Xeshra: Developers. everywhere, are increasingly jumping on the "UE5" or "Unity" bandwagon, as it seems to make stuff easyer for them using a "normalized" environment. On the other hand, we start to see less diversity when it comes to the engine and somehow the unique touch may slowly become lost. The textures are still unique of course but somehow the tools used for it are slowly becoming "equal" in some way... so in the end the graphical diversity is somehow becoming reduced.
Even Square Enix was using UE4 for a lot of games, although, on FF16 they was using a rare custom engine still.
I think Talos 1 and Talos 2, both are graphically impressive. Taken into account the first Talos is already 9 years of age it is actually even the winner. Anyway, Talos is Talos... even the newest Title is another great game on a great engine which is demanding a lot of resources.
Honestly, I think it makes a lot of sense that most devs should not reinvent the wheel and use an existing engine, especially if they are not highly knowledgeable about that to begin with.
This is such a common base for games and yet, also a huge very technical overhead, plus not a huge differentiation for a lot of games (unless you approach it with a lot of technical expertise and a singular vision, you're unlikely to do a better job than existing established game engines with the time you have).
Realistically, the creation of game engines should probably rightfully be delegated to either communities of tinkerers or studios with deep pockets and lots of resources to hire teams with the right know-how.
So I understand why smaller studios like them would want to explore existing solutions.
My main beef with unreal/unity situation is: Why aren't there more established open-sources alternatives yet and why aren't more devs using them? This kind of common widespread building block need tends to be the most fertile ground for robust open-source solutions to emerge where a lot of people contributes to said solutions (with time or money) because it fulfills their needs and that spreads the load a lot.
