I tend to think the dev iteration speed is the core Unreal weakness.
The problem Unity have created is if something can be made with Unity it will get crowded out with clones in five minutes.
We couldn't even get Unreal to build as an embeddable library for a mobile app nor could we get it to build into anything that would run in a web browser despite more than a week of effort.
We had Unity working for both use cases in under a day.
PUBG mobile, which is in unreal, uses flutter for exactly this case.[0]
Yes. Well.
The idea that developer iteration speed is actually an indicator of project-completion-at-scale speed is really only true at a trivial scale; you know, when you only have developers. Maybe a handful of them. ..and like, one does-everything artist.
When you have multiple different teams including non developers working on actually building a significant game, crafting levels, assets, etc. the iteration speed of your handful of devs is really really a drop in the ocean.
There are a lot of very powerful tools in unreal for teams, and they have consistently invested in tooling (eg. File per actor) and real life production needs (eg. LED stage support) with their customers.
Unity has invested in different areas, with a lot of effort, and bluntly, nothing to show for it.
really only true at a trivial scale
It's not just hobbyists and students.
And that includes most games.
Aren't they making shitloads on advertising?
This really has nothing to do with Unity. Flappy Bird could have been built on any platform and you would still have a million clones of it. Because it takes a day to make it. It's just as easy to clone that game in Unreal Engine, fwiw.
Unity didn't create the concept of the quickly built game, nor is Unity responsible for society incentivizing this type of game dev. If anything, the new runtime fees will disincentivize this type of game, so maybe that's a good thing?