The theme of 2023 is enshitification comes for us all. Zero interest rates created business models where there was a lot of consumer surplus (i.e. people got lots of great products for free or extremely low costs) and now businesses are beginning to either charge the real price (see Uber prices) or stuffing products with ads to make up the difference (see streaming services, Instacart, Uber, etc).
This Unity change makes sense given that trend and we should expect more of these across tech.
@carnage4life The more devs and other users are pushed and punished financially the more open source alternatives we will have.
Even if Unity backtracks on this I think the reputational damage has been done and Unity might be done for as a popular game engine.
Long-term open-source projects like Godot may benefit from this as they gain popularity as a Unity alternative.
