Act I; Users lured, moats built: Epic pivoted towards Games-as-a-Service. They took investment [0] and guidance from Tencent to the tune of 40% of the company. Fortnite and the F2P Unreal Tournament reboot were developed and released in this timeframe. These free titles would bring in the gamers into the Epic ecosystem.
Act II; Users exploited, business customers courted: Fortnite adds subscriptions in 2017 (Battle Pass Season 2 [1]) and makes money hand-over-fist. At the same time, the Tencent deal allowed them to relicense their engine away from the high upfront cost to "Free" until a certain point [2]. They also charged a far less cut than Steam, used hundreds of millions of dollars of their own investment to bring other developers to the ecosystem, as well as publishing a number of games that used the engine. This lured developers to the platform with their own dreams of Fortnite revenues. More investment poured in.
Relating this back to the original article here, in 2019 Epic gave a grant of $1.2 to Blender [3] to develop their tools to integrate Unreal Engine, including those for visual artists and film.
Act III; Everybody is shafted: See my original comment.
[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-tencent-changed-fortni...
[1]: https://fortnite.fandom.com/wiki/Season_2
[2]: https://fortune.com/2015/03/03/epic-games-unreal-tech-free/
[3]: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...
This is Cory Doctorow's definition of enshittification [0]:
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Note that he's talking about platforms, specifically middlemen. For Doctorow's enshittification to be a thing, there has to be a dichotomy between "users" and "business customers". Enshittification is the cycle of luring in users to make yourself valuable to your real customers (the "business customers"), then abusing those users to make your business customers even happier, then abusing your business customers to extract the absolute largest amount of value for yourself, then dying because you forgot who payed the bills.
Unreal Engine is not a platform in this sense. Epic doesn't have "users" that it needs to lure in in order to appease "business customers", it just has business customers. It brought a lot of business customers in by offering the product for free for non-gaming use cases in order to demonstrate to those non-gaming business customers that it was actually a viable product for their needs. Now that they don't need to make that case any more, they're doing what every business eventually needs to do and actually charging for the product.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/