The trust is already gone. I would never use unity after all this

That’s great but they didn’t say a single word about:

• the silent license update they made to enable this whole shitshow, which people discovered after they changed the license and had to find archived copies of the previous license to compare against
• the scummy and anticompetitive (and, in some jurisdictions, possibly illegal) fee vouchers they were handing out to try to nuke AppLovin’s customer base

The retroactive fee stuff was pure idiocy, but the above points are also deeply concerning and problematic, and indicate a leadership culture that appears entirely unconcerned with business ethics. And the exec team is not changing. They will try something similar in the future.

Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

Wasn't the free version already excluded from the changes before?

What they have done for the Free version is set the limit to 200k (it was 100k before) and they'll no longer be requiring the Unity logo to be shown, even on the free version.

And you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.

Yeah but how long is this solution really viable? It's not "skipping" the fee. It's just putting it off. Eventually your version won't be supported/will lack too many critical new features. No serious studio is going to work around you if they decided to just pony up.

No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.