C# and Visual Studio are pretty great now, and they don't lock you into Windows at all. Most of C# is open source.

"The customers love you, your colleagues respect and trust you... but upper management have expressed concerns about your comments around flaying them and their families alive."

"let's see...areas for improvement. 'Fewer death threats towards co-workers"."

They know exactly what they're doing.

They've been collecting metrics for months and plugging them into spreadsheets to figure out exactly how profitable this will be, just waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger.

They knew it would be incredibly unpopular. They knew it would likely kill the company one day.

But the spreadsheet doesn't care about any of that so neither do they. They sold off stocks then made the announcement.

When the changes go live, they'll squeeze everything they can out of successful projects, who will be left in a position of "losing 50% to Unity is better than losing 100% from pulling the game".

They'll stuff their pockets with us much of that money as they can and when the spreadsheet tells them to, they'll pull the plug and strip the company for parts.

It was the best thing for them and that was all that mattered.

The executive was hired by the board or with the board support (CEO usually)

They did exactly what they wanted

It is, but all we have right now is Unity's claim that this is what happened. We don't even know the content of the threat, who made it, why they made it. All of that context could cast this in a wildly different light. I am very suspicious of Unity the company's motives here in saying this when we haven't heard from anyone else.

It might have been wiser, but seems to me we got to a point we should be thinking of the circumstances.

Besides, that only would have solved their individual problem, IF they even managed it. The way the company is being run would remain the same. How it would impact all the people who rely on that engine would remain the same.

It's "never acceptable" to threaten someone, but intentionally ruining countless people's livelihoods is "nothing personal". Something is off about that.

Oh, I imagine working conditions there have gotten worse in recent times, too. The kind of leadership that fucks over their clients like this don't start with those clients. They treat everyone as a resource to be exploited, and employees are the ones they can abused most readily.

The public furor over the pricing model is the opportunity, not the motive.

The CEO and his cronies don't understand that people work for more than money. They think all people come into work just to do what is required to get money or, if there is ambition, to rise through the ranks and make more money or have ideas that make more money.

However, there are people, especially in projects like this, that are also there because they believe in something. Believe that they can help creating something special that helps people. Unity has it's dominance among other things because it's an easy to use and easy to learn tool that enables people to create games that would've otherwise had trouble getting into development.