Seems like they win on the end.
Looks to me like the good old strategy of we'll start with a very high proposal then come back with a more watered down version thst people will accept as being more reasonnable than the initial terms. But they still get to charge more and seem reasonnable doing so.
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.
Fortunately the rest of their pricing changes don't affect us, but it's still a real pain in the ass
For now. Reminds me of "first they came" [0]
And sure, 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"), instead they came up with a batshit insane plan, and their CEO should have been fired already.
That doesn't mean they can backpaddle on the part where they need to put a sales-based revenue stream in place. Either they do, or they go out of business (which is an even worse deal for everyone. Folks seem to vastly underestimate how close to failing Unity was even before this debacle).
As much as people will want to go raise pitchforks despite these changes, reading through them these changes are actually massive. The part where it only applied to Unity 2023LTS and beyond is a HUGE change. It's aggressive, and and a grandfather clause for already in-progress games is clearly missing so fuck em, they have more work to do, but it's also nowhere near as insane as the previous arrangement. And it almost certainly won't be their last change as long as the dev/studio world goes "good start, but this is still unacceptable".
Also, Godot has mysteriously acquired a large surge in their funding, and has a much less abusable license structure...
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.
I just don't see how anyone can trust them after that.