I don't want them to, just seems like the circle of life.
Unity took all the buckets outside, burned them, then demanded money from all their customers. I've not seen new projects using them, because stakeholders are concerned about surprise expenses down the line.
Source: I work in the games industry.
I personally would consider AAA to be indicative of the game's overall budget, but without looking up the develo
Once they have captured both the engine and distribution market share, the anti-consumer policies will begin.
In the long run, I remain highly pessimistic and suspicious regarding Epic's long term strategy.
I love Godot for game dev, but it's not the full stack package, and last time I checked it wasn't great for 3D, but it's basically the best you have short of modding Doom.
RPG Maker and Adventure Game Studio corner the market on a niche genre of pixel-art RPGs and point-and-clicks if you want to stay 2D.
It's expensive to build a new engine from scratch, especially when Unreal says it can cross-build to PC, Xbox, PS4/PS5, Switch, Mobile, etc.
The problem is that making a generic does-anything engine means it can't be optimal, and more and more these days studios are using the engine but don't understand how to optimise within it. So now you're downloading shader caches from Steam because you can pull a pre-compiled shader across the network faster than it will build at runtime, and you still expect the game to run smooth as butter.
I build shit for the web, and this is the exact trade-off you make when you, say, choose Rails for your server over a more hands-on setup. I can spin up web apps in Rails with my eyes closed, it's that easy, but the performance has a high floor.
There are still a lot of engines. Plenty of people are starting to incorporate Godot, Unity hasn't disappeared, and companies build and leverage their own engines all the time.
The main reason Epic Games is so big is Fortnite, not Unreal Engine. They're still incredibly focused on that metaverse play.