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.
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.
It’s not “the easy route”. Making a game engine is a tremendous investment these days. If you are making anything other than a game that looks like early 2000s or earlier, you need a pretty capable engine that takes years to develop. That’s on top of the time it costs to make a game, which is also typically years. Not to mention that your proprietary engine will have subpar tooling and make your game development slower.
For anyone but industry giants it’s not feasible to make a modern engine. Unless your game is not aiming to play and feel like a modern game, you have to run with an off-the-shelf engine.
Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s hard, the companies that did it are using it to control you and so now you don’t have a choice.
So get cracking or don’t complain.
Also Godot is a thing.
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:
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.”
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.
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.
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/
And yet somehow Godot exists.
Somehow, they managed to build a viable 2D and 3D open source engine without a massive AAA studio so clearly your assumptions are just wrong.
You just don’t like being told you have to take responsibility for a problem someone else caused, and to that, I don’t blame you. It’s not right that we have to go through any of this. But honestly, it’s time for us millennials to realize that putting in the elbow grease to build alternatives to what others have done to us isn’t doing that, it’s us building the infrastructure to allow us to move on from the powers that be, and if you want to break away from them, you have to. Your abusers will not liberate you for you.
It’s time to nut up and do it now.
You sound like you dont know anything about programming (at least engine programming). Most Engines have to run in something like assembly, else they would be too slow. (They use others too but Assembly is in like all, i am a junior dev so i could be wrong)
Assembly is already a large hurdle.
I mean it is “simple” as the arch linux type of “simple”. (Nothing more than you need to run it and nothing more)
So the option is to learn assembly or hire someone (or multiple) who can, good luck by finding one that is capable of developing an engine that does not suck and does not cost a fortune.
Then you need to know what the engine should do.
If you “only” need 2D or even only some system to interact with the console you will be fine, maybe.
3D is a bit more complicated, the reason why there are so much 2D/2,5D games out supports this claim.
Then particle support if you want it…
Every feature you want has to be supported!
And every feature costs and maybe needs maintenance when bugs occur. Supporting an operating system is a feature too :)
So the engine has to be updated when a mayor OS update comes out
There are more points for why not to make an own engine and use one of the marked that fits ones needs even if it is closed source.
You where so fond of Godot so trying to help them might be a good starting point for you to life your ideals. I sincerely dont want to mock you with the sentence. If you can successfully help a larger open source project everyone is happy. If you can learn something new i am sure it can benefit you. I was only a bit mad because it felt like you are comparing engines with “weekend projects” what they are definitely not in the slightest.
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.