Unity well and truly thought everyone would just roll over on this, and oh boy, were they wrong. They didn’t at all learn from the Wizards of the Coast debacle at the beginning of the year.
WoTC, Reddit, Twitter, now unity. All made changes that their user base said they wouldn’t like, made the changes anyway, then lost a bunch of users. There must be some new business Guru telling everybody to piss off their customers
Pretty sure Elon was first to the key, and the rest have followed suit.
In seriousness, though, the primary driver is the VC tap slowing down significantly and forcing long term business strategy to lean much harder into its existing opportunities vs. planning for periodic cash infusion from investors. A lot of these businesses never had to set themselves up for success in the absence of that capital, and it’s led to bad practices and product strategies.
This is the real answer. The low interest money train has left the building and these companies are scrambling to meet their feduciary duty
Unfortunately, they all seem to be working from the techno-feudalism playbook. It started when tech companies realized they could make more by making us rent software instead of selling it to us, and it’s spread.
Techno-feudalism sounds cooler than enshitification and way cooler than what it is.