There wasn’t an explicit comment stating they would charge for pirated copies, but it was inferred from their initial statements that their tracking didn’t give them any information other than that the game was installed. When people brought up pirated copies and people purposely uninstalling and reinstalling the games to force the developer to pay outrageous amounts, Unity backtracked and said that their tracking DID give them enough info to identify and exclude pirated copies and reinstallations, but this was only after the backlash began.

There is a contingent of people who believe that Unity intentionally marked out this stark change with extremely unclear requirements so they could “listen to the community” and partially revert the changes to their original goal plan (possibly removing the lowest license tier and requiring Unity ads for this license, plus Unity taking lots of tracking info about your computer that they can sell on to 3rd parties) as a way to make everyone accept the changes more easily, in a similar method as what WOTC tried to do with their OGL changes last year.