> Less than half their revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising.
That is to say, Unity makes most of its money from people PLAYING games made with Unity. The sales to the developers are secondary. Unity had to change their model, and that meant either making the engine cheaper to acquire more games to get more ads, or it meant raising the price of the engine at the likely cost of ads, and for some reason they chose option 2, which seems like a dumb idea.
The best explanation for that I can think of is that almost all of the advertising money should be coming from smaller mobile games, and so this is a move to try and make more money from the desktop games and the mobile games that don't use Unity's ad networks, which probably look like big, untapped sources of income to dumber product managers.
But now imagine that they did the opposite: they raise the maximum revenue requirements and "must show splash screen" requirements and generally make Unity more available for less. Engine revenue goes down a bit, but ad revenue goes up, which probably works out even better in the long run, but also solidifies the user base, garners good will, and generally leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.