After their previous controversy with license changes, in 2019, after disagreements with Improbable, unity updated their Terms of Service, with the following statement:

When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS.

As part of their "commitment to being an open platform", they made a Github repository, that tracks changes to the unity terms to "give developers full transparency about what changes are happening, and when"

Well, sometime around June last year, they silently deleted that Github repo.

April 3rd this year (slightly before the release of 2022 LTS in June), they updated their terms of service to remove the clause that was added after the 2019 controversy. That clause was as follows:

Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification.

This clause is completely missing in the new terms of service.

This, along with unitys claim that "the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime." flies in the face of their previous annoucement of "full transparency". They're now expecting people to trust their questionable metrics on user installs, that are rife for abuse, but how can users trust them after going this far to burn all goodwill?

They've purposefully removed the repo that shows license changes, removed the clause that means you could avoid future license changes, then changed the license to add additional fees retroactively, with no way to opt-out. After this behaviour, are we meant to trust they won't increase these fees, or add new fees in the future?

I for one, do not.

Sources:

"Updated Terms of Service and commitment to being an open platform" https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform

Github repo to track the license changes: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService

Last archive of the license repo: https://web.archive.org/web/20220716084623/https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService

New terms of service: https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software

Old terms of service: https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service/software-legacy