Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much better than you while you waste time creating this free thing that other people free-ride off of.
Here's the main difference between unreal and unity. Unreal costs 5% royalty per sale, meaning their product is extremely expensive to the developer if sales are high. Unity is generally royalty free and relies on "support and services" to make money. This is why Unreal will always encourage the growth of the ecosystem while Unity jealously guards the actual profit centers of the business, because Unity makes nothing on its core product!
More on unity: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/unity-engine-tos-chan...
Here's the main difference between unreal and unity. Unreal costs 5% royalty per sale, meaning their product is extremely expensive to the developer if sales are high. Unity is generally royalty free and relies on "support and services" to make money. This is why Unreal will always encourage the growth of the ecosystem while Unity jealously guards the actual profit centers of the business, because Unity makes nothing on its core product!