An absurd change followed by rolling it back to an โacceptableโ version that is still worse than their original position prior to the initial announcement.
This is a psychological manipulation.
And more to the point it ignores the issue of their violation of trust and consistency.
This is still precedent, they still showed their hand.
They want to have โpassive incomeโ at your expense.
Don't worry, 90% of our users won't have to pay anything at all! Just ignore that like 50% are people who downloaded Unity to mess around for a bit and never made anything other than a "hello world" or similar.
Theyโve proven they canโt be trusted. The people who devised and attempted to enact this plan - the exec team - have not gone anywhere, and they arenโt going to. They have shown the industry who they are, and they clearly donโt give a shit about business ethics or even legality (the AppLovin shit smells an awful fucking lot like anticompetitive market interference). They will definitely try something similar in the future.
Considering the trust they've lost I don't think they've planned to do it this way. And if they didn't plan it, they assumed that their original plan wasn't going to result in much opposition, so that was the plan they wanted to go with.
I still think its a terrible idea to start a new project in unity, but for developers who are too far into a project to reasonably switch without spending a lot of time or money (like Ultrakill or Silksong), this is good as it means they can finish their games without having to worry about a passive income loss which could put them out of business.
fair changes, but the ONLY way forward is to fire riccitello. i donโt see how anyone can trust them again until that happens.
removal of the retroactivity piece will likely appease a large number of devs tho (dunno if itโll be the majority but that was the biggest wtf for me)