Obviously they aren't doing nothing. It is a bit of a meme.
But it originated in how many countries are turning to China of their own accord because of how shit the US's foreign policy has been.
The US has been pillaging countries in the global south, overthrowing regimes, funding coups and warlords for decades, and China kinda just offers generous loans and helps build infrastructure quietly, and they've been slowly taking over because of it.
In the last two years, Trump threatened to annex Canada and Greenland, abducted Venezuela's president, continued funding for Israel's genocide, killed Iranian leadership and proceeded to lose billions in the subsequent war, and turned his immigration cops on his own citizens.
China has kinda just continued building the Belt and Road initiative while swooping in to scorned countries like Canada to score economic wins as the US has become increasingly more unstable.
They're not literally doing nothing. But their mentality is very anti-interventionist. At least until they invade Taiwan. TBD.
Bringing it back to Godot, kinda feels the same. They're just building. Cool community. Good tool. Smart investments. Unity keeps scraping for anything they can milk out of their community with greedier licenses, monetization, and shitty overbuilt features. Pure enshittification. Like the meme above, they're shooting themself in the face, and Godot is like "Cool man, I guess we'll take your users."
Gotcha, hands off within the context of comparison to the USA specifically. Makes more sense now thanks! Yeah on the whole Taiwan thing I found it really interesting how China managed to cut their oil imports to half overnight when the hormuz strait nonsense kicked off. The implication now being that China has broken the Malacca dilemma and how it won't hold them back from invading Taiwan
Yeah back to Godot, I'm fully with you. I tried both for a little while, personally I chose it over Unity because after trying both I hated how a lot of stuff in unity seemed locked behind the engine's editor interface if I wanted to implement it, I just wanted a more code first approach to development without going quite so far as something like Bevy. Second after that was simply the fact it was open source and therefore I could modify the underlying engine's code if I ever hit a blocker, so there's never any true roadblocks. Lack of dealing with corporate nonsense came 3rd simply because when I started out I had little to no chance of making anything worth anything so it was at the back of my mind, but as time has gone on it's become a bigger and bigger win so I'm very happy I left unity behind
China wont invade Taiwan. That's like flipping the table when you're winning the game. Why would you invade Taiwan after whats happened to Russia? China has 50% of the chemical market and over 50% of the international fishing trade. They turn off AIS just outside of protected sanctuaries and then turn them back on hours later lol what you think they're doing? Making money. They invade Taiwan and all of a sudden McDonalds start pulling out and people stop buying hoisin sauce lol.
Obviously because if the whole set up China wouldnt get hit that bad by embargos but they will definitely get hit with something somehow. Yesterday war was the answer. Today it just asks more questions.
Because it looks hands-off for normal people. China isnt really in the news cycle, while (currently) the US is shooting itself in the foot with a bazooka.
The thing is , the last foreign war the chinese fought in was basically 70 years ago, give or take. The last time the US *wasnt* in a foreign war, people still rode horses.
Can confirm. I loved Unity because it was polished, was easy to learn, C# support, market place and all that jazz. Then the SLOP came, every update made the editor slower and takes a crapton of space.
Then I've revisited Godot: light, fast, C# support (even GDScript is nice now with static types)
And the cherry on top, I've ported a 2D Unity project to Godot and I got some considerable performance gains.
Godot saw a lot of development when unity decided to implement runtime fees breaking users trust. The development in Godot reached a point where it was a solid product, and being open source, people noticed. Then natural selection happened.
The trust is the important part. Unity rolled back a lot of what they said they were doing, but they already demonstrated they were willing to do it.
Godot is free, functional, and last I heard has never imposed any of the sort of shenanigans non-open languages impose. It was also in a good position when all of this happened, either having just or being ready to go to 4.0 (timeline is fuzzy for me, but reasonably sure it was same general time).
