Re-Logic committing so much money to Godot and FNA is fantastic. I feel like either of those two (likely Godot) needs a serious champions willing to do everything in their power to turn one of them into a AAA-ready engine, like what happened to Blender, which used to be neat but not up to snuff to becoming a seriously good 3D modelling and animation package in the last few years capable of keeping up with Max and Maya.
Having a high-quality AAA open-source product available would do a lot to pressure proprietary engine makers to up their game and having to justify why people should use their offerings. Unity has had serious problems in terms of quality of features, bug fixing and regressions, and ease of transition problems when it comes to moving projects to new versions of Unity (which in my experience Unreal and Godot rarely have).
I feel like Unity's management has been coasting on the fact that Unity has a stranglehold on 60-70% of game engine users right now, and were committed to exponential growth in an age of free credit, but now that inflation has gone up across the world and central banks have been raising interest rates significantly to reduce it, that particular gravy train has crashed and burned and a lot of companies, Unity included, are scrambling to do something about the mountains of debt they've accrued. Reportedly this whole install-based system wasn't even seriously considered up until very recently and completely blindsided most folks within Unity when they realized that management were actually going along with it.
The fact is, Unity has taken too long to properly address this whole fiasco, causing a ton of uncertainty and panic. A ton of devs are looking at moving over to Unreal or Godot, and so are academic institutions that are seeing where the wind is blowing and know Unity is quite likely to be a pariah very soon if not already, which is going to be incredibly messy for students, especially those already midway through or close to the end of their education and all they know is Unity.
Thankfully, if there's one silver lining it's that transitioning isn't that hard. Unreal and Godot aren't that dissimilar to Unity in terms of workflow, Godot supports C# (though GDScript is incredibly easy to learn, especially if you already know C#, and not only is relatively powerful for a scripting language also but allows for hot-swapping, so you can literally change your code while your game is running and have those changes reflected immediately) while Unreal has Blueprints if you don't wanna learn C++, both have "prefabs" (though Godot's node system is significantly more flexible), and I'd honestly say that Godot is pretty much as good if not better than Unity at 2D stuff (you've also got other options like Game Maker for 2D games) while Unreal outdoes it in 3D.
unity.com
