Who on earth would rely on a game engine in bankruptcy?
They aren’t nearing bankruptcy first of all, and I as I mentioned even in this doom-and-gloom scenario they would likely just get acquired and operations would continue as normal. Is that what you think? That Unity is about to go bankrupt? I am not sure what we’re arguing here.
Engines need a constant conveyor belt of new games to sustain their revenues and I don’t see this happening.
What are you basing this observation on? Unity never made money from the volume of games released using their engine. Also, the part where everyone is suddenly dropping Unity is mostly just a narrative here on social media, and the bulk of the reason why it might not be happening is that there is no true alternative.
And yes there is pain and a learning curve to moving to other engines though I think most programmers would be able to cope with change and if they’re that incurious and inflexible that they can’t then maybe it’s time to find new programmers
It is not about coping and being incurious. Changing engine means trashing a part of your team, trashing your content pipeline, trashing your internal tools. It costs a lot of money, money which most studios don’t have. It would make sense if there was a true alternative to Unity for those mid-sized studios, which there isn’t.
As for Godot, I am sure it is not a 100% feature for feature replacement for Unity. But it sure as hell is capable of powering 95% of indie games out there no trouble whatsoever and I daresay some more challenging titles
Again, not sure what you’re basing those numbers on. Godot can’t even do consoles natively so there is definitely some troubles and headache in using Godot in 2023. I would agree that Godot is perfectly fine for solo devs and very, very small teams, but it is not a serious alternative for even mid-sized productions. It is still pretty much a toy compared to the bigger engines, and it lacks commercial support to really attract those studios.
I get it. The popular sentiment here is that Unity is doomed to fail, and the internet as a whole kind of wish it did. I am not gonna gather sympathy and votes by saying otherwise, but I just don’t see it. Godot is not ready, switching to Unreal does not make much sense since it is the same proprietary “garbage”. It is easy to make big statements here on Lemmy and claim how easy it would be for game studios to get rid of Unity, and how this would improve their business, but to be honest I don’t think you guys have a clue. If you are actually a developer or own a game studio then I am sorry for assuming.
Unity is not going anywhere, even in a bankruptcy it would get acquired by the likes of Microsoft or Meta. The “good guys startup” Unity is long gone, and it’s been replaced by the same corporate structure you would expect anywhere.
Tying yourself to Unreal would be just as naive, and Godot is nowhere ready to fill the niche Unity is filling. I would place the opposite bet as yours, the vast majority of actual game devs are not rich enough nor care enough about corporate drama to ever switch engine for possibly worst. Also, experienced C# Unity devs and experienced C++ Unreal devs are not that interchangeable. Unity made this move to survive and they know there is no true alternative.
This is my pov, I worked in the industry for over a decade and I am an Unity ex-employee.
It is a double-edged sword for a dev. When a genre is over-satured (which most arent) there is usually a large player pool of potential customers but you’re competing with so many games that realistically your game needs to be really amazing to compete. Reason is that there is so many soul-like that a lot of players have a backlog of games to play already, and unless yours reach top 10 or something, there could be dozens and dozens of games that are simply more enticing than yours, meaning the average gamer will never make it to playing your game.
Making a game that makes it to the top on a saturated genre is simply very hard, and a very risky business decision.
I mean, you can blame him for a lot of stuff but he designed quite a few iconic games. Most game designers will spend a lifetime and not achieve just what molineux achieved in the 90s.