Unity founder says we ‘f*cked up’ with price increase and company prepares to backpedal

David Helgason, former Unity CEO and current board member, said the company “f*cked up” on many levels with its price increase. The company said it was planning to backpedal on the fee by making “changes to the policy.”

Helgason stepped down in 2014 and was replaced by current CEO John Riccitiello. Helgason heard the outcry from game developers upset about last week’s new Unity Runtime Fee, which targeted developers with a new fee based on their numbers of downloads, after meeting threshold amounts. It didn’t go over well and led to a boycott of Unity Ads and ads from its IronSource division.

In fact, the organizers announced today that the boycott has grown to more than 424 companies with more than 20 billion downloads.

On Friday, I joined an X (Twitter) Spaces session on Unity’s price increase and lots of game developers weighed in. An attorney also noted the price increase would like catch the attention of European antitrust regulators.

In a post on Facebook, Helgason said, “We f*cked up on many levels. No other way to put it: a new business model for Unity was announced in a way that was hard to understand, but it also missed a bunch of important ‘corner’ cases, and in central ways ended up as the opposite of what it was supposed to be. Now to try again and try harder. I am provisionally optimistic about the progress. So sorry about this mess.”

And on its Twitter account, Unity said:

We’ll have an update as soon as we hear more.