They only backpedaled after people complained, but a retroactive fee was an insane breach of trust.
A month or so ago they realized the damage they had done and dropped the fee entirely, and bumped the cost of per-seat licenses instead.
They deleted the repo it a few months before rolling out the runtime fee and published it again after being called out.
So it's great in concept, but we've already seen it completely ignored in practice.
Here’s some more info on file deletion using git and blockchain: https://chatgpt.com/share/67096e57-d6e0-8004-9f68-ae646bb471...
The only advantage block chain provides is you don't have to trust anyone. Eg you don't have to trust GitHub to not delete or modify the repo themselves, but they weren't any part of the problem here.
Unity is cancelling the runtime fee for games customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41521630 - Sept 2024 (76 comments)
The people invested in the Unity ecosystem will stay, but Unity drove a lot of people to Godot and Unreal. Unity now occupies a weird space where it's more expensive and harder to use than Godot, but not as powerful as Unreal.
As someone who has taught middle schoolers game development, Godot will absolutely replace Unity for students not only due to its price and licensing, but the ease of getting it deployed on a fleet of machines without even requiring a separate IDE.