Cynically, I'd joke it'd lead to walled garden deprecation of any Nintendo games of Unity, for that 'value' reason.

Announcement of the new changes to the policy

https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

I kinda want to say this is reasonable and addresses essentially all the main points people had issues with…

…but then again, I'm still processing the annoyance from last week, wonder when this will suddenly change again when it's convenient – and we all of course know they would have never backtracked on their policy if it wasn't for the immense backlash.

But I'm stuck with Unity for the time being, and technology-wise, it has always been my favourite engine, so I'll be naïve for a moment and say I hope they have at least learned something from this.

I know this revised policy still has the runtime fee and that unity can just sneakily increase it at any time but I am so preoccupied by the fact that THEY KILLED THE MADE WITH UNITY SPLASH SCREEN OH MY GOD

It never made much sense to force it, but only to free users. Because of course, what's going to happen is people flooding stores with low-quality games branded with a big Unity logo, and meanwhile, the best games will hide it to dampen their association with those “bad games”.

You want it to work more like a badge of honour, so kids and aspiring game developers would see the logo on a great popular game and decide Unity is the engine they want to learn to maybe one day make games like those.

P.S.: Some more info in the FAQ. WebGLs and demos count towards the metric again; but with those thresholds, who cares; and you can switch to the revenue model if that would be a concern.

Unity Personal's internet connection requirement is increased from once every three days to once every month.

I'll admit, I didn't expect them to ritual sacrifice the forced splash screen as repentance. I think it shows just how desperate they are to retain the kind of users that are most likely to switch engines asap.

About that, though... I'm already deep into my own method of never having that splash screen again. A fair deal of indies are already done porting their games to other engines, and more are in the process. Unity dodged a class action lawsuit by exempting all current and past projects from the runtime fee, but this is still everyone's last Unity game, whatever they're working on now. The backpedal is more substantial than I thought it would be, but even if it wasn't too little, it's definitely too late.

My objection to that is, they might not dodge a class action lawsuit by spiteful corporations, smelling blood. Until then, just got to wait for all the companies to pursue legal counsil, before we have any possible, irrevocable lawsuits in hand.

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As an aside. Normally I'd hate to throw a YouTube meme on this, and I dunno if the link would work here on Newgrounds. But given the fact this is not from the mouth and sincere voice recorded tone of CEO John himself. It will have to do;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

Given Unity had silently deleted their old TOS off of Github before changing their license and trying to gouge devs via the runtime fees, I'd say the corpos have a good case against them here.

I find this whole situation mighty confusing. It only makes sense to me if a bunch of incompetent, self-serving individuals suddenly gained power within the company.

Otherwise what kind of sane person would even consider a per install tax? 🐀❓

A bot farm could easily ransom game companies threatening them with dozens of thousands of daily installs unless they paid them. The amount of room given to bad actors to damage companies is ridiculous. 🐀❗

I understand the need to further monetize your product, and it is obvious that their product was not being properly monetized if they were on the red while companies made big profit from the added value they brought to the table, but how in the seven coloured hells of the warp can Unity be so willfully blind to the realities of today's software market. 🐀‼️

This is one of those things that only makes sense to those more interested in shorting stock than familiarizing themselves with the field they are working in.🐀💫

me, who uses flash