I absolutely love unity. I've been playing with it on and off for the past few years and it has been surprisingly easy for me to pick up. The free version has a pretty spectacular feature set.
I've had a lot of fun with 2d mode- as a learning project I recreated the Monkey Island I Melee Island scenes with mixed sprites from Monkey Island II. Such a blast re-creating a game from my childhood. I really need to find more time for this stuff.
The problem with Unity from game-player POV is that it's too easy. It means that anyone can make games, and I've seen too many games now that have beautiful art and crappy play experience. The games feel slow and controls sluggish. It seems that developers assume that Unity would take care of everything and they do not have to consider performance of responsiveness at all.
Whenever I see Unity splash logo I'm getting mentally prepared for mediocre experience. Unless it's a strategy or point&click game where performance is not important.
Would you suggest making it harder to develop games?
Nintendo tried that with the Nintendo 64:
Yamauchi took a different approach with the SNES' successor the N64, however, which was released in 1996 at least partly to distract attention away from the disastrous Virtual Boy. Yamauchi admitted at the 2001 Space World event that he had deliberately ordered the N64 be difficult to develop for. The intention behind this was to discourage untalented third-party developers from releasing poor-quality games -- it was no longer practical for Yamauchi to personally approve every game -- but the plan backfired somewhat: given the commercial success of previous Nintendo systems, third-party developers were still keen to get their games on a Nintendo console, and this consequently led to a number of sloppy, low-quality third-party games that clashed significantly with the high-quality first- and second-party titles that were being released on the platform.
What you're saying is true, but it doesn't matter. Good games with good performance float to the top, get featured, get shared, get popular. Not so good games fade away, and hopefully the developer learns something and tries harder next time. It's all good.
it's not so much about Unity or other beginner-friendly engines, it's much more about Kickstarter, Greenlight and Early Access (and probably Patreon a bit later down the line, don't see devs using it right now, although some modders do). All of those delegate the task of sifting through piles of crap to end users, whereas before publishers used to take those risks. Yeah, publishers - they actually did serve a function.
I've had a lot of fun with 2d mode- as a learning project I recreated the Monkey Island I Melee Island scenes with mixed sprites from Monkey Island II. Such a blast re-creating a game from my childhood. I really need to find more time for this stuff.