This blog post points out something really interesting:
> Less than half their revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising.
That is to say, Unity makes most of its money from people PLAYING games made with Unity. The sales to the developers are secondary. Unity had to change their model, and that meant either making the engine cheaper to acquire more games to get more ads, or it meant raising the price of the engine at the likely cost of ads, and for some reason they chose option 2, which seems like a dumb idea.
The best explanation for that I can think of is that almost all of the advertising money should be coming from smaller mobile games, and so this is a move to try and make more money from the desktop games and the mobile games that don't use Unity's ad networks, which probably look like big, untapped sources of income to dumber product managers.
But now imagine that they did the opposite: they raise the maximum revenue requirements and "must show splash screen" requirements and generally make Unity more available for less. Engine revenue goes down a bit, but ad revenue goes up, which probably works out even better in the long run, but also solidifies the user base, garners good will, and generally leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.
Inconvenient opinion in the adware-fueled tech world, but ad income isn't a stable or safe source of income, and it's likely they're feeling that, and therefore jacking up the price for the engine. The big tech companies themselves feel it and spend a lot of money on "Other Bets".
Noob consumers may click ads, but after a while they program their brain to filter them out automatically. Or occasionally filter them out using technological measures. I bet that most ad clicks are by mistake or similar (especially ads in Unity games (which AFAIK are interstitial video ads)), or the user wasn't realizing what they were clicking on was an ad (noob users, or e.g. ads at the top of Google results, which used to be much easier to distinguish from actual results).
Most of my ad clicks are by mistake (due to bad page layout, or there just happened to be an ad where I happened to click), some (a handful of times per year at best) are to satisfy curiosity. And maybe a single one in my lifetime actually led to a purchase.
Google ads started out text-only, now they're pretty jarring on average. Guess why. However, there's a limit to how jarring you can make ads before consumers say bye-bye. Unity ads are probably way over the limit, Google are sort of tip-toeing along the line (or let's say they're over the line for a minority, and not quite for the rest).
>Inconvenient opinion in the adware-fueled tech world, but ad income isn't a stable or safe source of income, and it's likely they're feeling that, and therefore jacking up the price for the engine
You're right, but to expand: Apple's privacy changes at the beginning of 2022 screwed over a lot of adtech, and now the rise of AI is making ad providers even more speculative of certain types of content. I think Adtech is recovering now but for a company like Unity who relies on ads, it dealt them a huge blow for the last 18 months. That's probably what promtpted the merger/aquisition and started its plans into how it can extract more from its devs.
> Noob consumers may click ads, but after a while they program their brain to filter them out automatically.
Ads are not just about clicks. Half of all spending is brand advertising.
Noobs don’t click random SMB ads, and yet that’s like 40% of spending on mobile.
There are people who are “superclickers” and also super buyers. They’re just a really expensive audience to target, obviously.
Anyway, you’re extrapolating from your sole experience with ads. It is a super big ecosystem with a lot of rationality, as ridiculous as that sounds. It is growing a lot still, digital ad spending grows like $130b a year around now, which is the highest it’s ever been. So I don’t know, you’re not saying stuff that is substantiated in truth.
I don't think there's anyone not using unity today that would use it tomorrow because of a pricing change (well, at least, for values of today and tomorrow from last week)
It's not at the expense of advertisers, the advertising is staying the same. It's only at the expense of the advertiser in the sense that Unity is the advertiser and they've shot themselves in the foot.
The ad market is more competitive and very crowded there is no reason to use Unity for your ads if someone else offers a better deal.
Also Unity did try focusing on increasing ad revenue over the last several years, it didn’t work out that well.
> leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.
Making their engine entirely free would make most people feel even better.
> untapped sources of income to dumber product managers.
Why? Most Unity’s client’s don’t make much if anything at all a few make massive amounts. Due to the fixed licensing model the latter barely pay anything to Unity (e.g. compared to how much they pay storefronts/platform owners/ad networks). If they want to continue growing their revenue Unity has to get more from these customers, there aren’t that many other options.
