People were kind of sleeping on the fact that Unity could at any times alter the deal to their own benefit. It wasn't until Unity did what they did, that people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want.
So naturally, people start exploring other options that don't suffer from the same problem. Unity, realizing this, backpedals. Which yeah, makes sense, but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future.
I understand both sides, Unity needs to make money, otherwise it won't be around. And game developers need to feel like they're making a choice they can still justify and feel safe about in the future.
> but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future.
They likely have also put effort into moving to other frameworks, and if those are working out well enough for them there is no point making the effort to go back even with this change reverted.
Same for new projects that went directly elsewhere: unless Unity offers significant benefits (and the project controllers feel that Unity can be trusted not to repeat the rug-pull later) the effort of changing stack are likely not worth it.
> people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want.
Unity's thinking they could change the terms unilaterally whenever they want and not actually being able to make it stick suggests to me that Unity misunderstood the arrangement more than the users on the other side of that agreement. Yes, Unity had the legal power to change the agreement, but clearly the market disagreed with that move and Unity bore consequences that apparently they weren't ready to bear.
In the end it seems that Unity learned that legal power is not the same as market power and that they didn't have the real power to change that deal... and they learned it the all the hard way.
I'd go further and add that the fact a change like this could make its way through leadership and be implemented in such a manner demonstrates a disconnect in their understanding of how games are planned out and what their role in the process is.
If you just look at things like market share it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're all tool vendors like the dude in the Snap-On truck.
So naturally, people start exploring other options that don't suffer from the same problem. Unity, realizing this, backpedals. Which yeah, makes sense, but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future.
I understand both sides, Unity needs to make money, otherwise it won't be around. And game developers need to feel like they're making a choice they can still justify and feel safe about in the future.