You make some very good points, and you might be right. My educated guess is that this strategy is to get as many people as possible to try this. That would mean letting people do prototypes for commercial purposes too, but not to ship in production. Now, whether that will be enough to keep people hooked so that they use us in production as well depends on a lot of factors, both technical and political.

I think your worries about what is kosher and what isn't under this license are warranted and I'll try to point this to people internally so that the licensing terms can be clarified.

I think that what Wolfram is missing is that devs are not interested in getting hooked and then paying subscription fees. The payment model is the problem and devs won't be easily suckered by a free version.

I wouldn’t mind paying a license fee... that wasn’t hundreds or thousands of dollars per user, per core. Wolfram makes Microsoft licensing look cheap.

If Wolfram adopted the Unity model I’d be much more willing to try it out. (free to cheap for hobbyists and small businesses, steep rise in price based on revenue per year)

Isn't that the idea of this announcement? Free to start, pay when you deploy.

No, Unity allows commercial uses either for free in some circumstances, or very, very cheap, so long as your annual revenue is less than $2M.

That makes it a no-brainer to use--you pay little or no licensing fees until your game takes off. Unity makes their money off the unpredictable winners, while gifting a nearly free product to the hobbyist and startup ecosystem.

Wolfram Engine is more like the Epic Games (Unreal Engine) model: free to download and play around with, but steep licensing costs before you ship anything. No way to quickly iterate and try things, only paying up when an experiment works out.

UE4's pricing model is a lot like Unity's pricing model nowadays as far as I can tell.

Yes, they changed after Unity are their lunch.