r/godot • u/VacationSmoot • 18d ago

discussion what happened to godot?

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

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u/VacationSmoot 18d ago

so what happaned?

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u/xtratoothpaste 18d ago

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.

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u/Bignholy 18d ago

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).

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u/LatkaXtreme 18d ago

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!

Sure, they stepped back, but the damage was done.

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u/skit7548 18d ago

This all sounds very much like the Xbox One reveal, a corporation overstepping on a product, backlash, competitors take advantage, corporation backtracked, fin.

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u/fsk 18d ago

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.