Unity is it's own beast like Unreal but in a different way, Unity as a platform supports mobile monetization in a way other platforms don't and Godot won't be cutting their lunch in that ecosystem any time soon.
But I suspect you mean for indie dev, in which case I totally agree. Godot is the lightweight, get out of your way and build shit framework that people want Unity to be. Godot is better at that task by a long shot.
It's very telling that Unity is where it is because of monetization.
Godot on the other hand is being picked up because it's an excellent engine. Maybe it's not going to kill Unity, but it's certainly going to relegate it to a shovelware low effort money grab engine.
> It's very telling that Unity is where it is because of monetization.
No, it's absolutely not. It may happen to have mobile monetization features built in but it's where it is because it's been the best general game engine for everything other than AAA 3d games, although Godot is catching up.
> It's very telling that Unity will keep getting used because of monetization.
Once upon a time it was a good engine.
Nowadays it's an absolute mess, and it's been that way for a long time now.
I am not a game developer, I develop prototypes in my spare time because I have fun tinkering with engines, and with Unity it doesn't take long before it becomes borderline unusable. I don't even want to imagine the struggle devs need to go through to make a full scale game playable, and those struggles prevent them from focusing on making the game actually fun to play. But, thanks to the deeply integrated monetization system, Unity is THE standard if you just want to make a game quickly to shove ads in people's faces every time they die in your simple, yet extremely buggy mobile game with stock assets. Is that a good thing? It depends, but I'd lean towards no.
It would be insane to even try to compete with Unreal, an engine focused on AAA games that's been around for decades, with a large full-time staff. No open-source project will ever match them, because it's a moving target.
Fortunately Unreal Engine is a poor choice for many types of games, and Godot is doing a great job carving out its niche with 2D games and simpler 3D games. There's still a big market for 2D games, and surprisingly there aren't a ton of engines which do a good job supporting them. Godot is easily among the best.
I mean the problem is 2d game tools isn't getting loves for some time. Paper2d which is the main component of UE for 2d games still haven't updated with UE 5 last time I checked. So it misses a lot of feature parity.
Excellent engine, and more and more developers are rightfully recognizing its potential.