Any mature game engine also comes with mature developer tooling. Think profiling, debugging, assets management, map editing etc. That’s a lot of initial hurdles to overcome before you can even start working on your game ideas. For indie / solo developers who tend to be, you know, driven by one’s creative urges, this is not just a huge time sink but also a good way to ruin your motivation by never moving to the part where you get to actually create the game. When your time and energy is constrained you need to choose your battle and for indie developers this often means forgoing the technical part (unless you really need to) and focus more on the game part.
I have seen many people say “there are more games engines written in Rust than games written in Rust” and I wonder if what happened is that the software developers fell for the allure of building their whole stack from scratch and ended up finding out it sucks to actually develop a game for an engine with no tooling and “making an entity inspector that lets you click on an enemy and edit its attributes” isn’t exactly the sexy part of game development.
I have seen many people say “there are more games engines written in Rust than games written in Rust” and I wonder if what happened is that the software developers fell for the allure of building their whole stack from scratch and ended up finding out it sucks to actually develop a game for an engine with no tooling and “making an entity inspector that lets you click on an enemy and edit its attributes” isn’t exactly the sexy part of game development.