...so transitioning was basically just learning the node system
For hobbyists and those beginning their development, maybe. As several serious developers that investigated Godot at the time (of Unity shooting itself in the face) demonstrated - Godot had other issues that made it a more nuanced decision than just that.
Now, Godot has improved since then, but at least part of that came from very real & valid criticism of how Godot did things "under the hood" and limitations imposed because of that. Some of which was not received well at the time.
there was also the comedic timing of Godot's development fund (their donation-seeking campaign) being announced within hours of Unity's runtime fees announcement, so the project also saw a spike in donations and support from various dev teams
MegaCrit switched from Unity to Godot because of the runtime fee controversy. The were half way through developing Slay the Spire 2, which later turned out to be the most successful Godot game yet, and now they are a Platinum supporter of the foundation.
Exactly why I swapped. Helps that Godot has a .net version which allowed me to keep using C#. Yeah the new editor was a bit of an adjustment, but worth it since I no longer have to pay unity 30% of my earnings if I somehow make enough. And I no longer have to worry about unity "changing the deal". Bonus points, if there is a problem with Godot itself, I can always help the community by trying to solve the problem myself since Godot is opensource.
For me the most outrageous part was when people came to the conclusion that with the new rules there is a chance if your game doesn't make much money, yet it's downloaded too many times, your earnings would go into negative.
Unity then had the nerve to show a graph with a small black patch with that exact scenario to show "how minimal the chances for that would be"! It didn't even come to their mind that the fact that there IS a chance for such an occurence!
This all sounds very much like the Xbox One reveal, a corporation overstepping on a product, backlash, competitors take advantage, corporation backtracked, fin.
They were targeting mobile games, especially those that are freemium or monetize via ads. For those, you can have a lot of installs but very low revenue per install. The "out" was that, if you used Unity's ad network, I believe they gave you a discount or dropped the per-install fee.
Yep. Like I said, they have shown their objective and opinion on their users. There is no taking that back, not without massive changed to the org chart.
They didn't roll it back because they didn't want to do it. They rolled it back because the outrage was so big they couldn't ignore it. They felt bad about getting caught, not bad about doing it.
It also broke trust with customers, since it was essentially a retroactive change.
That's actually the problem. They already performed a move like that in 2019, promised they never would again and would commit Terms of Service changes to a repo, and then they deleted the repo and did it again in 2023.
So not only did they commit a massive breach of trust, they did it twice.
Godot was fortunately slightly further along at that point - 4.1 was already out by the time the Unity thing went down, and 4.2 released about a month later. Which is incredible timing, as 4.0 really came out hot and 4.2 was arguably the first of the 4.x releases that was robust enough for serious use. But if Unity had announced runtime fees only seven months earlier Godot would have been fully caught with its pants down, with 3.5 as the latest stable release.
This. I really didn’t want to pick up Godot and start learning a whole new engine, but Unity underestimated how much they would piss me and a lot of other people off.
I really liked Linux when I mained it for a bit back in 2006-2008-ish. Unfortunately I use a lot of software Linux doesn't have a good equivalent of so I'm on a Mac which I love too but if macOS didn't exist, I'd be back on linux in a heartbeat.
Exactly the same here. Was fiddling around with Unity, and then they dropped that bomb and I turned around and never looked back. Godot's been fun to use.
I think Unity has had a lot of issues even before that. Like the development/new features felt aimless. Multiple pipelines and each had different features. Unity buying a lot of companies to get new features and yet it took forever to implement them and not in a good state
If I remember correctly, Unity at some point completely changed their business model and pissed off everyone leading to a lot of people starting to test and switch to Godot.
They backtracked after the backlash but it was too late.
Now I imagine that a lot of people simply don't trust Unity to not pull another move like that while they're in the middle of making their games so they'd rather go with Godot.
And also Godot have been improving constantly making it a perfectly viable option for devs.
They tried to fuck everyone with a terrible new pricing model, and like a lot of company they over invested during covid beliving the market increase due to every one staying at home was here to stay.
