Why would you take away those engines? What does it matter that the games used Unity (or any other pre-made engine)? The point of a game is to make a fun experience not to reimplement every aspect of interactive software.
Do you make the same comment about someone using standard libraries or frameworks? How productive would you be without system libraries or even an OS?
> So yeah, it's not "that hard" if you use a product which has already had millions of developer hours put into it like Unity or UnrealEngine.
What point are you making? The GGP correctly claimed it's "not hard" for small teams to make games. The games they referenced were made by small teams. The fact those games used an off the shelf game engine is immaterial. There's no "point" to make about it.
Your "point" comes off as a qualitative judgement about those developers using an off the shelf engine. If you've got no problem with someone using Unity what point are you really making?
The article is about how hard it is to productize game graphics and the GGGP said its not that hard because there are a ton of small team games with great graphics. But those teams aren't productizing graphics, they're using an engine that had millions spent on it and a huge team which did it for them. I believe that was the point being made: that its a false comparison.
Using someone else's hard work doesn't mean that its easy, just that you don't have to do that work yourself because others have done it for you.
> Your "point" comes off as a qualitative judgement about those developers using an off the shelf engine.
I didn't read it like that at all. In most cases, for most teams (certainly small ones), using an off the shelf engine is absolutely the right call, exactly because it means you don't have to solve the hard graphics problems yourself. But using an off the shelf engine does not mean that those hard problems don't exist or aren't hard, just that you can outsource them to the engine vendor.
If you make a game with Unity, you have productized the graphics. It does not matter at all that Unity has millions of dollars or thousands of person-hours built into it. The game developer paid the asking price. Everyone was compensated. The game developer didn't somehow unfairly "take" the hard work of the Unity devs.
From the point of view of a game developer, having good graphics is "easy" because Unity and Unreal exist. The fact Unreal and Unity exist enables thousands of developers to make games that couldn't otherwise. Making a "point" that a small game developer didn't write their entire stack is just shitty gatekeeping.
Do you make the same comment about someone using standard libraries or frameworks? How productive would you be without system libraries or even an OS?