The printer stopped making brrrrrr sounds not that long ago and unlimited VC funding prioritizing user acquisition at all cost dried up. New financing is expensive and so the old pricing models stopped working for the big game engine company. Unity can price their product in any way they want, but the retroactive thing is poison. The trust is lost. Let's see how big the devs exodus will be.
Discussion
This is part SaaS problem. I personaly blame high time preference caused by unnatural inflation…
On bright side, lot of these studios make relatively simple games, so they have lot of engines to choose for new projects. I hope they learn from this and move to FOSS substitues.
Godot is good enough for them and because of FOSS nature this problem is imposible.
Another option is Open 3D Engine (this is under Linux fundation, based on Amazon Lumberyard engine which has been based on cryengine, rly don't know state of this)
It's probably good for godot etc. I've been told the problem with godot rn is the console ports. Now there is an incentive to work on that I guess.
Will see, the studios with games being built in unity are really scratching their heads... well pulling their hair... and considering to switch engines mid development. Crazy.
I looked at it and problem is closed source nature of consoles SDK. They can't publish FOSS godot using that SDK…
But at least there are some companies which port it for them.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html
ahhh, right... makes sense