The play store is not really relevant to what I was talking about because it is intentionally not curated. There will always be at least one place like this where the developers who can't afford the expensive fees to get on the curated stores will congregate. It also seems irrelevant to me to keep referring to the "crash of 1983" when that was very obviously caused by Atari having a monopoly, i.e. the exact opposite of there being an open market for hardware.

I personally have avoided many game development communities for exactly the reasons you describe — overly extreme fear of "copy cats" to the point of paranoia, coupled with way too much enthusiasm to adopt certain pieces of cargo-culted technology without considering the question of who will support it and for how long. I think Godot is a step in the right direction, but it will take these companies time to let go of these other APIs that cost them high prices just for the privilege of being able to read the documentation. They are not immune to these price dynamics.