The thing is it's still far cheaper than Unreal, so unless Unreal is dying too calling it death doesn't make sense.
These new Unity per-install fees could hit developers who aren't making money - for example F2P games, free demos, very cheap games (e.g. charity bundles), potentially even pirated copies (if Unity intend to track installs via analytics sent from the runtime?)
In reality, most indies fail and won't hit the 100,000 download threshold or the $100k revenue threshold. But it's a new fee to worry about, and one that gives Unity a lot of 'monetization levers' to pull more aggressively further down the road (tweaking the fees/thresholds)
It's also worth considering that Epic could change the UE pricing model significantly if their sole serious competitor starts to fade into irrelevance...
There were also people who'd read it as a 'per install per month' (e.g. monthly active users) charge, as the pricing table refered to 'Standard monthly rate', which made it look pretty awful...
If they made the price increase continuous and charged for max(0, #installs - 200,000), then that would be something else, but the way they wrote it implies a bomb waiting to explode if your game gets too successful
There's a revenue threshold to meet to pay the fee.
So when I install my Steam games on my desktop, my laptop and my Steam Deck that's 3 installs. If I reinstall the OS, that'll be another install - or if I clean up my Steam library and reinstall later, etc.
Maybe this is acceptable if your title has microtransactions because you may get some ongoing revenue stream for that user - but otherwise?
And it's entirely unclear to me how this works with Game Pass, streaming, etc.
[0] - https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280
Even if you go crazy and install the game 10 times, that 10cents is less than the 25 cents unreal would charge assuming your game is $5.
For example at $2 million in revenue unreal would cost $50k in royalties. Assuming a game with a price of $1 and 2 million installs unity is $10k in install fees. If your game is priced at $10, that's just $1k in install fee vs the same $50k in fees to unreal.
Assuming Unity Pro ($2000 per seat per year) - first 1000000 installs are free, next 1000000 priced as follows: 0.15 * 100000 + 0.075 * 400000 + 0.03 * 500000 = 60000$ + Unity Pro for each seat.
This is how you kill a product.
As a comparison point Unreal also has another advantage, which is that they waive the unreal revenue cut for sales on Epic Games Store, so that subset of your revenue (if you release there) is yours to keep. Unity can't offer any deal of that kind, all they can offer is discounts if you use stuff like their ads service (which is only appealing to F2P mobile game developers).