1409

One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 78 points 1 year ago

Yeah, now I'm concerned this might happen with Unreal Engine, even though they've given no indication that it will. Once Godot works out the kinks with level and texture streaming, and has a landscape editor I will be going back to Godot.

[-] AProfessional@lemmy.world 97 points 1 year ago

Proprietary software can never be truly trusted. You are always at their whims.

[-] Epicurus0319@sopuli.xyz 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Long-term I think corporate tech as we know it is screwed. Their explosive growth from the pandemic making everyone terminally online is drying up as more and more people go back to touching grass, so now the bill’s coming due and it’s only a matter of time now before Unreal also does something stupid we can’t even imagine for a quick buck

[-] elscallr@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

People were terminally online well before 2019. It exacerbated the problem but we're not going back. I don't really think that's a problem, technologically it pushed us further ahead which is always a good thing.

You're right in that we are starting to rediscover what it means to be physically social again. I think that's a good thing, too. People that got away with shit before aren't getting away with it any more.

[-] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

The problem is that interest rates have gone up after being extremely low ever since the 2008 crash, so investors lost their endless supply of debt-fuelled free money. They can't pump money into companies operating at a loss anymore, so suddenly those companies have to find a way to turn a profit.

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.

You can see how that's working out for them.

[-] thantik@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago
[-] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Nice, it's been 6-7 months since I used Godot. Glad they got a terrain editor ported over.

[-] RockHornet@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The biggest thing about Epic is that it is NOT a publicly traded company.

It doesn't mean that it's not subject to the "Infinite Growth Disease" but look at their biggest investor: Sony and Tencent.

Both Game companies that SHOULD be more interested in having access to a good game engine than to make every dollar's possible.

this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
1409 points (99.4% liked)

Games

31808 readers
1184 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS