The current CEO of Unity is John Riccitiello.  He was also the CEO of EA from 1997 - 2004 and again from 2007 - 2013.  You might remember that EA won the "Worst Company in America" award in back to back years in 2012 and 2013.

Yeah, this dude is terrible at his job.

Unity is supposedly having something in place to prevent piracy from causing issues. Also, it seems they've rethought their plans a bit, and now Game Pass should never and demos should usually not count as installs. It's still terrible though. The worst part is that this applies retroactively and without a transition period. This would be bad enough if it only applied to new releases starting, say, in 2025 or 2026, let alone now and retroactively. This is practically abusing publishers/developers that have already committed to using the engine, since they might not really have any time to react to this.

They can apparently scan for pirated copies as well, from what I'm hearing (which sounds just as batshit crazy to hear about with this plan). 

Now it's 'only' for the initial install, supposedly.
But like their other explanations, questions of how they're able to discern an initial install from successive ones, seem to come down to "Just trust me, bro".

Is any of this suposed to apply to games already released? Because that would be insane. Imagine signing the contract, and then years later find out you owe them millions because of this new policy they added after the fact.

Same guy that came up with the crazy idea to charge us for magazines in Battlefield. Thank god that never came to pass. 

"Demos mostly won't trigger fees"

What the heck, paying for a demo? The point of playing a demo is your decision if you want to purchase a game or not!

Yes, as far as I know. And yes, that's absolutely insane, in fact the craziest part about this in my opinion.

That's why I get annoyed whenever a game I bought years ago is updated (be it MP or SP game) with EoS, and the dev's EULA isn't changed, nor did I buy the game's years ago to expect EoS to be injected into the games I bought, which in turn muck around with my games and render them useless in Steam's offline mode (this already happened with me and KillingFloor 2, a game I was originally able to play on my own in offline mode, but ever since EoS was injected in the game I can no longer do as such, nor can I remove EoS fully).

Making these kinds of changes last minute and not telling us ahead of time, even in the case for Unity and devs is insane all on it's own.

This makes me wonder now if lawyers could get involved, because devs signed for these some yrs back, not for what is currently happening now, which will obviously take a hit to their finances, and they did not originally agree to this (because it was never there until recently). 

This is crazy enough that I'm sure this has some legal basis, because there's no way Unity has not considered the legality of this. Probably the original agreement allows changes like these, and Unity has gone through the terms with a lawyer to ensure what they're doing is legal. At least that's the theory - this sounds crazy enough that I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't hold up in court.

The main issue I'm seeing so far, is that there are going to be devs who are midway through dev and then this just crops up out of nowhere (if devs had known, we would have heard of this agreement to changes made months ago). That CEO basically has the devs locked in and by the balls, metaphorically speaking. 

Something will likely come of this, but it'll probably be behind closed doors. I doubt we'll see any dev/studio coming out on Twitter to state they are getting lawyers involved (something lawyers would advise you not to do).

This is just not a great time to be doing this either. We're already midway through Sept, and that gives devs 3 months to sort their end out for Jan 1st, and those remaining who are midway through are going to have to figure out some way to counteract the increase in fees for their 1st/6 month sales targets (for a small dev that competes against a load of games every few months, that's daunting as hell with the extra fees on your back).