IMPORTANT EDIT: I have learned that Unity is going to charge for games already released now. This is a scummy move. I have still not found info on whether devs will be back-charged, like suddenly a huge bill will show up for games which already have a million downloads and a lot of revenue. I was previously in tentative favor of this change only so long as:

1. it would apply to newly-released games after the change (no longer valid)
2. the first 200,000 installs would not be back-charged even after the change over (still unknown to me)

Scummy move, Unity.

ORIGINAL POST:

I'm seeing a couple pieces of misinformation in here so I just wanted to clarify:

• This applies to the free Unity and Unity Plus - the enterprise version has different thresholds.
• The fee will apply to games that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 per-game lifetime installs.
• Even then, the costs are different depending on which country you are in - "emerging market" is only $0.02 vs $0.20 for other countries.

Essentially it looks to me like you have to have made a significant amount of money already to be charged these fees - someone releasing a free game that goes viral won't be charged. One thing I haven't found is whether those first 200,000 installs will or won't be back-charged. If the initial installs aren't back-charged then I would consider this very reasonable, frankly, and cheaper than Unreal provided the game you release costs more than $4.00 (since Unreal takes a flat 5% of revenue I believe).

Unity does need to make money to be able to keep developing their engine, and right now as far as I understand it they aren't making money.