Unity had made their plans clear. Whether they backtrack a bit now or not doesn't matter. We know what direction they are heading: squeeze more money out of indie devs
The controlling shares of Unity are held by a trifecta of private equity and venture capital organizations. That’s why this is happening. It’s a classical presentation of the (short-term) profit über alles enshitification cycle.
That's correct. Even with this backtrack, it's a safe bet that they'll likely re-introduce this same policy with different wording once they believe their consumers have calmed down.
They're still exploiting their customers who've been developing products based on a completely different fiscal agreement; you can't just change engines after years of work.
The worst isn't even people currently developing things - it's developers who already have released products. Imagine if you released something like, over the summer, for example. You've been paying the current revenue share, and will continue to do so until Jan. 1, then you'll start paying the per-install fee. So you're paying twice for the same customers' purchases.
I really feel like they're going to lose a lawsuit on that.
Unilateral contracts don't have unlimited power and "we can blanket change what we want to charge you on games already made" doesn't seem like it's going to be enforceable.
There’s no way they can stop install bombings. There’s gonna be something that they rely on that can be changed somehow, and even if they find a way to perfect it, how could any developer trust that it’s flawless?
This is bad even if everything did work and everything was flawless. They’ve wrecked their trust here.