That wasn't at all why people got mad. The unilateral claims (perceived or otherwise) on prior releases of the engine, claiming that the platforms (e.g., Microsoft) would just pay it--it was badly messaged, badly considered, and the initial feedback from their customer base was blown off and dismissed.

None of it was handled well.

Steam could take 90% and the 'gaming community' would probably defend it (and therefore developers don't want to be seen criticising the almighty Valve)

Epic got a lot of hate for merely trying to compete, to weaken the Steam near-monopoly over PC game distribution.

With Unity though, the outrage was over a loss of trust more than the cost of the fees themselves. And it came at a time when it seemed that the engine had been stagnating for years, after they'd made significant redundancies and cancelled the Gigaya project (their attempt to actually make a game themselves with their engine - which could have been very beneficial, creating internal pressure to fix/improve provlem areas), and while the main competition seemed to be adding exciting features at a much more rapid pace.

Even if you're right about the pricing. Launching this change with so many unanswered questions (like how they're going to track "installs") was going to end in disaster. Should have gotten their ducks in a row first.

FWIW Epic's cut is 12%, not 30%.

I don’t know how you are coming up with this take. Everyone that i know in the industry, big or small, calculated their fees with the faq open next to them so they wouldn’t make a mistake. Everyone would have owed more to Unity. A few owed more to Unity than they had in the bank.

Because the edge cases were loud on account of the "just made it past 200k" line literally bankrupting some studios. They forgot their market isn't just mobile f2p and didn't at least offer an alternative pricing model for premium games.

It's also just a plain bad model to retroactively change a license, full stop. If Unity was actually inrotoducing some exciting tech with 2024.1 or whatever it could entice devs to move and take the hit. But they know that they haven't done that in 5+years, so there's that underpinning.

>When Steam and Epic pockets 30%?

Epic pockets 12%, and if you use UE and publish to EGS they waive the engine royalties. Since we're speaking of "doing the right thing and idiots crucified him for it".