this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)

Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.

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[–] adriaan 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You're not listening. It's not that it's hard (although it definitely is), it's literally just infeasible financially and time wise. You cannot spend millions developing an engine unless you are a large AAA studio. You can't pull up your bootstraps your way into making a modern game engine within the budget you have to make a game.

As for Godot:

  1. While games like Domekeeper and Luck Be a Landlord are great, they are made by two people and one person respectively. It has not proven itself as an engine capable of supporting the type of development cycle and team necessary for larger projects.
  2. The best games released in Godot are visually vastly inferior to anything you can whip up in other commercial engines. Its focus has been on 2D, and the 3D games released in it don't look great. Users expect more from bigger budget games.
  3. Godot is very new. Many games started development in its infancy, and some before it was even released as open source. Not to mention that most studios have existed much longer and are already established in an older engine, with lots of capital and knowledge locked up in those softwares. There is a lot of inertia to adapting new technology.
[–] captain_aggravated 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you're comparing apples to orchards here.

I'll grant you, Unity has been a commercial standard that many large and good games have been made in, Godot hasn't. Godot has been used largely by solo creators or small teams which has limited the scope and detail of the artwork in Godot games thus far.

This begs the question: What's the best looking solo-developed Unity game?

Does that game include a lot of purchased/sourced assets? Should that count as "solo" developed then? Given the contents of Steam's catalog, by sheer volume of titles it seems that Unity is THE engine for creating low effort shit-tier asset flip "games" that are little more than a tutorial project file with a retail price. "Games made in Unity" is a LOT of rough to look for diamonds in.

Once you've found the best looking solo-developed Unity game, ask yourself this: Could this game be remade in Godot? Is Godot technically capable of running a game like this?

I'm also unconvinced that Godot is inherently a poor choice for larger development teams. It has built-in support for versioning systems such as Git, and its modular node-in-scene system mean that different team members could work on different components independently, then bring their work together as a whole. There's also that whole aspect where the Godot editor is itself a Godot "game" that runs in the Godot engine, which means it's possible for developers to create their own extensions to the editor using the same skills needed to make games.

Beyond that, much of the work on graphics--3D art, level design, character/creature design, rigging, animation--a lot of that is going to be done in an art package like Blender rather than Godot. And yes I would suggest Blender for the same reason I'd suggest Godot, because Adobe and Autodesk are also pulling the same kinds of enshitification that Unity is.

The real reason that Unity is the industry standard? Because it's what they teach in school. "Learn Unity because that's what they use in the industry."

[–] adriaan 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry but if large teams could pick up Godot and make next-gen games with it just like that, they would. You can't. You can find absolutely stunning looking projects from solo creators in Unreal Engine. Sure you have assets from the asset store. That's the point - you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

[–] captain_aggravated 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm just not going to accept a baseless assertion that "you can't." Show me a technical reason why you couldn't build, say, Subnautica, in Godot.

[–] adriaan 4 points 1 year ago

Take it from godot themselves, they have a list of missing features for AA/AAA developers: https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

I said this in other comments earlier, you don't need to rewrite Unity to build your game. Build what you need, or pick up an open source product and add what you need. I don't understand why people bring up financial feasibility if you're being charged now for a wrong choice in the past. This was to be expected. It's always the same pattern. If you can't figure out how create your game without some false promise product, then don't build your game. It's really as easy as that.