I am not kidding about the title, because here is what budding developers have in store for them if they sign up.
1 - Unity will spend 100,000 dollars a month to help your game climb the charts and grow in revenue. That sounds good on paper, but…
2. At the end of the month, Unity will tell you to pay them back. If you are fortunate enough to not be driven into debt, you will need to give a whopping 50 percent of your remaining revenue back to Unity.
3. If that is not enough, they are limiting this service to F2P game titles only. When point 2 is taken into account, it means that making a profit will be very difficult if the game does not include predatory and psychological tactics to separate players from their money.
In other words, unless your game ends up being lightning in a bottle, Unity Tech. is essentially offering a poison pill that will drive you into debt at best or outright bankrupt you at worst, which is pretty much the polar opposite of how Epic is supporting devs. Godot doesn’t provide any grants, but you never have to pay anything regardless of income anyway. I could see the possibility of lawsuits (which in turn could send the engine to the software graveyard), already their blog has a comment from one of the founding developers mentioning how he regrets ever coming to work for them. In a way, this could end up being the worst and the messiest decision they ever made.
I know Unity is at least throwing Blender something in the form of funds, but the latest development shows that they have yet to rediscover their roots as the company to democratize game development. For those still using Unity, is the company behind the engine just a lost cause at this point?