Unity have never been serious competition outside of being easier to pickup for indie developers. Trying to compete with Unreal was their mistake.
Okay. Any suggestion for how unity could have avoided losing hundreds of millions of dollars?
They're a game engine they naturally compete with unreal.
I dont think it's our job to solve unity's financial problems, but I am feeling generous this morning so here is some pro bono financial advice:
Stop adding so much unstable eye candy to unity and focus on the stuff that most devs actually use.
Some devs moved to competitors not because of money, but because the editors ridicules startup time and how buggy it was. Thats a pretty good sign of bloat, dont you think?
In retrospect the acquisitions were a huge mistake, but that was when the whole industry was operating off of "corner the market first" mentality. That ended suddenly and caused all the tech layoffs of 2023. Hindsight is 20:20, but this was an industry problem, not a unity problem. Tech as a whole needed to shift away from promising explosive growth, but with the AI craze we are still far from doing that.