Person holding mobile phone with business logo of US video game company Unity Software Inc. Shutterstock/ T. Schneider

Videogame development software maker Unity has announced it is retracting plans to charge customers for every new installation of their game over a certain threshold which sparked outrage and calls to boycott among several videogame developers.

Unity is a game engine developed, first released in 2005 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X game engine.

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The game engine is popular for iOS and Android mobile game development and indie game development.

Unity had stated on X, formerly Twitter, that 10% of their customer base would be affected by the proposed pricing changes, which would account for 23,000 developers.

“More than 90% of our customers will not be affected by this change,” Unity tweeted. “Once you meet the two install and revenue thresholds, you only pay the runtime fee on new installs after Jan 1, 2024. It’s not perpetual: You only pay once for an install, not an ongoing perpetual license royalty like a revenue share model.”

Last week, Unity closed two offices after receiving a ‘credible death threat’ following the controversial pricing changes.

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Several indie game developers released statements on X criticising the changes and threatening to boycott.

Landfall Games, publisher of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, tweeted: “We would love to stick with the engine we have used to make our games for the past 10 years, but at present, we don’t see how we can start any new projects using Unity.”

Software developer Unity acquired ironSource in a $4.4bn deal in July 2022. ironSource is an Israeli mobile software company that focuses on developing technologies for app monetization and distribution.

It is estimated that 70% of mobile developers utilise the Unity game engine as their development platform.