Unity: "We weren't talking enough" to game developers

gamedeveloper.com:

Unity's upcoming price increases to the Pro, Enterprise, and Industrial Collection licenses follows a month of turbulent news for the game tool creator. 

Though it's seen financial wins with some acquisitions and a proposed merger with adtech firm IronSource, game developers have expressed anger and uncertainty over brash comments made by CEO John Riccitiello, renewed contracts with ties to the U.S. military, and IronSource's muddy history with possible malicious adware.

It wouldn't be hard to look at that barrage of news and wonder if Unity leadership is more focused on the company's stock price than its game developer customers it built its company on. It seems now that Unity wants to address that perception.

In an exclusive interview with Game Developer, Unity senior vice presidents Marc Whitten and Ralph Hauwert not only discussed the thinking behind today's price increases, but also addressed the last month of developer concerns. 

"We weren't talking enough, and we weren't being clear enough with where we were going with gaming," Whitten said. He said that Unity leadership has "heard that feedback very clearly," and that it wants to make clear that "gaming is at the center of what they do."

Whitten and Hauwert did not provide one specific reason for the price increases on these plans. But Whitten did share some insight on Unity's thinking behind the Enterprise plan's pricing model.

During our conversation, we wound up in a position where it was briefly hard to explain Unity Enterprise's prior cost of $4,000/month per 20 seats, and how that connected to Unity Enterprise's new price of $3,000 per year. "That was a bit confusing with the seat counts we presented on our website," Hauwert admitted. He said the company now