> 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.
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.