No, Unity is still saying they want a cut of old games if they're ever newly installed.

Fuck Spez… oh wait..

"Hey bro, let's go check out those sirens over there. I swear, bro... just plug your ears with wax and tie me to the bow. Bro, it'll be so epic."

Sirens arrive

"Bro, why the fuck did you tie me down?? Smash this goddamn boat against the rocks!"

Maybe a tiktok challenge for rich people?

Sadly, there often comes a time when a critical mass of the business leaders decide "you know what, I want to cash out and no matter how disastrous this will be long term, I think short term this will milk some revenue out of some captive audience".

In the IT industry, that time is usually when Broadcom buys you.

Its the same ethos of those CEOs that are demanding everyone must return to the office. No ifs, or buts.

They damage moral which takes years to build up, they further announce layoffs which destroys whatever moral was left.

These idiots never seem to be held accountable.

Honestly, these management types need to be case studied.

The Venture Capital Well is running dry, tech companies are turtling up their data so other tech companies dont use AI to scrape all their content... its the 12th hour of the tech bubble and they're all scrambling to become real companies that make, you know, money. Problem is they dont know how, and customers dont want to pay them for the garbage they used to tolerate when it was free.

The lack of "easy money". A lot of companies have had accelerated growth due to an influx of investments which were mostly interest-free (or very low interest) loans . You didn't have to have a good product - just overinflate your value till your IPO, then the value will determine stock price, everyone gets rich.

Now that interest rates are higher, investors want a lot more bang for their buck. Couple this with companies that no longer know how to make good products, now they're just squeezing shit dry and scheming and scamming their customers to fulfill their one and only legal obligation: make more money for the shareholders.

Capitalism. While the average person is frustrated over their grocery bills being 2x, the corporate ghouls are trying to milk as much money as they can. Not to mention I believe they pulled out their shares before the decision was made so it seems like they were trying to just cash out before shit hit the fan.

Everything is being run on borrowed money, even major studios like Marvel or Blizzard take injections and answer to share holders / venture capital, instead of just making a better product.

Greed and societal acceptance of greed.

If it affects your rights then yes. It's not just that they're sending a bill. For example, if it is illegal to change a TOS to suddenly charge for something that wasn't in your jurisdiction then it's probably affecting "your rights".

Even then, it only says the current calendar year. They're making the pricing change on January 1st, right? If so then you're probably out of luck.

You can't do that in unity, because each version has somehow a major bug ruining your life or your project.

They usually only fix them after they introduce another bug that breaks another part of your project, so it's a neverending race.

You don't wan't to reimplement everything yourself and they are always "working on it" so you trust them

Godot, it's the most mature of the bunch. It's a little different than Unity, but it's definitely very user friendly, really powerful and has an active community.

Godot is probably the best choice for open source game engines. Its got funding and full time developers working on it.

Stride3D is probably the closest open source clone of Unity. It was developed by Silicon Studio as a commercial game engine but they eventually stopped and open sourced it. Its got a ton of modern features including vulkan and direct x 12 support. It has an active community too, but no full time staff making new features.