Unity Engine runtime fee

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Unity Software Inc. (aka: Unity Technologies), a publicly traded software company known for their Unity game engine, implemented sweeping changes to its pricing model for Unity that would affect all users of the engine, forcing users to either adopt their per-download fee or de-list their games.

Background

Unity is a well known game engine used by studios of all sizes, and very widely across the indie space due to its accessibility, capacity for both 2D and 3D development, and C# support. Prior to the runtime fee, Unity had multiple subscription tiers:

Unity Personal

Costs nothing and allows you to the Unity game engine to produce commercial works up until your revenue from the product created using the Unity game engine reaches 100,000$ at which point you're required to change license to one of the higher tiers.

Unity Pro

Costs [TBD]$ yearly per seat, and allows you to continue working on your projects past the 100,000$ revenue limit and gives additional features.

Unity Enterprise

[TBD]

Runtime fee

On the [DATE] Unity announced the new pricing model which requires you to pay a fee starting at 15 cents per install of product developed with Unity, this change was to be applied retroactively to any product released prior to this change, and going forward the developers would have to pay for future installations of their product.

To ensure adoption of this change Unity quietly changed their EULA to allow for such a change and never notified their users, going as far to private their EULA Github repository which was created as a result of a prior incident where Unity Technologies changed quietly their EULA quietly.

Consumer impact

What the repercussions of the incident are for consumers in the context of "new" consumer protection (privacy,right to ownership,right to say no).

Consumer response

Summary and key issues of prevailing sentiment from the consumers that can be documented via articles, emails to support, reviews and forum posts.