The craziest thing to me about this whole situation is how Unity even came into being.
I was in school learning Unreal back when it was an absolute trash fire - pre “UDK” days when Epic was splitting their time between working on their engine and making the next Gears of War game.
Unity was this breath of fresh air that made it so the interface made sense. No more “clicking the 3rd green checkmark” to import your skeletal mesh that you generated from your $2,000 software from Autodesk with a plugin that barely works made by desperate people in forums…
Unity's main initial release (version 2.5)...
...was not only BEAUTIFUL by comparison to the "Unreal Editor..."
...software from around that time, but it worked with interchangeable file formats and eventually native program files like PSDs.
They are the main reason that Epic got scared, lowered their stupidly high price of ~$1,000,000 to license their game engine, and started really redoing the whole UX to the point that it actually wasn’t cryptic arcane magic but on par with and sometimes even above what Unity offered… and they helped make the entire indie game industry able to hire folks with skills in an engine that wouldn’t break the bank and that everyone could carry over.
It used to not be like that. I worked at a studio with 20 guys and they had their own engine… and the original engine programmers were all gone. It was like trying to do maintenance on a commercial jet liner while flying it and never having been given a manual but just a few guys with second-hand knowledge.
It’s so goddamn maddening to see them completely destroy themselves like this. It’s some Star Wars prequel “you were the chosen one” type meme shit.
I’m happy that Godot was there to fill the gap, because I hate to think what would happen were Unreal not to have any competition with the 3rd party engine market again… but Unity… man… it never was “as good” as Unreal visually, but it had gotten to a point where it was “close enough” that everyone used it.
Now though? I can’t ever see any studio wanting to risk using it again at the chance they get greedy again and try to rug pull small dev houses.