The outrage is warranted. Two things about this are poorly designed:
1) Charing for installs vs sales. Because installs are potentially a multiple of sales (and thus, revenue), this will make it extremely difficult to build accounting models for in advance of launch.
2) For the thousands and thousands of devs that decided to invest in learning Unity (vs Unreal or otherwise), many of them did so with the understanding that the business model would always offer a royalty free tier. This was asserted by the CEO! They've since raised (arguably) way too much private equity capital and now have to put the screws on their customer base.
While Unity has been slowly losing its focus (indie / mobile), Unreal has been executing better and better. If you're invested in Unity, it's time to strongly consider a switch.
Yeah, my immediate thought is "wow, that really shows the dangers of depending on a proprietary platform; maybe people will start going FOSS to escape". Because honestly, using a proprietary platform is an understandable move if it's useful and you think it won't do a rugpull, but a major vendor deciding to do exactly that feels like it shifts the analysis.
But I'm not a game dev, so take this with a whole helping of salt grains.
1) Charing for installs vs sales. Because installs are potentially a multiple of sales (and thus, revenue), this will make it extremely difficult to build accounting models for in advance of launch.
2) For the thousands and thousands of devs that decided to invest in learning Unity (vs Unreal or otherwise), many of them did so with the understanding that the business model would always offer a royalty free tier. This was asserted by the CEO! They've since raised (arguably) way too much private equity capital and now have to put the screws on their customer base.
While Unity has been slowly losing its focus (indie / mobile), Unreal has been executing better and better. If you're invested in Unity, it's time to strongly consider a switch.