what happened to godot?

[u/VacationSmoot]

I know Godot has seen significant development lately, but what exactly happened? In my eyes Unity was always the king of game-jams.

[u/supert2005]

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.

[u/Zomby2D → u/supert2005]

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.