While I totally believe that's a strategy that's often employed, the amount of goodwill lost and bitter devs created can't possibly be worth it.

Yeah, the main outcome of this seems to have been a massive amount of distrust seeded amongst game developers, and nobody planning to start a new project on Unity.

Also, Godot has mysteriously acquired a large surge in their funding, and has a much less abusable license structure...

Our Unity rep has been applying a ton of pressure to purchase more licenses and I've heard similar stories from other companies.

I think Unity has some bad financials right now and are pressing every part of the business to generate more revenue.

I don't think this was some grand scheme - I think they're panicking about money and acting without thinking through the long term consequences of their actions.

The great thing is, if it was a scheme as implied, they now have so much reputational damage on their hands.

Which is why this "scheme" seems highly unlikely.

When this started happening I thought it was bog-standard enshittification. They can't sustain user-base growth so they turn to squeezing existing users as a source of revenue.

Bad financials? Maybe they should stop making multi-billion dollar acquisitions, then.

Unity recently forced us to upgrade to their Industrial tier. We had to cut back on the number of licenses we use because our costs went up at least 10x.

Fortunately the rest of their pricing changes don't affect us, but it's still a real pain in the ass

> Fortunately the rest of their pricing changes don't affect us

For now. Reminds me of "first they came" [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

Remember that Unity is not profitable. They desperately need a revenue stream, and they should have gone with plain old revenue sharing from the get go ("we get X% of your sales, so if you sell nothing, we get nothing, and if you move 2 million units, we get an amount you can quite easily part with"), they just came up with a batshit insane plan instead (and their CEO should be fired over that). That doesn't mean they can backpaddle on the part where they need an actual revenue stream, only the way they implement it.

Unity having financial trouble is like a shovel-factory going bankrupt during a gold rush. It means they screwed up /pretty/ bad on the business side... You likely don't need 7000 people to build a top-notch game engine, and likely invested way too much in side-bets which haven't panned out.

They probably thought they had more venture-capital runway, but the broader economy is now in belt-tightening mode.

Aren’t the fees pretty much the same? Besides the 2.5% revenue option.

In the process though they've made many game devs start a transition to a more open or reasonable game engine. It's not much of a win when their userbase is now essentially falling.

I'm not so sure about that.

The engine is such a central part of a game company's stack. On one hand that makes it harder to just up and switch, so there is some lock-in there, but on the other hand, if developers don't regard Unity as a reliable partner, they are going to be taking a hard look around at alternatives.

I think the real problem with this pricing move is that it made a lot of Unity users think "hey, we can't trust Unity not to screw us over." That is something that is hard to take back.

They initially proposed changes that were retroactive, potentially leading to fees for released, unmaintained games.

I just don't see how anyone can trust them after that.