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The features offered by commercial engines are lightyears ahead of FOSS engines, especially at the high end.

If you're running a commercial game studio in such a brutally competitive market as video games, how can you afford to use FOSS? Your choices are go without high-end features that your competitors do have; or divert resources from your game content to build them in-house. Both seem less attractive than "just buy a commercial engine" to many studios.

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Or focus more on good gameplay and less on technical features. Not every game needs to be a AAA open world extravaganza and graphics powerhouse.

Lots of studios still build engines from scratch for this very reason: get exactly what they want and avoid vendor lockin. A good FOSS engine that gets them 50% of the way there for free? Seems like a pretty good deal to me. So long as the engine can be extended to get the features they want, it makes sense to use a FOSS one instead of building from scratch.

Also, inhouse tooling will need to be built regardless, whether the engine is commercial, in house from scratch, or FOSS.

If the studios give back to the FOSS engine source code, it creates a virtuous cycle, like with the Linux kernel. Everyone wins.

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