I ended up grabbing the Affinity bundle since it's half off despite concerns about Canva. I'd expect even if they end up moving to a subscription I'd at least have the versions I bought for an extended amount of time. I still have a working copy of Photoshop CS 5 as well. Hopefully we see Affinity remain committed to affordable non subscription plans but if they don't I think the one time purchase will last me a long time. If they put out a version 3 without subscription and it's compelling i'll upgrade, if not i'll continue to use 2 for I'm sure years to come.
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I'm in a lot of gamedev communities and I'm not seeing any complaints. Everyone agrees this is fine. I believe if they announced this initially people probably would have complained but nothing close to the backlash there was. Most people just don't trust Unity after this. This is after all the second time we're getting a promise not to change the terms on an existing engine version as a result of backlash. How long until the third?
This is basically everything policy wise they needed to do to quell the storm. This is honestly what should have just been announced originally. So much reputational damage just to arrive at a reasonable model weeks later.
I'm happy for all the Unity developers out there that are breathing a sigh of relief. Hopefully they can ship their ongoing projects but I'd be hesitant about a continued long term relationship with Unity after this.
This isn't the first Unity backlash and I'd be surprised if it's the last.
We've been calling it "Install Bombing" after the common abusive practice of review bombing. Unity claims they have anti-fraud systems in place and you can always appeal with their fraud team but I don't have an reason to blindly trust a black box that when fails makes Unity more money and puts the burden on me to prove otherwise.
This video[1] talks a bit about this from a lawyer's point of view and is a really good overview.
For people who are not paying as much attention to this I'd like to summarize the main points of frustration.
1. Unity has just shown they believe they are able, and they are willing, to change the terms on what you have to pay them. What are the bounds to terms like this? What if Unity is tight on money and decide to squeeze developers further? The risk to continuing business with Unity is very high as you have unknown future exposure.
2. The monetization model they've chosen is tied to installs, not revenue. On the initial day of announcement they even claimed re-installs would count but they've since walked that back (or "clarified a miscommunication"). Unity has been extremely wishy-washy on how they even plan to track this mentioning proprietary systems they can't elaborate on and your only recourse is to appeal if you think they got the numbers wrong. This is not a metric tied to your revenue and is difficult to plan around.
There are a lot of people arguing against a strawman of people who don't want to pay unity but that is not at all what this is about. Unity chose a terrible model they can't even explain for how they want to bill people and apply it to all past games that use the engine for all future sales.
This would be similar to if Microsoft said everyone who ever built anything on C# has to start paying a fee for every future install because it includes the .net runtime.
I've been doing Godot development with my 9yo and he loves it. If you're looking for something with less emphasis on text based programming Construct and GDevelop are engines I've heard good things about as a continuation from Scratch.