Unity finally made a new plan public:

To our community:

I’m Marc Whitten, and I lead Unity Create which includes the Unity engine and editor teams.

I want to start with this: I am sorry. 

We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.

You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust. We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.

Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.

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

For those creators on Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, we are also making changes based on your feedback.

The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.

We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version.

For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.

We want to continue to build the best engine for creators. We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.

I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions. In the meantime, here are some more details.^*

Thank you for caring as deeply as you do, and thank you for giving us hard feedback.

Marc Whitten

So the fee per install garbage and all related issues are obviously gone, and it's now revenue share or some fee per new unique player count.

They will host an AMA apparently, I hope someone asks something akin to "Was it so hard to come up with something with basic logic?".

Will the trust come back, will unity be left with an associated stigma, time will tell, still want Riccitiello to be shown the door though.

This is only going to stop the bleeding in the short run, mostly for companies that have their Unity game halfway done. Once their projects are done, noone is going to trust Unity to not pull this stunt again. They are going to need a lot of time (or another company fucking up in equal measure) to recover.

Sorry about the huge post. That was one reason why I stopped posting in VGChartz: I usually ended up writing (a lot) more than I initially wanted, and so I spent more time here than I wanted.

"Those are supposed to be the investments you make so that your tools actually work. Without it, Unity simply has no value and it is actually already monetized by the value it procures to unity."

But where do those investments come from? That was my point: Oracle and Microsoft can afford to offer JRE and .NET (respectively) for free precisely because they have other products that aren't free. Also, Unity isn't exactly the same kind of product than JRE or .NET, so I don't think it's a 1:1 comparison (Unreal Engine is). In any case, Unity Technologies doesn't have other products or services that aren't linked to Unity, so it has to make money from it if it wants to keep existing. The reality is that the value that the company gets from Unity becomes totally useless if Unity doesn't generate enough profit to be sustainable and remain competitive both on the short and long terms.

And let's not forget that Unity is the David of the professional game engines, with Unreal being Goliath. Epic Games is the one company that could easily afford to offer Unreal Engine entirely for free, with no taxes whatsoever, and yet they still decide to charge a fee right from the first dollar you make using its engine. On the other hand, Unity Technologies, which doesn't have anything else to hold onto if Unity fails, still give you 1,000,000$ for free. And as you said, Unity is more stable now (and has more and better features and services), so it's clear that the money they've being making so far has being well spent (at least partially).

"The Twitter feed I linked is to the contrary mostly constituted of serious actors that are actually paying license and revenue to Unity. And even for the hobbyist the move is still crappy if they ever had any hopes of maybe..."

Inside the spoiler tag, there's a list with the last 70 developers (no cherrypicking) mentioned by that Twitter account (with 632 posts at the moment of searching). Among them there are only 4 midsized companies and 8 other devs that seem more or less serious. The 58 remaining are either starting, or hobbyists, or small unsuccesful or not-too-succesful "companies" (sometimes they are actually constituted as such, sometimes they're just a bunch of friends working together), or just not developers (simply people or small associations supporting them). So your claim about which actors constitute this Twitter account doesn't seem to be true.

And, about the hobbyists part, they will have gained 1,000,000$ (minus 2,000 for the Pro license) before they have to actually pay the fee, so this doesn't affect their hopes in the slightest. And, if there are actually some hobbyists claiming that the fee will crash their hopes (which funnily there are), either they haven't given it much thought (at all) or they are just being overly dramatic in order to make it look like the situation for them is worse than it actually is. I mean, seriously, one million dollars (minus 2,000) before you start paying? And you gain that as a hobbyist? Please, where do I have to sign?

You're right, however, that among the 230,000 stated by Unity there's probably a lot of hobbyists too.

Also, about what is actually representative of the industry or not, there is a huge number of midized and big companies that make casual, hypercasual or casino games for mobile devices, which means that they make the most played games in the biggest segment of the industry, despite being mostly unknown or "invisible" for the majority of people. I could name you dozens of these companies (probably close to 100, because I have them written down) from Spain alone (which is an emerging market), and those are just the ones I know and the ones that had an open offer for a Unity developer job in the last couple of months or so. If on top of that we start counting those that didn't have open jobs lately and from all over the world instead of a single country, we'd probably get thousands of them (perhaps even tens of thousands). And most of them have between 10 and 50 employees, some of them even more, with the bigger ones having thousands.

So even if there are more solo developers and small companies in the world than there are these midsized and big companies, the sheer amount of developers working for them is probably way higher than the developers working for the smaller ones. And these are all serious companies, while in the other group there are many who really aren't professional. So, about which is more representative of the industry, maybe both are, but one group has certainly a lot more economical impact than the other, and that is the group that is less likely to abandon Unity and start using other engines that aren't used in trully professional circuits, like Godot.

"I find it quite natural that customers will push back when they are at the being exploited phase"

Overall, my point was that Unity would not be as negatively affected by this controversy as a lot of people think. Thus, as I said before, the best scenario here is not one in which Unity is severely affected in a negative way, but one in which a different engine (mainly Godot) is positively affected in a sufficient degree. If Godot, for example, starts making its way into the professional space, that's good, because it means more competition. For that to happen, that explosion that you mentioned in the use of Godot should eventually translate into successful games from successful teams of developers, leading them to grow and therefore hire more Godot developers. If that amount of Godot companies is high enough, then this engine could get a few portion of market share in the professional circuits, which is what it is lacking now. And all of that is only possible thanks to people pushing back, so I totally agree with what you said above.

I disagree about to what extent the retroactivity would affect existing developers, however, but that doesn't matter now, because Unity has already released its new fee and it's way better than the previous one (not that that was hard to improve anyway): https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out pal.
Somebody had to take the fall for this debacle, and I can't say I feel sorry it's Ricitiello after his long history of being a shady bastard.

What's hilairous is that rather than taking this opportunity to kick the opposition while it's down, their big rival Epic recently jacked up the price of Unreal Engine for non-gaming clients, amid news they're struggling financially: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/epic-games-to-update-unreal-engine-pricing-for-devs-outside-game-industry

Imagine how shit you must be at business to be losing money when you own f-cking Unreal Engine lmao

Finally, Riccitiello will quit

Like myself and many others here have been saying, a reversal was not going to be enough, and a new CEO was required to build back trust and we were right.

It will still be a hard year ahead for Unity especially since they already operated at a loss, and there's no way around the fact they lost customers even if mitigated by the reversal and now the new CEO. This whole debacle also served their competitor and other open-source solutions a publicity spotlight they could never achieve on their own.

But at least, now I feel many actors will have an easier time giving Unity another chance and some will probably reevaluate changing to another solution by weighing the cost of doing so to the ever-decreasing risk of Unity doing something akin again. 

Now the question is who will replace him, I hope for someone more down-to-earth.