This situation with Unity looks very similar to the recent blunder by Wizards of the Coast attempting to change their license and triggering the exodus of their customers: https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coasts-new-dunge...
Individual people are weak and not rational. Majority will always continue to pay for entertainment companies products and bring money no matter how bad they treated by said companies. Think of Disney or Electronic Arts games.
Unity Technologies is a B2B software and service provider. Their decision to do a rag pull under 10,000+ of businesses will force everyone in industry to diversify. Unity not going under anytime soon, but now every single CEO and CTO in gamedev will be doing research on alternatives simply because pricing Unity come up with is not viable for a lot of games.
At the same time gamedev business is still a business and Unity is now unreliable supplier. Today we are lucky, but their ToS and fee changes could literally kill my company overnight in slightly different circumstances. Businesses that not mitigate risks like this go bankrupt really fast so no one sane will ever trust Unity after this rug pull.
Consumers of Unity games == consumers of D&D
Companies based on the OGL == Companies based on Unity license
WotC/Hasbro == Unity
D&D consumers =/= companies based on Unity license
In both cases, a large corporation (WotC/Hasboro, Unity) captured the space with promises that their platform would be free to use in perpetuity. In both cases, smaller companies were built around this garuntee; they naively thought that in perpetuity meant in perpetuity. In both cases, these smaller companies that popped up grew the large corporations to what they are today.
In both cases, the corporation tried to sneakily revoke the older agreements to trick these smaller companies into a terrible deal. In both scenarios, the corporation displayed rent-seeking behavior and proposed changes that would destroy the companies that helped them become what they are today.
> Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D"
Not sure what you mean by this, but my friends and I are and always have been fans of "free and open source D&D" because that's literally what D&D has always been. That's why so many were angry with the OGL changes; thats why the OGL changes got dropped. And, once Hasboro tipped their hand, many did transition to free and open source tabletop games that respect their third party creators and consumers alike https://www.polygon.com/23587624/non-dnd-dungeons-dragons-og...