It depends on the game. Unreal for example is optimized for large teams, and collaboration between different kinds of professionals (programmers, artists, level designers etc.). If you're doing a one-person project relying on procedural generation and pixel graphics, you might be more productive with a much simpler game engine with a much shorter code-build-run loop
Unity is on the same league as Unreal, with the difference to target developers that rather use C# instead of C++, other than that the complexity is the same.
This subthread was in response to skohan above who said:
> If you're doing a one-person project relying on procedural generation and pixel graphics, you might be more productive with a much simpler game engine with a much shorter code-build-run loop
So I presumed you were saying "Unity is as bad as Unreal in these regards."
Exactly because of that unless there is a whole team of designers, level builders and artists alongside the core devs, there is more ways to spend time than getting a PhD level knowledge on AAA engines capable of producing Hollywood class 3D movies.
I have tried out Godot and many, many other game engines in the past. They aren't there yet. Even as a hobbyist, I find Unity much more easy to use, and even still I'm tempted to learn Unreal simply because it seems more powerful and well architected under the hood.
They are where Unity 3.0 used to be around 10 years ago.
However Unity now is capable of supporting such kind of productions, with the respective increase in learning complexity and development teams scalability,
Because 99% of people using these engines are hobbyists and want to use something that works for them.
I personally prefer Godot, its node structure makes sense with my mental model of the games I tinker with. And it has enough there that if I did decide to ever finish a game, I could. That's all I need.
If the Bugatti is free, why not use it? Unity is very easy to use, and it gets easier over time. They keep making paid features free, and once ECS is mature (in the UI, I know it's production ready), I think it's going to have a huge positive impact.
Same? If helicopters and fuel would be free, I bet everyone would fly one to store. Safety is the only concern here, and it is irrelevant for the topic.