Crocodile tears....

If the budget allows developers will seek a new engine regardless, the damage has been done and trust has completely faded away.

This is why it's a bad idea to have people run a business who don't actually use/know their own products. I don't understand how the board meeting could have gone for this. Did they not even consider the potential downsides of this plan? Surely, something would clue them in when they realize nobody else is doing it.

If their apology was sincere they would reverse their decision to alter the payment system

RavenMaster:

If their apology was sincere they would reverse their decision to alter the payment system

Even if they reverse their decision the damage has been done.

I think they're entire pay per "unique" install scheme is insanity itself. How would that even work properly? Almost all of these types of "install tracking" solutions I've ever seen depend upon creation of a unique hardware identity. This identity is usually based on the low-level hardware information it can read. The moment any underlying piece that makes up that identity changes you are essentially a "new system." If course all of that depends upon the apps ability to phone home, which any basic firewall could handle without a problem. In the end that tracking dataset could very easily be manipulated despite whatever BS Unity may claim. You can't always know when traffic / data comes from a botnet so... What they are going to charge developers one month and then refund them the next? There's no way anyone in their right mind would accept a deal like that. What incentive would Unity have to even bother checking if hardware registrations came from a botnet? There's no financial gain in it and a significant amount of accounting overhead. Pretty sure Unity lost any "trust me bro" cred the moment they started messing with TOS and not telling or tracking it. Probably long before that for some Unity-focused dev teams.

"misunderstandings" That would be by the CEO and other top execs of how any of this works would it?

A serious company doesn't make dramatically changes on EULA affecting previous client-contracts and as well doesn't withdraw as it was a joke. Unity just showed they aren't a serious company anymore.

Everybody install and then uninstall hearthstone over the next few days...I think it's the smallest Blizzard/Activision game and let us be honest, it would be funny to see Blizzard go negative on their stock...especially when the game if FTP... Unity messed up big time on this, and although I do not like Unity as a game engine due to the toolchain being mostly reliant on purchasing third-party tools from their marketplace to make the engine toolchain work the way it meant to work...(sorry for the run-on sentence)...I still think there should be something like Unity on the market for options for people. 2D is really where Unity is a walk in the park to use and run simple animations, probably why Hearthstone runs it - this is also where indie devs running on mobile/tablet/tv are using it the most. That being said, there are other engines and I do not think Unity is so dumb to kill off any dev interest in their product. Something happened internally at Unity and I am much more interested in learning about what happened. This is a major screw up, as no dev will now trust them. Install the 'convert unity to unreal engine' batch wizard and then, profit.