Unreal is for people who get games financed. The demos looks great and the execs don’t play games anyhow so what do they know. That’s why it’s all FPSes, it’s stuff non-game-playing adults can understand just by looking at it. They will fund the most photoreal looking pitch for the Star Wars IP.

Unreal as an engine product is competing with Frostbite and Source Engine (the various engines Star Wars appeared recently) not Unity.

However EA and Respawn won those bids for a variety o reasons, mostly related to the mechanics of royalties and their support commitments.

It’s complicated. There are many forces at work, only somewhat related to engineering, that funnels the engines to one kind of game or another.