Yup. Lots of people were saying that right at the start too. That unity was only doing this to make the real shit-sandwich slightly more palatable when they finally unveiled it.

Because if they had simply announced that they were going to be taking 4% of game companies’ revenue, the game companies would have rioted. But now Unity can claim that they’re doing it because “we listened to you and made adjustments accordingly. See how reasonable we’re being?”

Movie directors are known to do something similar when trying to avoid an Adults Only rating. An AO rating kills movie sales, because you can’t take your teenage kid with you to see it. So directors will shoot for R ratings instead. They’ll have a movie that should probably be rated AO, but then they’ll throw in one horribly shocking scene, right in the middle of the movie. Then when the raters come out of the movie, the director has a chance to go over the rating with them and negotiate. The raters all go “it’s definitely rated AO because of that one scene.” And so the director “reluctantly” agrees to pull that scene if they’ll agree to rate it R instead. The raters don’t remember any of the other stuff that should’ve pushed it towards an AO rating, because that one scene was so out of proportion. So they happily agree to rate it R without that scene. Now the director has the R rating they wanted, while still getting to keep lots of Adult Only content in the movie. The director never intended to keep that one scene in the movie. It was sacrificial, so the raters would have something to compromise on.

I hate it. So. Much.