What kind of nonsense is that!? That introduces a bunch of unnecessary unknowns to developers, making a project using Unity way more riskier than it should be. Retroactively charging developers is really stupid on its own, but to make matters worse it means Unity could come up with more stupid nonsense down the road that also affects projects retroactively.
They say it's only the initial installation that will be charged but how much trust can we put in that? I mean, it wouldn't be fun if someone discovered a method to make an infinite amount of "initial" installations just to be an asshole...

Oh, I absolutely agree. Despite thinking that this is probably technically legal, I still think this is a terrible move that will result in something.

Back then he brought up the idea of charging people to reload guns in Battlefield so he's a special kind of scummy.

Another gem from Riccitiello: devs who don't focus on microtransactions are "the biggest fucking idiots"
https://www.ign.com/articles/former-ea-ceo-devs-who-dont-focus-on-microtransactions-are-the-biggest-f-idiots

Chances are high that it is both legal and binding (Unity's lawyers would have likely checked this through multiple times, but I've no idea why their lawyers did not advise to not just throw this info out so suddenly).

But either way, even with some of the backtracking Unity is doing at this moment, the damage has been done. I'm already hearing about devs who are either in dev wanting to move away to Godot/UE, some that want to flat out scrap their early projects and just move to the other two, or those left with finishing their projects to then move onto the other two engines, but all of these tells us that devs have lost trust with unity and are willing to switch to another engine (even if that means dealing with months of learning to use a different engine if you're not well versed, and for aspiring indie devs, that can be a setback).

Tbh, after seeing this all blow up so fast and so loudly, I don't really think Unity can earn the trust back. I think the damage was quite large, maybe not completely fatal, but enough damage that has caused ripples in the dev side of the industry, that it's gotten Godot to increase it's gains of public/dev attention, and of course I imagine Epic will gladly use this short window of time to advertise their engine over Unity.

If I was on a board of directors for Unity, I'd vote to have the CEO removed from position within the month. His history, despite the money he can and has made, is not worth long-term damages he has caused. It's wild to me, utterly wild how general citizens around the world can sue for defamation, yet CEO's for corps are allowed to waltz in and utterly demolish entire businesses and walk away with a golden parachute and not suffer any heavy penalties for it. 

That CEO is possibly one of the worst I have seen. I have always seen Tim Sweeney as a bit of a childish person (especially his sense of entitlement to a platform he willingly abandoned and mocked for years), but Riccitiello is just a whole other level of vile, and the link Curl posted speaks volumes of how that guy views everyone around him, devs and customers, as "fucking idiots".

No one should ever hire that man for any position of power, because he is incapable of leading anything towards long-term sustainability.

Then fuck Unity.

Godot devs right now:

My response to that: Boards who hire Riccitiello as their CEO are the second-biggest fucking idiots after the man himself

To be fair, I don't think that was an actual idea, but more of a way to illustrate just how far people could potentially be pushed to spend money in the right circumstance.
But that comment, and his track record shows that he's clearly very focused on exploiting people's wallets as much as possible. He was unsurprisingly in charge of EA the year they added lootboxes to FIFA.

This has the potential to kill off Unity in all but the largest projects run by already huge companies. Mid-level developers will be hurt the most with the fee, and smaller developers likely can't risk the potential cost if their game becomes a success. Many will likely simply look for other engines for their games if this decision in effect, but I wonder what'll happen to games that are already in development, and perhaps even close to release? For them the option to switch might no be possible, so the choices becoming either accepting a huge loss of revenue due to this fee, or simply cancelling them game altogether because they can't afford to release the game. Just a horrible decision, but it's not like greed is anything unexpected when it comes to corporations in the video game industry.