Just because Unity’s revenue from ads is greater than from the engine doesn’t mean they need to change their model. It’s ok for one part of their business to make more, especially when the engine is still making lots of money too.
Didn't find this article especially helpful. Author admits to having no special knowledge so literally polls Twitter and shares the results. Doesn't really add much to the discussion.
I'd really like to see how alternatives handle stuff such as:
- Editor tools for non-artists
- Editor API for customization/automation
- Profiling CPU/memory
- Integration with things like FMOD, Spine, whatever else
- Tools for debugging
- How does level editing work, what tools are present to assist with visualization, organization, construction
Casey is a seasoned dev in the scene, with a decent resume of games and an even more impressive resume on knowledge in engine tech. Most notably, he's working on a new programming language called Jai that is tailored for game development.
So he may not be the most appropriate person to ask for game engine advice (since he says in the article, he makes and rolls a lot of his own tech), but he will inevitably be asked for his thoughts and advice on the situation regardless.
Godot is the most obvious answer from a long term non-profit perspective, but it's not without it's caveats. Rewriting is obviously difficult, starting new projects is somewhat easier. The main issue I see is the Unity asset store ecosystem is completely different and provides massive amounts of functionality for current games, which Godot doesn't yet have much of.
I've tried Godot a few times and basic stuff like export to web didn't work at all out of the box, and it felt like alpha quality stuff. I would however like it to succeed.
Unity also has extensive documentation and training and it's an established tool for game devs who then migrate to industry jobs like industrial process/environment simulations. I have a feeling Godot is barely aware of these scenarios as it's rarely the engine of choice.
To put this very directly, Godot is a meme in the commercial games industry. Most of companies with above AA cash would rather write their own engines than use Godot, as the maintenance effort would probably exceed the effort to write the own engine to spec.
Maybe Godot is more seriously considered by indies and open source fans. But then, Unreal Engine is also practically open source for any licensee, including ones that won’t ever pay a cent to Epic. So even in indies, it’s rare to see Godot.
I champion all development in games. So I wish good luck to Godot. I’ve actually been thinking about contributing, too. I think in some ways, the ethics of Godot are a breath of fresh air. But contributing to UE looks much better on a resume.
There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent. No marketplace actually is the least of its concerns as we don’t use marketplace stuff much in AAA/AA. The engine makes a lot more sense on paper than in reality.
> To put this very directly, Godot is a meme in the commercial games industry. Most of companies with above AA cash would rather write their own engines than use Godot
I find this an odd statement because from my perspective there aren't any AAA titles written in Unity either. They are all proprietary engines or Unreal nowadays.
So the question isn't if Godot can take over the AA, AAA games, it's can it take over the market currently served by Unity.
It probably can't right now, but probably not as far off as it seems either
> There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent.
Other than "instability" none of this is a criticism of the engine itself... so why is it a meme?
Edit: I'm actually really struggling to think of a game I would consider AAA that I know of made in Unity. Please help me out if you know of some I'm not aware of.
I hope Godot/Bevy do well but there's a kernel of truth there as well. It was not uncommon for us to make significant changes to licensed engines to meet the needs of the game style/design. UE3 for instance was pretty awful for open world titles(gears was quite a rails shooter and the engine reflected that), there's a number of titles that took the renderer and re-did many of the major game systems.
Once you make changes like that upleveling is a serious challenge. We had one dev who's responsibility was to pull latest, spend about a month getting to to compile, another 1-2 months fixing all the issues, checking it in only to them spend another 2 months fixing all the cases that weren't tested. With a ~6mo uplevel cadence it was just enough time to finish it in order to start the next uplevel. Once you've gone through that internal engines start to look appealing(although they have their own pitfalls, I.E. heavy dependency on MAX/Maya for editor support and other "fun" bits).
