Among my acquaintances, they are now actively being avoided as an engine. Their asset store is still helpful, though. And with good open source competition like Stride (shown at GDC and C# + visual editor like Unity), I'm guessing that getting anyone to buy into a financially unpredictable and technically unstable engine like Unity is a very tough sell.
Don't get me wrong, I would rather be working on any other engine.
Unreal is great, but its very heavy, and blueprints - yuck.
The core team at Godot don't understand the needs of developers and it's very buggy. You wouldn't choose it if you don't want to be in the business of fixing bugs in your engine.
Didn't godot start as an in-house engine in a gamedev company?
On the other side Godot does not have this bandwidth so at the moment you have to bring your own engine team for your own needs. And because of that many "unsexy" features are not as good as they could be.
That said, I see a lot of movement and the Fund raised significantly in the last months. And the fact that stuff is open source helped me so much compared to Unity where you might have documentation but the feature just doesn't work and you can't figure out why..
Personally I have no interest in GDScript, but I recently ported a rather large C# code-base from Unity to Godot and I never had to touch GDScript. So it can happily be ignored. In general it took me less time to rewrite the code-base then implementing some of the workarounds for missing features in Unity (e.g. HTTP2) in the first place.
I heard the exact same complaint from plenty of Unity users about Unity though ;)
It will be hard to measure though as the biggest impact over time will be lost growth.
In game development universities there are only three game engines that count, Unity, Unreal, and the one students have to develop during their studies.
Especially if you're an American, and not personally wealthy enough to be able to float the debt for a degree that no one will care about, going to school to learn any kind of software development would be idiotic.
That said, it would probably be best to focus on the most popular game engines just because that experience is more valuable and the community around them more developed, but encouraging vendor lock-in only leads to the normalization of exploitative practices. People should experiment and try new frameworks when they can.
A lot of the people who switched to Godot after Unity's license debacle remained. A lot left for Unity as soon as they started acting reasonable again, and they had a lot of complaints about Godot which have only made the framework better, and more competitive, and Godot will be more attractive to them the next time Unity screws them over, which it now knows it can do. That can only happen if developers take a risk on investing in alternatives.
Despite that, Stride 4.2 launched very recently and (claims to) has full .NET 8 support, so I imagine they will be taking advantage of such features very quickly. That's one of the biggest pluses for me in how quickly they keep up with and commit to being fully .NET compliant.
As for the other points, sure. the marketing wave hasn't hit yet and that wave can be a bit ephemeral. I feel that educational coverage defeats the point on why people would use Stride as of now. Maybe one day that will be important, but it's contingent on the marketing, and part of that will be contingent on people who decide to dive in and make some impressive games with the engine.
People doing that obviously won't have 5 years of Stride experience on their resume, so they have to rely on fundamentals in both software engineering and engine programming to do that.
Where did you get that from? They just got a new CEO who is not as delusional/incompetent/x as the last one?
Even if their revenue keeps growing at 30% YoY these cuts still make perfect sense considering how bloated the company was