So regarding Unreal. I used it for years, even back to Unreal 2004 in school when I was learning game development. I spent a lot of time with UE4 and played with UE5 beta too. I'd still be using it if it worked on Linux well. I switched to Linux 3 years ago, and the Unreal editor support on Linux is lackluster. It does work sort of, but the asset store doesn't link, on UE5 a lot of the new features are Windows only, etc. It's also unstable, crashes all the time. I had one project become completely corrupted and it wouldn't open. Luckily I had Git, but I lost all the work from that day. I think it makes sense for larger teams, like over 10 people.
For solo indie work or small teams, I think Godot is better. Unreal obviously has better graphics, but you can't make a AAA game by yourself no matter what engine you choose. Godot is more than enough for like 5 people or less, you will be limited by your skills long before you reach the limits of Godot.
Unity is okay, but I don't really like it anymore. It was really good at the beginning maybe around 2010 or something. But they started adding new features, deprecating important stuff (like global illumination), adding all these render engines that didn't work, etc. It's basically broken. I mean, for simple stuff it is easy and cheap and there is a large asset store, so it's the most convenient option. But it's not a good engine, I think they lost focus when the management changed. Now they are trying to compete with Unreal, I don't think they know what they are doing. And they've never turned a profit. They've been in the red burning VC money the whole time. They don't even have a business model.
But Godot still needs a lot of work. Godot 4.0 is a step in the right direction, but there are still important concerns that we will have to wait for. But I'm okay with working with what's there and fixing the issues myself. At least Godot makes it easy to do custom stuff, and add C++ or do whatever you want if you need. And Godot 4.0 will allow engine mods, without recompilation, so this should be good enough.