It’s worthwhile remembering that in the AAA/AA space that Unity was “a meme” for far longer than it should have been. I remember first seeing it mentoring student teams in Dare to be Digital whilst working on an AAA title and thinking WTF is that!?
I’d also note that the ‘commercial games industry’ is much broader than AAA/AA, includes indie game developers and ships games making looooots of money on all sorts of weird tech stacks.
> To put this very directly, Godot is a meme in the commercial games industry.
Godot might be a meme in terms of AAA games, but "Commercial games" is a lot more than AAA, both by revenue and just total games developed.
> Most of companies with above AA cash would rather write their own engines than use Godot
See previous statement. When did we start talking at "above AA" companies? Also most companies with "above AA" money aren't using Unity.
> So even in indies, it’s rare to see Godot.
This has more to do with age though. You see less people driving 2024 cars than 2020 cars.
> There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent. No marketplace actually is the least of its concerns as we don’t use marketplace stuff much in AAA/AA. The engine makes a lot more sense on paper than in reality.
Yeah again, it really feels like your perspective on game development is purely from the AAA BigCo game dev side. Which is a real perspective, but is certainly not even close to all encompassing with regard to game development.
> To put this very directly, Godot is a meme in the commercial games industry.
Yes! I feel the same. As soon as you go beyond toy examples, working in Godot becomes very hard.
And the lack of an asset store is killing it. Sure you can get assets from other sources, but I found you have to do a lot of messing around to get it working properly. While with Unity, all assets work out the box.
Worth noting people running Godot have mentioned the Asset store priority is climbing. I didn't save the tweet when I saw it but they are aware that is a huge area that would help people transition off of Unity.
IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers. Unless you are building something for the web or low powered mobile VR I wouldn't even consider anything else. For PC and console games UE5 provides incredible amount of tools and flexibility. It's also great for building 2D/3D mobile games. People who say complexity of Unreal has stopped them from using it have gotten it wrong. UE5 provides you with a lot of tools, you don't have to use them all. But if you are thinking of building something more complex than a hello world example, you'd realize that the additional tools that UE5 provides you greatly save your time.
If you are a total beginner you can use Blueprints to write the game logic and use the existing out-of-the box tools. If you are a more experienced programmer you can use C++ to build custom components/plugins to get more customization.
I remember a time that game engines were these precious secret tools that you had to pay millions of dollars to get a license for. Now you can get the full source of UE5 on Github for free. And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue. This is just a no-brainer folks. IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. In fact it's a bargain and you save money by paying Epic 5% compared to anything else out there. Use UE5 unless you have a really really really good reason not to.
> IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers.
The only place Unity really shines (both IME and in industry) is mobile games. Unreal IIRC doesn't really have even close to comparable support for mobile platforms. Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry, so I would say the ">90% of use cases" thing is just untrue.
> And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue.
> IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified.
Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_.
In retrospect this comment feels like some form of advertisement for UE5 more than actual discussion.
> Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry
I've said this already in another recent thread but mobile games and pc/console games are two entirely separate markets, with different potential customer pools.
Conflating them together makes about as much sense as conflating console/pc games with accounting software.
>Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_.
Not necessarily, let's do the math:
for 1m downloads, UE depends on how much money you make. But regardless of how much money you made, Unity's new plan on Enterprise (in the worst case, because they have not specified if the charges start after 1m installs or applies to the first million as well) will cost you $46,500, on top of the per seat pricing of enterprise. in this case, the cutoff point for when Epic costs more is if you made more than $930k in revenue. But since Epic waives the first million, this actually means you need to make $1.93m in revenue before it cancels out.
and if we go further along (where Unity's prices for enterprise start to stabilize at $0.01 per install), if you hit 5m downloads you are charged a total of $106k, the breakpoint here for UE is if you made $3.1m in revenue (again, waiving the first million).
