Starting on January 1, developers will be charged a fee every time someone installs a game built in Unity after they reach certain revenue or install thresholds.

Obviously death threats are not ok, but for fucks sake, that change is insane. People may install games many times for many reasons, like switching drives, computer, OS or debugging, or corruption, or because they go back to it after not playing for a while.

How is it a good model to charge for repeated installs?

The decision sparked an astonishing backlash against Unity from across the gaming industry,

I bet, this will threaten some people on their livelihood, and if you are 90% finished on a project, it's an insane change that will force you to switch to another engine, and could kill several projects.

Also as a user, this increases the need and amount of DRM mechanics, which we need less not more of.

I hope Unity will see a massive dive in customers on these policies. This is the kind of decision a company deserves bankruptcy for. And the CEO John Riccitiello deserves to be fired without benefits, and never hired as CEO again.

Edit PS:

The fee is up to $0.20, that's steep and would mean the end of sub $10 games. This would hurt single and indie developers very much.

Luckily there are other engines, but Unity used to be among the good ones, now they've become an untrustworthy player, and that decreases competition for the entire field.