Unity on AI, new tools, and recovering from the Runtime Fee

To use some technical business parlance, Unity has had an absolutely shocking few years. After establishing itself as the near-de facto game engine for indie and mid-tier developers in the 2010s, it was already burning goodwill with misjudged platform development before jumping to outright pariah stats on the back of a proposed Runtime Fee in September 2023. This would have charged developers every time someone installed their game, once certain thresholds were met.

Following the backlash, Unity made some changes to the Runtime Fee before ultimately canning the entire scheme altogether. The controversy helped end John Riccitiello’s tenure as CEO (he stepped down in October 2023), before current chief exec Matt Bromberg took the top job in May 2024.

Despite a vocal backlash to the company, Unity is still widely used. Just this year, it has been the engine behind breakout hits such as Peak, Schedule I, and Megabonk, as well as Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz ahead of Unite 2025 (and the shock announcement of Fortnite supporting Unity games), Adam Smith, SVP of Unity’s engine product, admits that mistakes were made at the company, but argues that the engine giant is a very different beast today.

“Some of the decisions made by previous leadership really did not feel as if they were being made from a product value standpoint that would make developers’ lives better and result in a better player experience for everybody,” he says. “We now have a 100% new leadership team in the company. Since Matt arrived, things have dramatically improved. I find myself recommitted for the future because of the experience and the developer empathy that he has and the complete overhaul of leadership that he has made. That leadership team is composed of folks from the industry who understand what it’s like to be a developer.”

Regardless of the changes that have been made in Unity’s management and ethos, there are going to be those who are sceptical. When the Runtime Fee was announced, many developers turned their backs on Unity, opting for competitors, notably the open-source Godot. Emilio Coppola, the executive director of the Godot Foundation, told GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year that Godot had seen a “huge increase in popularity” following Unity’s missteps.

All of which begs the question: what is Unity doing to win back the hearts and minds of developers? As far as Smith is concerned, focusing on doing what the company has historically done best – helping developers launch their games across as many platforms as possible – is as good a start as any. This includes a few new features the company has announced at Unite 2025, such as the Platform Toolkit, which makes it easier for creators to launch across multiple platforms.

“At the end of the day, it’s all about focusing on our end users’ end users, the players, helping them build a community that’s fun, social, and a community that they want to come back to and stay invested in and allowing them to create that community across whatever range of platforms and devices they want,” Smith explains. “The simple short answer is focusing on our developers’ players, putting that runtime performance and community-building capability in the hands of aspiring creatives.”

Part of the negative reaction to the proposed Runtime Fee was that it was simply a feature that developers viscerally did not want. It was something they felt went against what Unity was about and that what was once a useful tool had become something that was going to siphon more money off the back of their hard work.

But the other piece of the Runtime Fee controversy was that developers felt that they had been betrayed by Unity. Whatever social contract existed between the engine giant and its customers had been broken, because Unity was set to bring in a seismic change to the terms of their relationship with developers after the fact. You can take away hated features and try to charm developers by offering them tech that will make their lives easier, but trust is a more fickle beast.

“Trust isn’t given, especially after a social contract breaking like that,” Smith says. “It’s earned back. I do feel strongly that we are on that path to earning it. Unity 6.3 is the absolute culmination of the specific domains that our development community wanted to be higher quality, with greater stability, more iterative workflows, reaching more platforms never before in new ways, new supported XR devices, web and web GPU. Really, it’s the ability to bring your creation to a wider audience than ever before.”

The AI question

Unity is no stranger to AI. At Unite 2023, the company revealed the Muse and Sentis tools. At the time, the firm said it was pushing for “responsibly sourced” AI tools.

Now, the engine giant is introducing some more functionality in this space, namely the AI Gateway and Vector AI. The former allows developers to use third-party AI tools in their workflow, while the latter is an ad quality tool.

Proponents of AI within game development generally fall into two camps. Many people on LinkedIn and Twitter – including Elon Musk – insist that the tech will soon be able to generate entire games, while more levelheaded voices suggest that it can be used as a tool to help speed up specific processes. Unity’s Smith falls into the latter camp.

“They skip the greenlight and prototype phases and go straight into the build phase”

“We see developers using AI to collapse […] the game development life cycle, which was concept, prototype, greenlight, pre-production, and then into production,” he says.

“What we see now are that developers can test ideas so quickly, leveraging AI tools, that they find the core game loop faster. It may not be the final implementation, but they’re able to find the fun faster, and iterate on the core idea with maybe within a day or two rather than months, acting as a technology company just to get the core gameloop to work. We see AI right now as an accelerant through the earlier phase. Studios know what they want to build, and they just start building it because they have the tools to speed that up. They skip the greenlight and prototype phases and go straight into the build phase. They’re developing and deploying faster than ever.”

While tech companies continue to push AI features into just about every piece of software imaginable, there is a very vocal backlash. Asked about this divide, Smith says that AI is simply part of the future.

“Players are going to accept this method of development,” he insists. “It’s going to become more common that some studios have a gap in their production capabilities and they will leverage AI to use it. There’s a vast difference in what the critical response to a game is and what the player response to a game is. The world is evolving.”

Core Standards

Another addition to the Unity ecosystem announced at Unite was the Core Standards, essentially a vetting process that third-party goods on the company’s platform can go through to ensure that they meet certain criteria.

“As we embrace this ecosystem of third-party tools existing natively inside the engine, we need to ensure that our community is confident that we’re not just bootstrap implementing these things; they’re meeting the same implementation standards that we hold our own first party technologies to,” Smith explains. “As we embrace third-party tooling coming into the engine, this is a method for us demonstrating to developers that it meets the same first party threshold that we hold ourselves to for our own technology implementations.”

Despite the wealth of negative press and attention Unity has received, Smith is optimistic about the future. The company announced a partnership with Take-Two to bring their games to Nintendo Switch 2 via the engine’s tech, starting with PGA Tour 2K25. But beyond courting massive publicly-listed companies, Smith reckons that Unity will continue to be the force behind the wealth of surprise indie hits that are popping up on Steam.

“It’s not just the 2Ks and the larger studios,” he says. “In 2026, the vast majority of games just like Schedule I, Peak, Megabonk, Ball X Pit and so on – the breakout hits that come from places you wouldn’t expect – will come straight out of the Unity community. That’s what excites me most.”