Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.

What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn't have any.

The new changes are essentially this :

You're forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).

You're forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.

You're forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.

They're definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.

It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.

John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can't help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn't justify waking up in the morning. We're long past the "Users first" slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.

Unity is mad that mobile game companies acquire millions of users in a few months as they transition from soft launch to global, and then sell their companies for millions - if not billions - of dollars.

They want a cut of that pie, and in true unity fashion, they chose the most inept way of doing that.

If you have developers of games like Cult of the Lamb feeling scared, you did it wrong.

You protect your indies, you protect the people making art with your product. The people who invested 3 million and are making billions in the mobile ads game? That's your target.

How they could be this inept is astounding...

Also, I'll echo the other commenter's statement in saying the article is very well written. They just weren't able to really answer the "why" portion very well. John Riccitiello wasn't wrong when he said this plan wasn't designed to affect 90% of their customers - but it also doesn't mention how that remaining 10% makes more than that 90% combined.

Ffs Unity, get your shit together...

An incredibly well-written article.

Magic, thanks for posting this. I've been trying to find a good and clear explanation of that been going on since I started reading about people getting upset with unity during the week.