That's too bad. I guess for profit companies won't then and actual decent human people with more incentives in their lives than only profit will continue to do so.
Even without profit in mind: sometimes you just want to build a game.
It's easy to get sidetracked by "the engine" when all you wanted was to create a game... Most amateur gamedevs I know all started creating "the engine" and then the actual game never happened.
I wish to just work on making cool games, but unfortunately my damn landlord and grocery store only care about profit and charge me money every time I have to deal with them.
If anything ONLY huge for-profit companies have the knowledge and resources to build their own engines. Without Unity or whatever takes its place thousands of indie devs would never have get off the ground.
You're all (everyone who replied to my comment) assuming that human game developers only develop games so that they can earn money off them. It's HN so that's not weird, pretty much everyone here has their for-profit blinders on. But what if I told you that not all human behavior is done for profit? Including game development.
Not everything has to be "financially viable" and return a profit. The best things in life are made by people without any profit motive at all.