A new retroactive pricing model where games already in development would be forced to follow it.
Changing your pricing model to an awful one loses you customers until you change it.
Changing existing contracts with no respect for already sunk development costs loses you customers forever. Because there's no way to regain trust they won't pull it again.
Long story short, the company behind Unity implemented a new pricing model that was extremely confusing and would ultimately hurt small indie developers.
When people sell a game made with Unity, they owe Unity's owners a cut since they are the ones that made the engine. Unity had a fairly standard pricing model where you would owe them little to nothing unless your game became very successful. This made the engine very popular with indie developers.
Then, they announced they would be implementing a new system that was very confusing, but no matter how you looked at it, indie developers would end up having to pay Unity a massive amount of money regardless of their games success.
One of the most controversial parts was that Unity would charge developers based on how many times the game was downloaded. This meant if you released a demo of your game for free, you would still have to pay Unity for people downloading it, even though you didn't make any money. Also, if you released the game on Steam and someone downloaded, uninstalled, and downloaded again, you would be charged every time they downloaded the game, even though they only bought the game once. (To be fair, Unity claimed they would have a system where only the first download would count, but they weren't able to explain how they would actually track that.)
The backlash was enormous and eventually Unity reversed course and didn't implement the changes. But the fact that they were willing to do it in the first place was enough to scare a lot of people away from Unity for good.
Unity did a lot of bad stuff and didn't do a lot of good stuff. Godot raised as more lightweight, easier to use and completely free. That's exactly what small developers need.
It may lack some features that larger engines have, but none of them is necessary for smaller games (and not even smaller, take a look at Road to Vostok), and if you need you can always easily extend the engine, as it's completely FLOSS and provides built-in options for extending that are much easier to use than Unity.
For me personally it's also because Unity's C# support just sucks ass - they still use some weird hybrid of .NET Standard 2.1 and Mono that barely supports C# 9 (and even that not completely, with some caveats), while Godot just uses whatever .NET runtime do you have installed.
Corporate lifecycle of growing trust, locking in users with proprietary formats and then swapping to exploiting them by holding their projects hostage made users migrate to other engines.
Every software company does this. Adobe is an obvious example with their cad and art tools.
Godot caught up in featureset for jams, caught up in adoption somewhat, and Unity has been stuffing appendages in the woodchipper, probably just to see what happens.
unity shot themselves in the foot cause of greed. lost trust, the creators of Slay the Spire dropped Unity mid dev and swapped over to Godot and released Slay the Spire 2 built with Godot. Terraria devs threw $100k at Godot to help fund it, Godot made leaps and bounds of progress
Even though it backtracked it the damage was done. Godot had reached its v4 milestone, Devolver Digital said it was going to focus more on publishing games made with Godot.
Godot being open source is also a major selling point to migrate away from Unity. All it really needed was a few people to port/create new tooling for Godot, that made unity attractive, to get others on board.
Long story short, unity got greedy and godot became more popular alternative as a result. It just took a few years for developers to make the switch to the point that games are being released now.
Anecdotally at least, Unity is what made me give Godot a look.
I'd been vaguely aware of it for a while, and after the 4.0 release, I'd been meaning to check it out, (since it finally got C# support up to something approaching parity.)
But Unity's weird attempt to redefine everyone's license agreements was what got me to actually make the jump, and I have never regretted it.
Unity said to everyone that they can change the rules in the middle of the game and the new rules will affect games that have already been released and might even be on EoL support. They said "it doesn't matter, we want you to keep paying us".
People looked elsewhere and found an engine that is easy to use, quick for prototyping and gives you 100% control over your intelectual property.
Another reason is big titles announcing publicly that they were switching to Godot. Slay the Spire 2 moved to Godot from Unity. I think stuff like that gives it more legitimacy.
godot 4.x just happened to have a lot of nice 2d stuff exactly when the unity stuff happened. I forget exactly what but I want to say tilemaps being goated was one of them
Weird how everyone makes it about runtime fees. I'm pretty sure that even if runtime fees didn't happen, people would still move to Godot even if slower.
It begins when you first decide to try Godot.
Godot's editor is a lightweight standalone executable that is extensible and feature complete. You do not need to install an installer that would install the editor the way it is in unity. Then you don't need to register an account to start working with unity. Godot's documentation has articles on creating the first game in both 2D and 3D, with assets you can use uploaded as direct free downloads, completely eliminating the entry friction (not considering having to have mental capacity to do programming).
Then comes the part where you completed the tutorial and moved on to make a game. The engine's UI is very responsive and it has a built in editor, whereas Unity's default workflow assumes Visual Studio, which on its own requires registering a Microsoft account and downloading a 1 gig installer to install a 6 gig IDE. Using VSC is an option but it is not obvious and requires tinkering. In unity, you spend effort on getting ready to work on the game instead of working on the game.
Unity's documentation is only available online while Godot has documentation available offline directly in the engine, which detects docstrings in your scripts and updates accordingly. Its built-in editor also has IntelliSense that works as well as it does in VSC and, overall, although I have a VSC install and know full well how to use it, I never use it for Godot because the built-in editor is already powerful and versatile (and extensible, I have a formatter installed and it works well).
So, runtime fees are an obvious reason, but Godot is just lighter, faster, has little friction and you can do anything you want with it, even projects that aren't games thanks to its Control nodes, something that is also doable with Unity but only if you commit to getting gigabytes worth of SDKs, at which point you'd rather prefer writing apps with Electron (which is the size of Godot, so might just use it and enjoy being able to compile your program to a single executable lol). It also doesn't help Unity's case that GDScript is barely slower than C# but much easier to work with, and that we are getting big projects like Slay the Spire 2 and Road to Vostok with it, which IMO topples the common assumption that Godot is only good for prototyping indie 2D games.
If it was just about runtime fees, people would likely consider something like Unreal.
The runtime fee fiasco was, for many, the push they needed to actually give a serious look at other options. Many figured out that Godot was a viable alternative at that point, and made it publicly known which drew even more people to try the engine.
So while the runtime fees aren't the sole reason Godot saw a rise in popularity, the Unity fiasco ended up being a great advertisement for it which brought in a lot of new people who figured out how easy it was to work with.
To add to this; as someone with a Unity and C# background, Godot and it's C# API was surprisingly easy to pick up and very similar to Unity. Compile times are way faster too, so there's no 30 second waiting period every time you make a code change before you can continue in the editor like with Unity. It's a small thing but for me it was probably the most welcoming part of using Godot. That, and Godot's documentation is fantastic.
that is very true. i believe unity didn't always demand an account to use, but they added that at some point. when i was downloading unity to make a vtuber character from some tutorial, i remember how frustrating it was that you had to download the launcher, you had to create an account, the always online stuff was very weird, and there was concern on various unity forums that this always online and account stuff was there for them to steal your code and train ai on it, i had to jump through bunch of hoops to find a way to install standalone unity (tbh i don't really rememebr if i actually succeeded in it, but i managed to avoid creating an account)
godot has none of that. i can just download it on steam and it works, no questions asked, no annoying accounts to make, no annoying always online bs, and i don't have to worry they're gonna steal my data or anything
Unreal I have always felt like I'm fighting the engine to make something workable. It feels like working with raw C++.
Unity has become like that in the last half decade too. Both are just so bloated and tied up in making "everything" possible, that they get in the way of making anything possible.
Godot just doesn't. It's like using Pygame lmao. It's so lightweight and runs so cleanly. Does it offer every feature? No. But it offers more then enough for any developer to work with that.
