Unreal getting paid only when a user makes money [1] also compounds the dog-fooding. I believe that is how a company should be run - align your interests directly with the users'.
With Unity, the price per seat means only people who leave will send a signal, which will be too late. They are not incentivized to make day-to-day work efficient, which is why there are a million small bugs.
[1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq - "This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD."
Licensing their engine is just a side business for Epic and I’d bet on average their not getting anything even close to 5% (all their bigger clients should have custom agreements). But that’s fine for them since they’re making loads of money from Fortnite with much less effort (than you would need to make anything similar from just a game engine).
I’m not sure how the overall quality compares, but I’d expect Unity’s users to be way more critical even if it had more bugs just because of all the indie/small developers who’d fall below the 1mil threshold for Unreal but have to pay for Unity.
With Unity, the price per seat means only people who leave will send a signal, which will be too late. They are not incentivized to make day-to-day work efficient, which is why there are a million small bugs.
[1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq - "This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD."