This is a water sandwich. As far as I'm concerned, Unity is pivoting to a door-in-the-face[0] strategy. Since it works on anchoring, the only counter to door-in-the-face is to treat the substitute offer more harshly than you would have otherwise. In other words, punish companies for being untrustworthy business partners.
I really hope game developers start demanding the following:
- Unity abandons all attempts to adopt a revenue share of any kind and funds itself solely on subscriptions to Unity[1].
- Unity poison-pills themselves such that if they attempt any additional significant change in business model, then all developers who have developed games on Unity are entitled to GPL source access to those versions of the Unity runtime. They can hold source code in escrow to be released should this poison pill trigger.
- Unity specifically fire John Riccitiello.
Choosing a game engine is a matter of trust in a particular development team. Unity has broken that trust, and as far as I can tell, that is specifically due to John's "gotcha" business tactics. Remember that quote from a decade ago about charging players a buck to reload? That's revealing of the mentality behind this business model change.
[0] Door-in-the-face refers to making a ridiculous offer intended to be rejected in order to make another offer seem less onerous in comparison.
[1] Yes I am aware this implies cancelling features. Given what people have said of Unity's development pipeline over the last half-decade, it sounds like most of those features weren't actually things Unity's customers wanted.