LMAOOOOO Unity posted today that they were going to totally upend their fee structure in a tweet that raised a lot of questions and answered very little.
This includes the hypothetical possibility that devs will be charged money based on the number of times a unity-running app gets installed. Meaning hypothetically (again, the specifics aren't totally understood thanks to the poorly thought-out message) that a malicious user group could install and uninstall your indie game repeatedly to rack up a huge bill for you, the developer.
The thing the REALLY strikes me about this is the line about "these changes are meant to target successful games". This kind of thing has come up recently in the gaming world. It's the exact same "we want to have a slice of the pie" language that came from the WOTC OGL situation from earlier this year. In that situation, the OGL was being modified because WOTC did not like that successful games like Pathfinder and successful media properties like Critical Role were making money using elements of their system. In this situation, it appears that Unity doesn't like that people are making games using their engine that get "too popular".
I think it's super important for people to be raising their voice about this. It's such a foolish move! And apparently Unity KNOWS it's a foolish move because the Unity CEO sold off 2000 shares of stock a couple of days ago. So they knew that this would be a shitty move and that it would tank their stock price and intentionally sold off prior to it!
