And some of them realistically can’t. Every other commercial game engine is developed for the studio first; Cry, Source, Unreal etc. These engines were made for, well, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament. The studio saw returns for engine development in the sales of games, then they said “We could probably further monetize the work we’ve already done if we license the engine and SDK out to third parties.”
Unity on the other hand is trying to have the Autodesk/Adobe business model of “We have a free student or hobbyist tier, and then a commercial license that’s $100,000 per minute per seat.” The thing is, Autodesk and Adobe really don’t have realistic competitors in their market sectors. Unity very much does. Unity competes directly with GameMaker Studio, Godot, Unreal, Source 2 among others, the development of which are either directly supported by the sales of first party titles (or are outright FOSS projects in the case of Godot). So Unity has to set their prices to compete in that market, without the support of first party game sales.
It’s been my understanding that the general populace has been asking the developers of GIMP for years now to overhaul the UI and make it much friendlier to use, and the answer came back, “No, stop asking.”
Godot should definitely be adopted more by the indie and small studio scene. I think there’s going to be some folks who slide over to Unreal because Godot’s 3D capabilities don’t even match Unity’s yet, but there’s some stuff it can do, and it’s in active development.
Unreal has been in a different league basically since its inception. Compare the original Unreal engine to its contemporaries like Quake or Half Life and it’s amazing what they could do, if you had a box that could run it.
The difference between Unreal and Unity is Unreal has a sustainable viable business model (I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no “sustainable” business models under capitalism, what with demanding infinite growth and lal that). Epic Games develops their own games; the development of Unreal Engine has pulled its weight as a component of Fortnite and such. Same thing with Valve; I don’t think they ever bothered to charge for developing a game in the Source engine because they made their money for engine development through Half Life 2, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc.
Unity on the other hand doesn’t make and sell games, so they have to either directly charge developers (which they both do and don’t) or they operate their own adware nonsense. And neither of those revenue streams are enough. Which means they don’t have a viable business model. So they pull a stunt like this to hasten their inevitable bankruptcy.
Unity has an in-house advertising/monetization system called LevelPlay. It’s their system for putting ads/analytics/etc. in games. But not a lot of people use it; a lot of people use a direct competitor called AppLovin, which is just outright better.
Several developers have reported Unity quietly reaching out to them and saying “Hey, we see you’re using AppLovin…if you switch over to our LevelPlay service instead, we might just waive some or all of our new Fuck You Fee.”
So apparently this is being done to kill a competitor.
Godot is a full engine, I would position it in the market somewhere between Unity and GameMaker Studio. It is capable of making 2D and 3D games, though there’s some things Godot lacks, for example the asset streaming capabilities that allow for large seamless open worlds without loading screens, they’re working on that.
Godot runs on WIndows, Mac, Linux various BSDs, and they’re working on an Android port. Godot games can be exported to Windows, MacOS, Linux (and thus SteamDeck), BSD, Android, iOS and the web. Godot games can be ported to consoles, but Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are really fucky about licensing. The way you would go about publishing your Godot game to Playstation, Xbox or Switch is to work with a porting company who specializes in such things.
Fun fact: The Godot IDE is itself a Godot “game.” The Godot editor runs in the Godot engine and is built from UI tools available to end users; this makes it pretty easy to create tools and extensions to customize the editor to your team or project’s needs. It’s also a practical demonstration of how robust Godot’s UI creation tools are; I’ve been toying with the idea of building a woodworking CAD program in Godot.
2014: “You guys should be careful building your industry around proprietary tools, you really should think about open source-” “Blah blah blah stop your moralizing, open source software isn’t 100% ready to go right now so we absolutely can’t use it, instead we’re just going to pay money for this turnkey solution.”
2023: “Help! The proprietary turnkey solution we’ve been paying for this whole time is enshitifying! Subscription models, mandatory cloud services, more and steeper fees!” “Open source tools are still a thing, you know.” “Yeah but we’ve spent a decade telling an entire generation of talent to learn the proprietary stuff so it’s hard to migrate, and we didn’t contribute any code or money to FOSS projects this whole time so it still isn’t up to snuff.”
Well I guess you can slide over to Unreal and kick that can down the road a bit waiting for Epic Games to enshitify their product as well, you can use and contribute to Godot, you can develop your own in-house engine, or you can keep taking it up the ass from Unity.
Just let me ask this: If even a few smaller games, something like Unrailed or Papers Please, used Godot and contributed what they paid to Unity to the Godot team…where would the engine be today?