But now I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.
What has happened? Across the last few years, as John Riccitiello has taken over the company, the engine has made a steady decline into bizarre business models surrounding an engine with unmaintained features and erratic stability.
Unity is imploding in on itself, and it’s very sad to see.
That’s a giant shame for existing Unity games (I could see that pricing structure incentivizing the removal of download links for existing free games and the death of inclusion in Humble-style set-your-own-price bundles).
At least they waited until after Godot 4 came out and broadened the range of Unity use-cases that Godot is a viable alternative for.
( Speaking of which, another thing just announced today. Godot just launched an in-house replacement for their Patreon account so they can keep a higher percentage of the money people send them. https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/ )
And Unity being free and popular was the reason that gave us the free Unreal Engine option.
(At least that was the apparent reason).
Now, are we going back to a mono culture? Or will we have to choose between two bad options?
Imagine calling Godot and CryEngine bad
Funny thing is, I was warning Unity people the moment they’ve chosen that John “Dungeon Keeper Mobile” Riccitello as the (then) new CEO that this would happen. All that did was getting me banned from the Unity forums, which I am still banned from to this very day.
Bah Bah Bah BINGO! The second I saw John “Bleed “em Dry” Riccitello was CEO I knew that company was FUBAR’d, He was the one that ruined EA with every kind of loot box season pass premium currency scam he could stuff in, no shock he is doing the same here.
Let’s give full credit here, he was also the guy that started the whole thing with unrealistic deadlines and permanent crunch over at EA, especially after he became CEO in 2007 and got full control of the company.
What is needed, is an industry-standard, competitive, free and open source game engine, analogous to Blender in the creative-sphere. Game developers could be assured that nobody is going to pull a fast one on them. But this idea would not work in the real world, because game developers generally are as anti-open source as it gets, except when it comes to integrating open source libraries authored by others while making their products. Indeed, schemes like Securom exist to ensure that you have no ability to play your purchased games a decade from now, and no ability to fix them when they break. https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/621017-drm-securom-tron-evolution-unplayable-activation
So, if someone put out the perfect, ultimate open source game engine tomorrow which handles all types of games with ease, either one of two things would happen, depending upon the licensing of said engine. Either game developers would take it and not submit any improvements to it if it were BSD licensed, leading to the engine rotting and withering away of technical debt (how many people are using fixed-function shading or stencil shadows in 2023?), or, developers would simply refuse to touch it at all if it were copyleft, implying that developers have to pass on the same freedoms to their customers/user base that they enjoyed while building their games.
kbd,
Great question/points!
For the sake of discussion though: what if instead of a traditional game engine, you had a FOSS project that was a “game engine builder”. Much like how GNU C++ compiles binaries and blender helps generate assets, you might have a tool that lets users build their own proper game engine without imposing license restrictions on the output? The tool itself would be FOSS/copyleft, but the output binaries and opengl instructions would be owned by users.
Godot isn’t withering away so far, and it’s MIT-licensed. If anything, it’s making a good effort at following in Blender’s footsteps… it’s just not as far along the catch-up curve yet.
At first I thought this post was about Unity – the desktop environment 😀 Maybe should have disambiguoused it 🙂