Unity’s runtime fee will be collected once a game “has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months” and “has passed a minimum lifetime install count,” according to the blog post.
Unity Personal and Unity Plus customers must pay $0.20 per install after reaching $200,000 of revenue in the past year and having more than 200,000 lifetime game installs.
Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise users will pay $0.15 and $0.125 per install, respectively, after making $1 million in the past year and having more than 1 million lifetime game installs. (Those fees will decrease as higher thresholds are met.)
You literally pay less the richer you are. Most efficient system.
Thankfully the retroactive bit was dropped, but Jesus what a horrible decision. Really sucks that Unreal is also complete trash for 2D development (which is the main indie environment), but at least Godot got more devs.
If they were to have tried to retroactively charge anyone. That shit would be immediate lawsuits from every dev. And I would hope that all of them would manage to not let it be turned into a simple class action situation. Make them go to court in every possible state and for each dev/studio. Bleed them completely dry and force them into bankruptcy bad enough for the source code to be acquired and open sourced. And after the company is done, then bleed the entire C-staff and anyone that approved this fucked up move. But not just financially bleed either. Got to set some real fucking examples about fucking around. Maybe even make it fun for the devs that would’ve ended up paying the most, and let them drive a knife in their backs for every charge that the devs would’ve been charged.