They’re having to issue statements about how they’ve fucked up and have rethought and will change the announced price plan, so obviously they do care to some degree (though probably not enough to completely drop their plans). The whole announcement was pretty obviously half-baked and ill-considered and they’ve been having to issue a stream of “clarifications” (that sometimes change or even reverse previous statements), but it’s just been non-stop chaos.
I don’t think they even thought about it, but the thing is, the bit they were ignoring is the bit that very much drives the rest of their business. They might have fixated on the mobile market that makes up most of commercial development (and pushing their ad system onto them), but they just spent billions of dollars buying companies that feed into Unity as a AAA dev and movie production tool (aping Unreal’s move into the movie business). Unity has dominated in educational environments, and those students aren’t dreaming about producing free-to-play mobile games, they’re largely aspiring to make bigger (PC/console) games, and those students feed into indie development. That userbase and their knowledge (and willingness to share it) has driven the rise of Unity. Without it, Unity withers.
So yeah, they might not want that ecosystem, and might have been unhealthily fixated on short-term profits, but they also clearly didn’t think it through and what that would mean, either long-term for the future of Unity, nor even how it would work as a coherent price plan. It’s par for the course for the company lately, as it seems to be making a lot of chaotic, poorly thought-out decisions.
