This part of the article needs a citation. Unity has been setting money on fire, but it hasn't been buying a market advantage. It's been burning money on highly, highly, highly questionable (at best) acquisitions like buying Weta and Iron Source as well an insane hiring spree and then paying those people for years for work and churn that Unity never actually manages to ship in the engine.
The other elephant in the room is that the owner of Unity's main competitor is quite a bit larger than it is. I can't say that anything Unity buys would give it a market advantage.
Second place and the niche for mobile which is lucrative and ‘XR’ which isn’t but could be isn’t too much to sniff at. I think it’s a mistake to think a healthy market is two companies or that the only thing spending buys is absolute dominance.
I don't disagree. Please don't take my statement as a defense of Unity. The intended implication was, "A market sans Unity is not a robust and competitive space, it's Unreal as a monopoly."
I don't know if there are many other options for mobile, but for XR (in this phase where UX norms are being hashed out), I really hope that people look beyond the two, and even dark horse Apple, to what Snap is doing. Even further: look at what people are doing with Dreams on the PS4/PS5 (https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong).
Part of why this hurts is that we let ourselves be taken in by a singular platform... again. Maybe standards with plenty of authoring options instead of cottage industries, next time.