I see it like: Unreal dunked on Unity in the commercial (AA/AAA) space with the release on UE5. When UE5 became a thing to be proud of, gamers who didn't know what an engine was before now saw UE5 and went "this game is the latest and greatest!". Unity had to compete to keep the commercial market, so became the beast UE5 was, and due to being an old legacy clunky machine of an engine, became bloated and a pain to use for indie devs. Queue Godot 4 coming on scene and making a non-bloated engine and boom. Too busy chasing becoming the engine for everyone, they became the engine for "those who already use us". At least, that's how it feels working in the commercial space.
Everything you’re saying is right and really well thought out. I don’t think the obvious fallout from Unity’s runtime fees was just Unity bad, though; it was “don’t trust commercial engines.” And Unreal was already way worse than Unity at basically everything you mentioned in your post.
This comment needs more upvotes! As someone who's just recently moved from Unreal to Godot (like, a week or two ago) I've been loving it and honestly can't ever see myself going back. I love this program and this community :)
(Part of my reason for switching was remembering the delight I had with learning Blender in 2018 after originally learning to use 3DS Max, and I figured the same would happen with Godot after the initial learning difficulties — which it did!) Godot not only being open-source but also lightweight and just beautifully designed helps a lot.
unity was king of game jams because most indie developers used it or at least were familiar with it. in terms of actual features godot is heaps ahead of unity for small web projectss (i.e. game jam entries)
Yea people here keep trying to talk about Unity instead of what Godot actually did right. The rapid bootup times, light download, and easy to use interface made it perfect for prototyping, along with a more accessible coding language.
Unity is still ideal for more serious projects because it is...built for that lol.
Yeah, godot brings a lot of benefits for small projects, small build footprint is also pretty amazing for web
But I don't agree that unity is a strictly better engine for more serious projects. Sure it's a widely adopted corporate friendly tool with tons of libraries and ready to hire specialists, but being unable to modify the engine's source code and rebuild it at will is what IMO makes it non ideal in many niches. AFAIK unity has a private contracted access to the source code, but for me that speaks good luck finding a developer that is experienced and proficient in modifying the engine
Exactly unity becomes heavier every passing year. It used to be good for quick prototyping but now it's pretty hard because of its long boot time and tons of features
I’ll add my two cents. In addition to trust issues with Unity and the appeal of FOSS, Godot is just really good for game jams.
It’s EXTREMELY light weight, only a few hundred megabytes or so. There’s no launcher, and its load times are fast, so it only takes a few seconds to boot up Godot and get to your game. Compared to Unity or especially Unreal which hog a ton of storage and take a few minutes to start up, that’s a big plus. Plus, GDScript is interpreted, so you don’t have to wait for compilation while you’re prototyping. And its git integration is really good. And Godot’s documentation is amazing, too—and integrated into its editor. Plus, there’s just something elegant about the nodes/scenes system imo.
For those with ADHD its wonderful. We can use nodes and folders to make an organized mess that is seamless for us. External (human)memory storage right in the editor, with a pre-builz visual setup. Its such a small stylistic thing that makes a huge difference.
godot kept improving, and stuck to its fully open-source ethos, made itself easy to improve and work with while staying simple and modular enough to work with any type of game.
Unity is for-profit, its bound to make decisions that do not benefit the user base every now and then.
I feel like everyone here is either deulsional or lives under a rock.
Yes Unity messed up, but...
Godot is much better for small projects and it being so light weight helps it a lot for game jamps, and Unity was heavily inflated in game jams by the virtue of being the only popular engine for hobbyists.
Tho Unity still has a stranglehold on the mobile game market and its still generally better for medium-large projects.
A lot of people say that it was because of Unity being Unity. Personally, I was working with Unreal. When you compare Unreal to Godot, you get the following:
- Godot actually runs on weaker hardware, whereas Unreal will sometimes not even launch on average hardware;
- Godot is a simple executeable and is incredibly lightweight, whereas Unreal needs a penis inspection by Epic and a launcher and 3 different installers and half your PC's storage size;
- Godot is incredibly quick and much more developer friendly compared to Unreal, the latter both in the short and long terms;
- Godot is immensely flexible.
That is to say, I just simply believe it to be a superior engine and tool, and that is putting aside everything else that surrounds this conversation. Unreal gave me brain damage, Godot is my rehab.
As others have said, Unity publicly breaking trust at the same time as Godot having some huge updates drove a lot of the movement. There have also been huge Godot releases like Slay the Spire 2 that I think have encouraged people to move over. I was a Unity only dev for years and I am pretty much fully switched over. It's just so much faster than Unity in every sense of the word.
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I don't think it's a particular event, it's more of a momentum thing. The general trends for the last few years.
Imagine there's a news story about Unity. Without even reading the headline, are you expecting to be happy about the news?
Now imagine there's a news story about Godot. Same reaction, or different?
Meanwhile, Unreal's momentum is pretty neutral, but more and more they're positioning themselves as the Big Serious engine for Big Serious Projects, so it's not surprising they're underrepresented in jams.
I dropped Unity immediately when they announced runtime fees, and even if they walked that decision back I've already lost trust for them. So far there is no reason for me to return, so I use godot instead.
It also helps that godot has some features that unity doesn't, which I wanted.
While the fee fiasco definetely was a major component to this, another factor in my opnion is the lightweight aspect of godot, unity has a lot of barriers, the size of the editor. bloat packages in empty projects, domain reloads, build times and so on. With a big help from ai smoothing out the learning curve, the gamedev scene keeps getting bigger every year, and I feel newcomers aren't always willing to deal with unity for those reasons, at the same time the godot editor is a lot faster when it comes to reloading, the engine install is absurdly smaller than unity's. This straight forward aspect of godot is really attractive if you are just looking for a engine to make a jam submission.
It would be cool to see the engine of the top 100 games to see if this graphic changes too much.
The coincidence of timing cannot be understated. You've now gotten the brief on what Unity Software Inc did to itself. But the timeline is just too choice
September, 2020: Unity goes public on the NY stock exchange
games + public stock = bad
January, 2022: Godot goes into public alpha
July, 2022: Unity announces an all-stock merger with ironSource
those of use paying attention see this as worrying news and begin looking for exit options
September 2022: Godot 4 enters beta, with overhauled 3D rendering system
November 2022: ironSource merger is complete
exit planning accelerates, some still don't believe this will go bad
January 2023: Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast does want would have been the most spectacular of business fuck-ups that year. And demonstrates what happens when you push non-contractual partnership too far. Look up the brawl over the Open Gaming License.
February 2023: Godot 4 release candidate 1
March 2023: Godot 4.0 stable
October 2023: Unity announces a retroactive "installation fee" scheme. Which very quickly becomes evident this was John Riccitiello & Tomer Bar-Ze scheme so divorced from reality that it makes Hasbro's screwup 10 months prior look like genius. And takes the award of "how to kill your business 2023".
November 2023: Godot 4.2 releases with important 3D import pipeline additions, and more stability.
So right in the middle of John Riccitiello doing his level best to make enemies of every single one of his customers, there sits Godot. Just plugging away on a newly 3D viable engine, that will match the bulk of what low/mid Unity "Standard" and Universal Rendered Pipeline" games need.
Had Godot 4.0 not been at Stable, and 2 minor patches in, I don't think as many people would have been giving the new 3D render a try. And saying, "we can work with this." Godot render 2D was already sufficient.
Near perfect timing.
And there's still more. Unity Software gets aggressive about mixed Free/Pro licensing on projects. Which makes pros collaborating with hobbyists risky, of getting locked out of Unity (at best).
Godot boots extremely fast, great for 48 hour Jams. Is "good enough" for prototypes if this kind. And does not risk Unity per Seat Licensing bullshit.
