It wasn't the quantity of money that was the issue for most people. It was the "I am changing the deal. Pray I do not change it any further"

They were asserting their ability to unilaterally bring in new terms, and specifically with the per-install issue bring in terms that require data that was poorly defined and could potentially be arbitrarily decided.

It wasn't a money issue. It was a trust issue.

The quantity of money legitimately is an issue too though. Especially for mobile games -- which rely heavily on advertising and scaling up thin margins -- 2.5% of revenue (plus $2,000/yr/seat) could be quite a significant percentage of profit.

To be fair that % of revenue Unity was historically getting from most of its customer that were actually making meaningful amounts of money (i.e. enough to have a permanent paid workforce) relative to the value it provides (especially compared to Apple's 30%) was very low. Of course not surprising given how relatively little pricing power it always had.

But I don't really buy the pricing argument. Most of that type of games are all made with Unity meaning that it wouldn't be too hard for all of them to raise prices by a few % with minimal impact. That mostly only applies to IAP not to ads but then again Unity was offering a discount/waiving the fee if you were using their platform (which is of course scummy and predatory but probably wouldn't have had a massive financial impact).

Overall yeah... they completely messed up with aligning their pricing model with their long term goals as a company. It was always highly suboptimal (the per seat license is almost insignificant for some companies while a significant barrier for smaller ones, contractors etc). They would probably still have been fine if they hadn't started almost literally burning money like complete madmen after the IPO for no reason. Instead they now have >$2 billion in debt (albeit low/zero interest) and nothing to show for it whatsoever (well besides IronSource to some extent I guess..) in addition to a still extremely bloated but also unproductive and heavily demoralized workforce.

Yeah certainly, changing the terms retroactively was just something else.

However I still think that the $0.20 headlines did a lot of reputational damage (even if most medium-major customers did the math) and that could easily have been avoided.

The way they introduced the already the hardly fathomable changes was IMHO as amateurish and half backed as it gets. Literally a corporate suicide attempt, can't imagine what were they thinking...

Any such policy can not work and would have been gamed heavily to damage competitors.