Sometimes the complexity of UE can be overwhelming. For example, if you're just trying to set up an AI-controlled actor to animate differently in some different states, you'll initially be frustrated by the gazillion bits of setup work you have to do. But in every case I've seen, that complexity exists to support the flexibility and richness needed by top of the line games.
Basically, for better and for worse, UE was written by and is used by people who have built, shipped, and supported AAA games.
https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Studios have made some great games with Unity. But the company Unity themselves have no idea how to finish a game, or even make one using stock unity. Even if they can't use current stock unity, they never bring their custom code into the mainline engine releases...
And I'm making these complaints as someone who exclusively uses Unity for their own hobby games. I really ought to give Godot a try, I just have so much personal experience using Unity (and working around their engine) that the idea of learning a new engine is daunting.
Epic dogfoods the engine with _real_ games. Fortnite, Paragon, Battle Breakers, Robo Recall are all titles written in UE4, by Epic, which have had active contributions to the engine in their development. Whether you like the game or not doesn't have much of a bearing on the impact the game has on the engine.
They did the same with older games too, and the remnants of games like UT and GoW are very visible in the source of the engine itself.
Unity, generally makes money by convincing more people that they could make video games, and keeping up that belief so they keep paying for versions or subscription fees.
Epic only makes money after games have actually shipped.
On the unity side, an increasing amount of their revenue comes from "grow solutions" [0] which is basically their ad networks. Game engine development is a funny business
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-posts-first-profitable-q...
"Contact Us" Licensing has always existed as you state, but has often included the possibility of royalties, and even when it doesn't it's always been at the price ranges where shipping a game was more likely than not.
And in-fact, a problem with early Unreal licensing has been Epic's approach to support of "If it's not a problem in an Epic game, it's not our problem" Which has improved dramatically since changing their licensing model.
And regarding Unity, yes, their ad networks are becoming more important, but that still doesn't do as good a job at aligning incentives, but more importantly, Unity has 15+ years of development in a model with unaligned incentives, which when you're talking about technical decisions, those are really important.
And to be clear, I'm not arguing against the point that Epic being a game developer first is an important factor, I think it very much is, however I'm suggesting there are also other contributing factors.
Amazon will ditch Lumberyard for Godot. They have deep interests in games as a part of their vision. Twitch, Luna, in house game studios, prime gaming, etc.
Apple will absolutely do it. They're building their own metaverse and VR. Although I'd also gamble on them acquiring Epic Games. Apple wants to own the future of content creation.
Google's significant investment in WebGPU is going to make Godot a more attractive platform. Google is indirectly contributing to this.
As Godot gains more and more mindshare and economic activity happening atop it, it will achieve the activation energy required to take on AAA rendering and workflows.
Companies will see Epic as a tax. And the entire world will be submitting patches to Godot. Godot is already spawning an ecosystem of support companies and console SDKs.
They are using O3DE now, which actually seems better than godot for 3D at first glance. Only issue so far is there isn't much of a community.
Edit:
>Although I'd also gamble on them acquiring Epic Games.
That is never happening.
Given Tim Sweeney holds a controlling stake in Epic this seems like the least likely outcome.
This will never ever happen. Ever.
I think it equally unlikely that Apple would invest in/adopt something like Godot. Modern Apple has a serious case of Not Invented Here syndrome and despite Godot being permissive, I don't see them adopting that. Instead, I think we'll see more investment at ARKit and Metal, even though the only people that take Metal seriously are people who have a financial incentive to build iOS games (no one has a financial incentive to support Metal-based macOS games and there is arguably no financial incentive to make macOS games at all).
Why would that be a bad thing?
Godot doesn't compete with Unreal. It competes with their largest commercial competitor: Unity.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And when they want to "upgrade", Unreal is right there, and they already have an Epic account.
Godot competes squarely with mid-market stuff: Indie, so-called "Triple-I" (high budget """indie""") and AA development, where Unity is the dominant engine. Unity has very little penetration share among the big AAA games.
Godot and other open source engines squeeze Unity from the bottom, and Unreal squeezes it from the top.