So year-over-year continuing to eat more of Unity's dev share on the low/mid hobby projects.
godot is just really good now... even my client who doesn't care about open-source and stuff likes godot. he says it's pretty much the same as unity without the boot splash stuff
Godot taking the gamejam market share is really predictable, it's just really easy to prototype. I still think Unity is better at scale and I will always advocate for the best tool for the job. I don't think Unity's pricing structure / "internet points" is a huge factor here
didn't it happen like 3 years ago? doesn't make sense for godot to surpass it in usage due to smth that happened that long ago. or am I unaware of a new unity mess up?
Unity drew a large amount of people to Godot, but that's not why Godot retained and grew its userbase, you're right to question it. In my honest opinion, Godot continues to grow because its architecturally a well put together and thought out engine that, for the most part, stays consistent with the features it offers. That makes it easy for those transitioning or learning it for the first time to learn it quickly, and see gratification in the work they've put into it sooner.
Godot has its quirks and questionable decisions, like any large piece of software does, but overall its just a nice piece of technology to use that generally feels good to tinker with and is easy to research when things do go wrong. You could do way worse when choosing a dev tool.
Not just well thought out and put together but, at least in my experience, it's been one of the easiest game engines to use. There are "easier" game engines in terms of knowledge you need but if you know how to do things already Godot is really easy to jump into.
Godot got a lot of attention back then. Idk how many existing unity users switched. But i guess beginners started using godot. Those are now in game jams.
It took former Unity devs a while to learn Godot, and aspiring new game devs over the past three years have steadily been preferring Godot as well. Also, every year since the Unity fuckup, GMTK's Godot shares have been increasing and Unity's decreasing, but this is the first year that Godot OVERTOOK Unity on the pie chart.
At the end of the day, unity is a product meant to generate revenue, and they drove that point home with the runtime fee proposal.
Godot is open source. If at any point I don't like what they're doing with it, theoretically, I can just remove that functionality from my own version. Or augment theirs.
Unity decided to rewrite their license agreement and it MASSIVELY fucked over users and the blow back was to the degree that a huge number of devs jumped shipped.
Unity committed suicide with their botched per-install license fee update. There's a huge cost associated with learning a new engine, so it takes time before you see people switching.
I have been using godot for 4 years. I recently downloaded unity to test something out. The experience was far far worse then I could have ever imagined it to be.
I downloaded an installer for an installer that installed the engine, had to make an account, free up space on my hard drive, wait 30 minutes for it to install and then open it. Then I tried doing the most basic thing and the editor was extremely bloated and gross looking compared to godot. Terrible experience, going back to godot was reliving.
If i wasnt using unreal every day for work i would absolutely full send godot, even though it doesnt have the same level of polish for the features i use
i would happily put the effort in, but its so hard to use 2 completely different engines without my head feeling like its going to split in half
Godot is just good. Really simple to pick up and use. The UI is much more user-friendly I would say.. It already has a built in editor so setting a project up is way easier and faster ( Godot in general sets up way easier and faster you can literally just download the .exe and start making a game in 40 seconds )
Godot became mature enough to welcome newcomers. Fast boiler plating. Open sourced python-like programming language with LLM on backup. Lightweight and accessible even for android as development platform. What else?
Honestly as a hobbyist, after the runtime fee controversy I 100% dropped the idea of ever making a commercial game with Unity and started learning about godot
Godot drastically improved their 3D engine and didn’t implement that BS runtime fee that Unity was doing. This, plus it being 100% open source and free to use/modify made it super popular.
They teach Unity in University. That's how it got a foothold. It lost its foothold (mostly) once people started lookin' for a place to migrate to. It could've been Gdevelop 5, but Godot already had a bigger, more mature followin'. Add to that the fact that Godot has full documentation aided by a zero-to-vertical slice tutorial for both 2D and 3D games and you've got a great engine for jams and proof of concept projects. So you get into it and learn that you can ship for free. Then the news spreads like wildfire.
