Sneaking DRM into the editor (successfully, because everyone is focused elsewhere) is not something a contrite company that is trying to make good faith, meaningful change would do.
It’s something scumbags do. Offering a hand to shake while holding a knife in the other.
The only reason they’re adding that DRM is to have more control over you. They want you to be as locked in and at their mercy as possible. That’s their nature. It’s the same reason why they won’t, say, try to restore trust by removing the forced arbitration clause. That’s something you would expect from people who are actually sorry, rather than pretending to be.
And it’s right in line with a company that would make a critical promise, brazenly break that promise (with around a year of premeditation), and then when things don’t go their way retreat back to that promise without taking any real responsibility, hoping you just forgive and forget anyway. And then, the real cherry on top, blame and gaslight you when you point out the premeditation.
Unity leadership cannot be trusted. They are untrustworthy by nature. This whole disaster started because Unity leadership made dumb, fiscally irresponsible decisions and then had to come up with a dumb idea to fix them. Now they’re in an infinitely worse position than before. They’re going to lose huge money and the new fees will not even come close to offsetting that.
If history is any lesson, Unity will not fix their absurd spending. They will not beg to take back the employees who left in protest who were almost certainly their most productive cornerstone employees. If they do layoffs, they will do them ineptly. They will not fix the corporate culture that is cancerous to real engineering, because leadership is the root of that cancer.
They will look to those of you who remain as the answer to their financial woes. The most immediate and obvious move will be to increase the cost of Unity pro, significantly, because they have you by the balls with that one. You’re paying a SaaS subscription for the privilege of paying a royalty. And speaking of, they will slowly shift the royalty fee to become more and more predatory with each iteration (hopefully at least tied to each new LTS release and not applied retroactively).
They will do this because they have to, but even if they didn’t have to, they still would (perhaps less quickly). They have to because they cannot run a business competently in normal times much less in this disaster of their own making. But they will not do so hesitantly or with sorrow or as a last resort or anything of the kind. They won’t feel a thing for you when they start to squeeze.
OTOH, maybe Microsoft will buy Unity and this seemingly inevitable future can be preempted. Or perhaps there are forces working internally to replace the current leadership that need a bit longer to line up all their ducks. Aside from those possibilities, you better believe the future is going to look a lot like what I’ve wrote here.
