So, Unity has backtracked. What does that mean for me? Not much, really, so I’m not going to do a big long post on it.

I’m kind of surprised by how much Unity sharpened their pencil here. I was expecting them to walk back the most controversial parts of the runtime fee, and maybe back off on retroactive application of the new policy. I wasn’t expecting them to cap at 2.5%, and I definitely wasn’t expecting them to essentially make Unity Personal the new Unity Plus (it doesn’t have everything, but it has the higher revenue cap and you can remove the splash screen, which are the two biggest draws of Plus).

It’s still a worse deal than before, obviously, but it’s better than I expected, and crucially, in most cases it’s better than the main competition. Which brings up the question of whether this was the plan all along, the door-in-your-face strategy. I personally don’t think so- it was all way too chaotic, for one- but the argument could be made.

There’s still the issue of trust. While both their words and actions offer some reassurance, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. If they were willing to do it once, they might be willing to do it again, and a lot of concerns about Unity’s direction, leadership, and finances have been brought to the forefront.

For the most part, I’m sticking with my plans as outlined in my previous post. Time will tell if Unity stays on a positive trajectory, or if they’ll try the same sort of thing again once the heat dies down.