1214
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
Are you being obtuse on purpose?
This isn't a case of "I use unity because it is free," because outside of recreational game developer use-cases, it isn't free. There are very real costs associated with monetization that any developer, team, and studio should be aware of.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing, that you can't opt-out of, with a little less than 3 months notice. Going back to the wheel analogy, these teams have designed entire vehicles around these wheels, with application-specific knowledge and workarounds to be told that "Hey, regarding that product which underpins your entire project, one with which we've already entered into a sales agreement... we decided we want to change the agreement and track its usage and charge you more money. You have 11 weeks to get over it. Your continued use of our product implies consent to the new terms of this agreement."
You can't just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
I get that, and it sucks. But too many offerings on the market are nowadays accepted as normal operating procedure, when they seem like such obvious traps to me. There is no financially-driven company out there that you can rely on with your project. Go with an open-source project or write what you need yourself. I fully understand the challenge of writing a product from scratch and bringing it to market. Your dependencies can break your neck one way or the other.
I know and feel that. I am no longer in entertainment, but I also see these exact same patterns in my current line of work (IT infrastructure). People use "free" tools that they take for granted, and then they're surprised by rug-pulls. This has been happening for so long in so many areas that it's almost tiring.