Technology

Context, I work for Unity, but this is my own understanding of things and doesn't necessarily reflect the views of my employer nor should it be considered "official" positions of the company. We have folks where communication is their job. Mine is helping build a better engine. There's been a lot of misinformation since the changes were announced and hopefully I can help straighten some of this out, but again if there are other questions, there are others who are better qualified to address that.

The limit for using Personal was 100k. That has been raised to 200k. For the original terms, and these new terms, it is the same; no per-seat price until you reach the threshold. Once you reach the threshold, then you have to upgrade to Professional or Enterprise, and then there is a per-seat charge for the editor. When you hit the revenue or instance thresholds, then there is an additional charge... But you will be doing very well at that point and the amount is insignificant for most developers at that scale. Compared with Unreal, it is still significantly less, even with the announced terms last week. Unity continues to try and make it possible to create highly portable games for multiple platforms, and devices, and to do so with terms that encourage anyone to become a creator and build your dream game. The last thing Unity wants to do is stifle innovation and creativity.

If you watch the Q&A, the reason for the change, so that it was "retroactive" was to apply these term changes to companies pulling in high revenue, think millions of dollars, and who were releasing what amounted to DLCs and Season types of updates but without doing anything except maybe changing assets. Some of these games are even repackaged and re-released as "new" games. In other cases they may sometimes radically change the game so that it might be more accurately described as a new game, but they continue to release using an unsupported version of the engine. If a developer did this every time they approached the threshold, they could technically have millions of users, all while skirting around the TOS. Do this on Personal, delist at 90k, and release a "new" game to perpetually circumvent the licensing fees. The change wasn't intended to harm the good developers or studios who are trying to make high quality games, it was intended to go after the businesses releasing "Banana Slots 2022.1 (updated)." If that's the content you release, I'm sorry, but I think your games are kind of scummy. Please stop. The app stores don't need more of this sort of cash grab content.

If you are making great content and the terms would severally impact you, then Unity was intending to work with you to reach agreeable terms.

Under the new terms, the same applies. If you or your studio are greatly impacted by the new trerms, Unity doesn't want to sink your business, they are trying to find a way to keep investing in the development of tools and services which will allow you to reach the greatest number of users and want to work with you to make that happen, as that works best for the creator and for Unity.

For those making games for charity which were told they were going to be impacted, that was bad communication and you inadvertently spoke to the wrong person who didn't fully understand your request. Content made for charity was always intended to be treated with favorable terms. The specifics of those terms I'm not deeply familiar with, so I don't know how that applies to per-seat licensing or the details of such a contract, but I know that Unity works hard to support humanitarian efforts and I'm sure if you were making content for charities, nothing has changed.

The bottom line is this. If you feel like the terms are going to make you insolvent, work with Unity to resolve that. Unity is a partner, not an overbearing entity. Unity wants you to be successful.