https://unity.com/blog/unity-is-canceling-the-runtime-fee
After deep consultation with our community, customers, and partners, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee, effective immediately.
Alternative title: Unity gives up
Do you see yourself going back to Unity after they changed streams? I do not.
Do you see yourself going back to Unity after they changed streams?
The only reason this didn't stick is because they got overwhelming backlash from it. They didn't revert it because they're thinking of their users, they didn't revert it because they had a change of heart; they did it because it was a PR issue and they decided they'd make more money by reverting the decision than by keeping it. That's the only reason.
The next time they think of some half-baked idea to milk more money from their users, they'll try that one, too, and they'll just keep doing it until something sticks, then probably start the process again and add something else on top of it. Anything they say denying this is just corporate speak.
Case in point, they're still adjusting their prices; they're lowering them for some very low-revenue teams while increasing them for their larger teams and this is, I guarantee you, because they ran the numbers and realized they'll make more this way.
Don't trust them. Get out if you haven't already. There's too many great, free options out there. Godot basically has feature parity with Unity right now except for console exports, and that's coming later this year.
I'm here to plug for Godot, it's the best engine I've used to date.
Unity can suck a lemon. The squeeze has already begun, and if they're walking back the runtime fee then they must have plans on something else.
nope.
dabbled in unity when arcadia was being actively developed, but i am glad i have never finished anything in it.
made a game in godot though, and i like gdscript a whole lot better than either clojure (slow to start-up in jvm, sometimes rancid errormsgs, but that was arcadias fault, not exactly clojure's) or c# (it's c#)