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I think an underappreciated aspect of this whole situation is that according to https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/U/income-statement , Unity Technologies is losing a billion dollars a year and is already 3 billion in debt, with their total market cap being 15 billion. This is a company that's circling the drain; this seems transparently like a hail-mary play that probably fails but maybe brings Unity to profitability.
Legally, I have no idea how big a grey area retroactive ToS changes are; the fact that Unity's doing it implies that they're not obviously illegal but I'm also aware that, in kind of a brute legal realism sense, different domains of law have judges that feel very differently about contracts where the fine print states "also we are allowed to fuck you in arbitrary ways defined by us, no limits, neener neener"
Like: apparently (based on what I've read in Matt Levine articles) corporate debt courts are really really specifically about the letter of the contract; someone puts in the fine print "also we can fuck you at any time" and the judge looks at it and is like "well, it's in the contract, guess you shouldn't have signed that one" which is in large part because corporate debt contracts are assumed to have been extremely well-vetted by lawyers on both sides. Everyone is assumed to be extremely saavy. My suspicion (not a lawyer) is that this is less true of consumer-facing EULAs (like Unity's); if I have a bunch of reddit posts saying "Unity will never fuck our users who sign this contract" and I have a EULA saying "Unity will never fuck our users. Also Unity, in its sole discretion, reserves the right to amend this contract" and then I do the obvious thing-- amend the contract retroactively to allow user-fucking, and then proceed to fuck our users-- I'm not sure how it would fare in court but it's not obvious the judge would love me for that?
Of course, there's also the legal-realism idea of "Unity probably just settles out-of-court with anyone big enough to challenge them, and hoovers up money from indies that can't afford ruinous court fees". Which is of course deeply unethical and also vibes like they're eating their seed corn (since who wants to go into business with a company that has, historically, not been willing to honor contracts.)
My expectation is that this ends with Unity sticking to its guns and declaring bankruptcy in a couple years.
I guess I'm not surprised about the changes, then, but I had assumed they were profitable given their established market share and how I had assumed their costs were fairly low. Good developers are expensive, but I didn't think Unity themselves had many costs beyond engine development and some seemingly-trivial web hosting (downloads, documentation, forums).
I know they have some adtech business on the side, but I'm rather curious where billions of dollars of annual costs are going: the statement only shows a billion each for development and administration/sales.
As a comparison, Valve is privately held, also publishes a game engine (admittedly, not the most popular one these days), and despite seemingly undirected management seems generally described as profitable. Although they also run a storefront that pays the bills. I guess Epic (the other major engine-publisher) does too.
Another thing about Valve, since you mentioned them: If I recall correctly, as per Tyler McVicker, Valve actually works (or worked?) in the same building/next door to Unity. Valve has even used Unity for their VR tech demos, and McVicker even once speculated that Valve could have switched to using Unity since it was much more developed compared to their own Source 2 Engine, which even today still lacks an SDK as fleshed-out as the first Source Engine's (and, sidenote, it would benefit Valve to strike while the iron is hot by finally going foward with their old plans to put out Source 2 for free and make it a UGC paradise).
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I also assumed they operated as a small company funded by license and asset store fees, but I guess they wanted to be more than that and tapped into VC funding and now are looking for huge revenue streams.
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It's more Unity's an adtech business with some game engine sales on the side; last I heard they had maybe 2/3 of their revenue coming from advertising. App Tracking Transparency savagely brutalized that business model, sadly, and I think Unity's frantically flailing around in search of a different one.
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