What most people don't know about me is that I've probably spent more time with Unity than with Ren'Py in its totality, because it takes far more time to learn the engine: roughly weeks/month versus day(s) scaling for the amount of things you can pull off.
In a week time as Ren'Py beginner you already got a working VN that feels uniquely yours, while with Unity you probably only copied the steps and code from a tutorial project, so in a way you hardly even made your own game and depending on how quickly you can pick up knowledge in a short time, you may not even gained enough baggage to really start on your passion project.
The only Unity projects I have submitted to itch.io are Find My Mind and Expedition Viridian. It was earlier when I tried to learn the engine and then I took a lengthy break from it because I didn't see game development as a viable career option.
For me, it's not even about the time wasted because Unity actually gave me an incentive to look into C# programming (turns out to be very similar to Java, while at that time I was mostly only formally trained in c++ for my university curriculum). This is probably what I found most useful.
I'm bitter personally because it's money down the drain because I already bought assets from the Unity Asset Store because I planned to someday do bigger game projects that are not the type of games you make in Ren'Py. In the end, it's not like a HUGE amount of money spent, but doing the maths it's still about 250 USD (Naninovel included) which is too much for my liking. Some of these were Humble Bundle temptations where you end up buying things you won't ever use, lol.
Whether the eventual games I make are to be sold with a small price tag is not something I've really decided on. I don't wish to make money with game development, only that I can break even if there is a possibility for it. It is a farcry from my Ren'Py VN projects where the amount of money spent is literally nil, and I think I enjoy this far better in terms of hobby goes, because you don't get poorer out of it: no spilling of blood, merely a little bit of sweat and tears. 😆
I know that my position is extremely mild and nothing comparable to devs or game studios who are actively working, have had, or are going to release commercial Unity games. It's their livelihood we should be worried about.
Nevertheless I had been thinking about my own sentiments towards working with Unity the whole week since the announcement. It's easy to say that the ultra small indie devs are unaffected, but the Unity brand is tainted so much, that as a player you definitely do not want to run an Unity game ever again because if it claims that it tracks installs, I imagine that it will be pinging your user data to the Unity servers and god knows what more. When there are plenty of other games to play that don't do this shit, it's easy for a consumer to make a choice what to avoid.
My decision is that I won't ever publish a new project in Unity again. Not sure yet what to do with the games I've already published on itch.io. I'm awaiting for more news from Unity.
I've delved a bit with Naninovel projects for practice, but I won't continue with it at all.
At least I believe that most 3D model assets sold in the store do not have licences where it states that it is only allowed to be used within a Unity project? I could find old forum posts that back my claim, though I probably need someone with more literacy in disclaimers to clarify such use.
It's a little bit too early for me to decide if Godot or Unreal Engine is more preferable. It's not so much a matter of programming language, because whatever you do, you have to be able to adapt and (re)learn everything again. For some reason I've always associated Unreal Engine with high-fidelity stuff, and the Unity Editor already uses a lot of resources so I never looked into Unreal Engine. Godot sounds much closer to my needs, especially how it's fairly light weight without huge files. Low-key, I am very curious about Unreal Engine because of c++ ironically, and I wonder if it's like coding back then where it's 'segmentation faults' everywhere. 🤣
