If you are a fan of Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail or any other game made by HoYoverse, you probably know about Unity. This is the graphics engine that powers all these titles, and many other successful games that you might also be familiar with, such as Among Us, Fall Guys, Cuphead, A Hat in Time, Pokémon Go, etc. For many years, it was praised as one of the best and most accessible graphics engines in the industry. However, the company behind Unity just sparked a huge controversy on the internet when they announced that they will charge a fee to the studios for every installation of a game made with this graphics engine.
How will Unity’s new measures affect Genshin Impact?
The controversy started yesterday, when Unity announced on their official blog that they will start applying a new “Runtime Fee” from January 2024. This means that, the video game studios that have exceeded a certain threshold of sales and installations, will have to pay the graphics engine company for every individual installation that has been made. That’s right, every time someone installs Genshin Impact on their phone, their PC or their PS5, HoYoverse will have to pay them a huge amount of money every day. Naturally, this announcement caused controversy throughout the video game industry.
The Runtime Fee varies between titles created with the packages designed for independent games and the “Triple A” games like Genshin Impact, which means that this new measure can ruin economically a lot of small studios that have already gone to social media to complain against Unity. Although the big multimillionaire companies like Nintendo or HoYoverse are not so affected, that does not mean that they will sit idly by. Especially when we consider that this fee will not only apply to future titles made with Unity, but also to existing video games.
To better clarify the situation, we will give an example with numbers: It is estimated that Genshin Impact is downloaded around 5 million times per month, across different platforms. If HoYoverse had to pay the new fee at a minimum cost of 0.2 cents of dollar (although its maximum cost is 0.15) they would have to pay 1.000.000 dollars to Unity every month. This is an extreme amount of money for something as insignificant as “installing a video game”. Knowing how big companies work, it is likely that they refuse to pay this installation fee and/or start the hard process of moving their titles to another graphics engine.
The new measure of Unity is something very frustrating because it will harm all branches of the industry: Big studios, small studios and even the very players. Because all this brought us an uncertainty… How does Unity track when a game is installed? Do they know every time I install Genshin Impact or Among Us? What will they do with all that personal information? Can I ruin HoYoverse or any company that I dislike by uninstalling and installing the same game over and over again? At this point, we can only hope that Unity retracts and eliminates this new fee before 2024 arrives. Or else, many studios and video games will be affected forever.
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