Mostly. The runtime fee now only kicks in after $1 mil, and you are limited to a 4% cap, and they are honoring the old EULAs, so if you want to avoid the fee, you just stay on the current version of Unity. They can still eat my farts, but this is much better and won’t kill a bunch of games the way it would have before.
You’re right, they’re absolutely collecting data, but saying they can’t differentiate between activations and then saying “oh yeah, actually, we can when it comes to (piracy/bundles/charity/etc.)” less than 24 hours later tells me that not only do they not care about game devs, but they think we’re stupid too.
€10 may not be much, but as a broke gamedev student, I’m really hoping this Unity exodus is just the boost Godot needs to become more competitive with Unity.
Certainly Godot is the safer bet (probably why they are surging so much more right now), but Unreal is nowhere near as bad as Threads. Unreal is open source, and the license specifically forbids Epic from making retroactive changes like Unity just did:
The Agreement Between You and Epic
a. Amendments
If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.