Following Unity’s announcement of its new Runtime Fee that charges developers using Unity for every game installed after a certain threshold, plenty of developers across the industry began looking elsewhere for an engine to make their games on.
Making your own in-house engine is its own trying task, but it looks like Unity is set to lose one of its biggest customers in Genshin Impact developer HoYoVerse, as recent job listings point to HoYoVerse switching to an in-house engine for future projects.
Multiple listings for engine engineers appeared from HoYoVerse in the last few days, and as a now massive studio thanks to the success of Genshin Impact, HoYoVerse has the bandwidth to take this route.
https://x.com/GenshinImpactOC/status/1704138880709017722?s=20
That HoYoVerse is beginning to take this route shows just how much of an impact it knows the Runtime Fee will have, and has weighed the short-term cost and effort of developing a new engine against the long-term financial hassle the Runtime Fee would cause.
In that comparison its no contest, though not every studio can pivot to their own engine, and those that would rather not have to leave Unity are standing against it in protest.
If Unity will do a full reversal however is yet to be seen. If not, it’s likely more developers will leave Unity, as HoYoVerse is beginning to.
Source – [GenshinImpactOC on Twitter]