1 wk. ago • 99%

Godot founders had desperately hoped Unity wouldn't 'blow up'

www.gamedeveloper.com Godot founders had desperately hoped Unity wouldn't 'blow up'

Godot was a big winner when devs revolted against Unity's Runtime Fee—but its founders were worried about a surprise influx of users.

Game Development @programming.dev Godot founders had desperately hoped Unity wouldn't 'blow up'

65 comments

It's great that Godot was in a good place when Unity had its (inevitable?) implosion. Having used both engines I think they are comparable enough that Godot was a perfect fit for small indie and casual devs to move over to without having to learn a completely new workflow. If Godot hadn't been around I don't know where everyone would've migrated to.

105
- I'd argue Unity's implosion was wholly evitable. All they had to do was announce, going forward, there would be different licensing. Big new version six months from now? Hey guess what, we'll do things differently from then on, so make your preparations accordingly. But no - they fucked over existing projects. They tried to retroactively interfere with the business decisions of games that were years into development.
  
  Oracle only gets away with that shit because they're an eight-ton gorilla. And people still desperately look for the exits every time Larry Ellison announces a relicensing scheme based on how many computers you can think of.
  
  47
Glad to see there are some level heads leading this project. Also great answer to how to pronounce it, the GIF creator should've gone for that instead of the pun.

79
- Yeah except it's named after the play so it's definitely pronounced God-oh. I think people just mispronounce it Go-dot if they haven't heard of the play. Looking at you Mr Linus Tips.
  
  44
  
  but also the logo for the project is a robot so pronouncing it like that word makes sense and means it won't be confused with the play: ro-bot, go-dot.
  
  1
  
  From the article linked on this very post:
  
  Those open source values even extend to how you pronounce the engine's name. We asked if Godot is pronounced "Go-dough," like the play, or "Go-dot."
  
  "It's open source," Verschelde said with a grin. "Pronounce it however you like."
  
  66
  
  And its logo is a robot, so it isn't unreasonable to think it's go-dot
  
  4
  
  My name is Empricorn. But it's pronounced "Plarxaniatl"!
  
  0
Unity was one of the first applications that made me take a good look at FOSS in general because my experience with it was:

"Hey let's make a game for our final project"

"Okay, let's try Unity"

Flashbanged in light mode

Dark Mode is only available for real cash money subscription license

"Yeah okay nvm let's try something open source lol"

67
- Meanwhile in my engine's editor, the default is dark mode, with no plans on making light mode on my end.
  
  3
- They really paywalled dark mode? That move alone is incredibly dumb. Surefire way to alienate potential new users before they've even tested anything serious.
  
  28
  
  Used to. It took a single registry tweak to enable it which was easily found, but still a pain.
  
  17
- I'm building something heavily reliant on the physics engine. Unity you need to be an enterprise member for the ability to override methods related to physics. Easy choice
  
  18
  
  Is that why so many unity games have the same feel? I've started looking into the game engine that's used and avoiding unity games.
  
  11
Joe-Dot

41
I've been with unity since the early days and back then it was this simple little engine.

Today it's a nightmare. I just made an hdr project and imported their own terrain example assets and guess what? It's broken in multiple ways. Now I have to waste time fixing it, instead of focusing on my project. And that's as a unity expert rather than a beginner.

That's not to mention all the errors it loves to throw at me, even though it's all quite vanilla. And how it loves to grab my attention with popup windows that block my view. How builds fail when I focus on another window. I could go on.

They keep adding features without finishing them. Clearly some kind of impulsive marketing behavior, rather than listening to the experts.

The cherry on top is that licensing nonsense they pulled, putting my hard earned livelihood in danger. That stuff really makes you scratch your head and look around.

Seriously, try out Godot.

Edit: I actually just realized I haven't even started yet with truly getting stuff off my chest here.

38
- go ahead mate, let it out, you'll feel better
  
  14
  
  Okay one thing that bothers me so much is how hard it is to hook custom logic into the play button. Like all I want is my own script to run when someone presses play.
  
  Sometimes this is important because you need to do some processing on the scene. Or perhaps the scene is a UI scene or something and you just want to start from another scene that shows the UI at work.
  
  Like if you are developing a UI, you just wanna press play and it should just work and play. Either from the start scene or a test scene.
  
  That's the weird thing about unity. On one hand it allows you to do a lot of editor customization, and I haven't worked on a project yet that doesn't have some form of that. On the other hand, you can't even hook into or replace the play button logic, which you could argue is the most basic action of all.
  
  Another thing is that a client I am working for just switched to unity's version management. And it just doesn't work in a straight forward way. I still don't have that working because I need to work and get stuff done.
  
  Another thing is that their new animation system didn't even allow me to query the duration of an animation, at least back when it came out and kept marketing with it. We actually ended up writing an entirely parallel system with meta data which was overly complicated for what we needed.
  
  I could go on..
  
  3
- @xilliah @popcar2 one big thing that got me when dabbling with Unity a year or so ago, an empty project still has over 20 thousand files in it!
  
  Don't know if it is the same now but it in no way felt practical for a hobbyist who would likely create a new project for every little idea.
  
  2
The pair said it was a major relief that the calamity came after version 4.0 of Godot was released in March of 2023. That version, they felt, was most ready for a sudden rush of new developers.

Sounds like they saw it coming for a long time and successfully prepared for it

37
No amount of precedent will get me to stop pronouncing it G'doh.

This isn't a Qt situation where the people who named it are objectively wrong about how those letters should get said. I just do not like any of the other options.

20
- Wait, how is it supposed to be pronounced?
  
  6
  
  Qt? They insist it's "cute," which, no.
  
  Godot? Don't care.
  
  12
Meanwhile I picked Defold as my engine of choice and absolutely love it.

14
- Does 'it' mean Defold or the learning curve?
  
  7
  
  I meant Defold, though I picked it up pretty easily. That said, I had very limited programming experience. It might be different for people used to working with other engines.
  
  3
- Right on
  
  2
Godot went from a promising but limited engine for hobbyists to the 2nd most popular engine for solo developers in about a year. We're even finally seeing high quality Godot 3D games releasing to Steam.

Give it a year or two and Godot might start to make headway into the established studios, too.

Unity's implosion has been amazing for loads of engines. other than Godot too. Bevy is making progress, and some of the biggest indies this year are on less known engines, like Balatro's Love engine

12
I’m not really surprised! It’s come a looooong way since 3.0, but I’m glad to hear that the newer users are understanding of the model. I guess we have Blender to thank for that

10
Few people get to choose their fate.

7
How do you guys pronounce it? Go-dot or guh-dough

6
- god-oh with no stressed syllable, like a french person with that name might pronounce it
  
  11
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot
  
  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/1/14/En-us-Waiting_for_Godot.oga/En-us-Waiting_for_Godot.oga.mp3
  
  11
I was trying to remember the other game making programs other than Godot and unreal, I genuinely forgot about unity

5
It serves my purposes well enough, and I enjoy using it.

5
You must wait to find out.

2
I don't really understand, Unity started as garbage. Sure it got better. Now what's this about it blowing up?

-1
- Unity's new revenue demands and that roll out blew it up. Not really the engine. They rightfully earned a lot of distrust.
  
  13
- Blowing up as in catastrophically failing.
  Not blowing up as in to the moon.
  
  5
- The company isn't in great shape and their lack of focus made them neglect important parts of their main breadwinner, which is the engine itself. And corporate greed made their core product unattractive. I know a couple of big studios that said they will not make any new game in Unity because of the licensing fiasco.
  
  3

You've viewed 65 comments.