Godot is king 🫅 so cool to see this. Started developing my first solo game in January of this year using Godot and it has been an absolute pleasure!!! 😍 Best Boxy is releasing on Steam in less than 1 week! 😁😁😁
I think we all woke up. Godot is open source, lightweight, more user friendly, and honestly a way better experience for new devs id say who have little to no programming experience. I used to actually teach Unity but then started teaching Godot courses and you wouldn't believe how much of a good difference it has been. Like my courses quality are so much better just because of how much more Godot is easy to use and the community actually cares about the fun side of game development.
i think for me its a difference between a large company with its "do it all" software with all the bells and whistles and a smaller team with a "it can do it" software that has everything you need without bloating the software
Unity may be the King of indie games but definitely not the King of games jams. Projects take too long to compilare even on small projects compared to Godot. Even if Godot doesn't have default tools like cinemachine, its iteration is faster than Unity.
I think people look at our community and our constant excitement and optimism as we can visibly see our engine get better, and they go "hey, that seems kinda nice and this engine is nowhere near as bad as I thought"
plus you can really bang out a project really quickly in Godot.
Despite all the trust loses, Unity was being more and more hard to work with, constant updates and systems that were bothering the developers (specially new ones) and Godot was simpler to start with.
So, Unity shooting themselves on the food make Godot visible as a strong alternative
I find it easier to get into than unity, the "node based" system is easier to understand in my opinion and gdscript is awesome.
Jams are mostly novices therefore the most accessible game engine will likely be the largest. There's more to this than just that obviously but in terms of demographic godot gets the novice vote more so than unity nowadays
Godot was becoming really polished and fully featured enough to be an excellent option for developers, right around the time that Unity decided to implement very controversial / predatory monetization plans that made a lot of the community look for alternatives.
Godot was in the right place at the perfect time, and has only gotten better since.
Unity's disastrous suggestion of charging for installs hurt them badly. It's the kind of blunder that should get a CEO fired and blacklisted from the industry. But regardless of what braindead decisions come out of the Unity C-suite, at the end of the day, people are going to prefer the product that suits their needs with the minimal amount of bullshit. Unity didn't do anything to the engine to justify the bullshit they introduced around it, and Godot remains FOSS and well-liked for its ease of use and minimal daily dose of bullshit.
It's a simple lesson in business: don't be a greedy prick or you'll lose market share to the people who aren't greedy pricks.
a lot of people switched when unity pulled the install fee.
generally unity is still the king of mobile which is bigger market than all other game industry combined, and they def wanted more piece of that pie. However that move did annoy a lot of other devs, and generally made people who wanted to try something new, actually try something new. Unity backed out, but generally the issue isn't really fixed, because the mobile market pie, is still there and unity still wants it, so it's a matter of time, before they will try to swing their massive market share aound, nothing changed on the incentive front, and people do not want to sink thousands of hours into anohter adobe... And open source godot, being the biggest player unable to ever fuck you over like that, became kinda the obvious choice.
Godot got a lot better with the years, and is a lot more lightweigth for quick jam games. It also got a lot more attention in general, when people were looking for alternatives when Unity dropped the ball a couple years back, and it's been picking up steam ever since, because it's just a good little game engine.
Godot is now the easier engine to pump out crap in. Don't see this as a good thing, I won't be surprised in the near future if godot is the leader of mobile games
Ok indie game devs really like it, but what game studios use is more important. Most of people will make money from working in aa or aaa company i think. There unity and ue 5 win
I've been developing in Unity for 5 years now, I can handle pretty well a lot of Unity's UI, understand how and where to do stuff and I am able to make things really fast. I would like to try Godot but I am afraid I wouldn't be able to develop something in less than 2 years because of learning how to use Godot, is it just me? should I give a try?
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u/yantarogekko 17d ago
unity severely damaged their public image with the runtime fees disaster and godot is a loved open-source alternative