Why are people so mad at Unity?

Question

I'm a little unclear about the anger toward Unity. From what I can tell they're now charging $.20/download if you have revenues over $200,000. To me that's a phenomenally low price. Game engines are hard. They have a gigantic toolset, impressive portability, massive amounts of free assets along with a thriving third party market, and seem to excel at both 2D and 3D games. Isn't $.20/copy infinitely cheaper than trying to create one's own game engine? I never understood how they could afford the original pricing scheme.Background: I have no skin in the game. I'm not a game dev. But the uproar fascinates me.

Festro · Accepted Answer

The emphasis should be placed on the 'cost PER install' to understand the uproar.
It might be a reasonable expectation to pay for Unity based on how many games you've sold, that way Unity's revenue scales with your own.
Pricing by individual sales would do this. And it'd be reasonable to track too, via online sales platforms, or even financial auditing if Unity ever suspected foul play.
However, pricing by install raises a few issues:
1) The costs scale faster than your sales, as users will install 1+ times. New computer, upgraded devices, multiple devices, problems with game corruption. There are tonnes of reasons for users to reinstall a game. Now a developer has to pay Unity for those reasons, despite them being nothing to do with Unity, in fact some of them could be the fault of the Unity libraries.
2) Bad actors. If you want to review-bomb a new game because it's bad or too woke for you then there's a new technique! Just install the game loads, hell someone might even make a simple script to do it for you, easy 10, 100, 1000 installs go nuts. Your actions now directly cost the developer!
3) DRM. Installs then need to be tracked. That means the game has to come with its own self-reporting DRM to identify how many times it has been installed so that the developer can be charged accordingly. Developers who don't like DRM can't use Unity any more!
4) Other issues like charity games built on Unity. Unity have covered this scenario but it's still a potential worry under certain scenarios, like older games being re-released for charity drives, will they still cause install charges?
The fact of the matter is that Unity has been thriving with its existing pricing model. The more people that use Unity the more money they make already. It's a scaling audience, it doesn't need a scaling pricing model to be profitable, let alone one that scales based on installs instead of game sales.