I remember the old joke about oracle pricing spreadsheets. Lots of sliders to adjust the parameters. But no matter what you did the price would always increase.
We had VMs running a few Oracle databases, nothing much more than 2 cores 16Gb or 4 cores 32Gb, the vast majority (90%+) of our databases were running Sybase, and half the resources were for the app, so something like 5% of those clusters were Oracle dbs.
We were paying Sybase maybe 100k a year for the entire datacenter, and so we expected to pay something between 10k and 100k for Oracle (remember, for 1/20th of the compute and with a developer license because we were not hosting client production).
We asked for a quote to Oracle, they came back a week later with a 520 million dollar bill, more than the revenue of our entire company. It was never paid of course but this shows how absolutely ridiculous their template is for billing. The reasoning is well known now, a 2 core database can run on potentially 6 servers * 32 cores * 2 threads per core = 384 possible cores, so if you have 2 or 3 databases you can potentially get billed a license for 1000 cores (and actually running 6 non-production database = 0 service on their part because if it breaks you just redeploy it, it's faster than opening a support ticket).
Another related but distinct reason is box-ticking purchasing decisions. Decision makers who 1. aren't the end users 2. lack technical knowledge 3. are overconfident and overweigh their own opinion, are likely to decide between products purely based on the number of feature boxes it ticks, regardless of their real-life usability and usefulness. Companies like Oracle know this and cater to it. They don't care if a new feature is useless or poorly implemented as long as it creates a new box that makes the decision makers 0.5% more likely to go with their product.
200bn market cap company ladies & gents
In fairness though - they have a great free tier (if you can live with the arbitrary account terminations)
This is precisely how they are such a giant.
Rule n.1 of sales: you should charge the highest price the customer can bear. By keeping things fuzzy, they can bamboozle you at will, making you pay not what you expect, but what you can.
But annual "support" fees are still 20% (or is it 25% now?) of list price.