this tweet that informed all of its customers about the upcoming changes that are to go into effect January 1st, 2024. It was accompanied with this blog post on the official site. We're not going to go into detail about how outraged most of the community was, but the game dev community is rarely so unified in their reaction.

September 13th:

• Unity posts another tweet. This time they are sure that the community is simply confused (we were not confused — we were mad!).

September 17th:

• Unity makes yet another tweet stating "We have heard you. We apologize..." , but we are still waiting to hear what Unity plans to do in regards to the original announcement.

There's a lot of news, drama and information out there about this entire fiasco and we recommend that readers do their own research if they are interested in the specifics. For us, as a studio on the Unity platform, we are in a position where we have been forced to make a decision as to what is best for the future of our own studio. Many developers and studios are considering leaving the game engine, and that's something we have to consider too. Having said that, we've explored Unreal Engine 5, Godot as well as o3de, the last two both being open source engines. As a studio whose target is to be able to bring high quality games to PC, consoles and mobile platforms, we have made a decision.

While we do not agree with Unity's decisions and how they are trying to change the contract for games that have been previously released on the Unity runtime... Our decision is to remain on Unity for the foreseeable future. Our first game Cozy Room Decorator is far enough in development that we don't want to change engines at this point. We also believe that we're going to see a rollback, or at least some sort of compromise or fix, from Unity in the near future. In the end, this change will not affect our studio enough for us to make a change in something as significant as our game engine, though we fully understand many studios will be heavily impacted and will inevitably move away from Unity. We hope our community understands and will continue to support us as we move forward with Unity.

We hate all of this "game engine drama" and the politics that are going to spawn from it. We're not pleased with Unity's leadership and their recent decisions, however... We just want to make games. And Unity, we believe, is the best tool for us to make those games. We hope you understand.

~The Lucky Roll Studio Team

UPDATE: On September 22nd Unity announced their plans on Twitter and on their blog in regards to the runtime fee and our options going forward. Lucky Roll is satisified with the results and in return, our decision to move forward with Unity will remain valid. We believe that these changes benefit Unity and game studios fairly. While we are sad to see how long it took to get here, we're happy that this is where the decision ended up.