I’ve worked with Unreal Engine 4 since 2014. I was a part of games that got the engine early. I adopted Unreal 5 last year when it was reasonable to do so. It’s honestly one of, if not the most powerful game engine out there. It has its own set of issues of course. A lot of people use its features without regard to their proper usage or pitfalls of using them. It’s also not an engine that caters to small indie developers. Every engine has its flaws. That said I’ve constantly watched as large indies to AAA studios switch to unreal over my career. It’s probably the best engine out there for those studios. It’s good to see major studios dropping their clearly buggy engines and being able to put out better products.
That all said, boy that 5% to Epic is making them a lot of money. I’m really hoping in a few years that Godot Engine will really start to compete but even talking with one of the major engine contributors: “godot lacks people who know what they’re doing.” I also see this in a lot of engine issues and poor architecture choices. It’s disappointing to see someone so close to the project confirm. Unreal needs a strong competitor though, something ideally open sourced.