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By the looks of things, for a mid-revenue game UE looks better, but higher revenues mean Unity start to win out. In particular, mobile games tend to utilize whales that can make the attach rate MUCH higher than $2/user (you may not have 99 users paying anything, but a whale dropping $1000 balances the arithmetic mean to $10/user), so Unity will win out. Funnily enough, the less ethical f2p games may still prefer Unity over unreal.
For games that rely on ads or subscriptions, though? Absolutely fucked over. Drastically. You simply cannot make an ethical mobile app with Unity anymore as every user that visits and leaves in 10 minutes after a certain threshold is costing you money. If you had a bad launch with lots of users but barely any revenue, you can legitimately end up in the red for using Unity. As it would be better to shut down your app and relaunch under a different name than to try and recoup the costs with the current app.
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I won't ramble on too much longer, but I do want to add one more tidbit to keep in mind. Gamepass and Apple Arcade are also factors, and Unity said they would charge the distributors for this. In the worst case, this can mean that Microsoft/Apple can remove your existing games from these services and disallow Unity games to be hosted. So if you want to one day utilize these kinds of subscription services, you may not even have such a choice to begin with.
30% for distribution is fine, 5% for more than half the cost of development is not?
Fortnite is also a top selling mobile game developed with UE5. You can make great mobile games with UE5 now. Mobile hardware right now is comparable to last gen consoles.
> Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_.
5% of 70%? Or 30% + 5%?
Regardless, price your game in a way that makes you money.
I know a lot of people recommend Godot because it's super good but if you want a more code oriented and batteries included engine I recommend Panda3D [0] it's open source, super mature (it's actually one of the oldest continously developed game engines), and can be used form Python and C++. Not sure why it's not more popular it's flexible and super fun to use.
I feel like any piece of software that's widely applicable to a whole industry of users (3d modelling, image editing, game engines, etc) is destined to eventually solidify on an fully production quality open source solution that everyone contributes to.
It's already happened for 3d modelling (Blender) and digital painting (Krita), and it feels like gamedev is an even better market for this to happen in than those because all the users are also going to be capable of contributing to development of the engine.
From the outside Godot looks like it's the closest to ready for building proper AAA quality 3d games.
I've also actually used Bevy and if you're a fan of rust and ECS based development it's really nice for building procedurally generated stuff that doesn't need a level editor, or for building 2d games and relying on a 3rd party editor like Tiled or LDtk. However there's plenty of places where it's still a bit rough around the edges, like dealing with more complex multi stage asset loading pipelines.
Windows has Linux and Photoshop has Krita. the open source equivalents aren't neck and neck competitors, but they grew to a point of influence where you can't ignore them. They have sizeable communites, and various professional usage.
Office is the rough one, though. There's LibreOffice, but it never seemed to improve on its UX. and in the meantime Google docs came and became the big competitor.
I don't think it's true, Blender happened to work and is now used by professionals, but some tools like PhotoShop or Adobe Premiere, Ableton, or even Word/Excel for that matter, don't have an equivalent that could replace them anytime soon.
The 3D modelling industry is bifurcated. The "low-end" of town (like hobbyists or indie studios) uses blender, and the high-end of town (like the sfx shops that do hollywood movies) uses things like maya.
Photoshop is an interesting one. I used to be a power user for years, but have since mostly moved to Krita. For a "I don't know what I want or need" type of manipulating images, Photoshop is great. For painting, it's not even close to being the best (I agree with the parent comment that Krita is much better).
The reason it's so popular is because there wasn't anything else for a long time, and also probably because it's still lobbied to unis.
There's hardly any AAA titles that use Unity, the most well known ones are games like Hearthstone, Cuphead, Beat Saber. These are great games but they're not exactly GTA 6 or Call if Duty.
Yeah I'm not saying Godot looks AAA ready, just that it's much closer than every other option.
Although I would love to see how far a code only engine core + separate third party level editor tooling model could go, it appeals to my intuitive feel of what the "right" way to build software is.
I've been enjoying Construct 3. Not the visual scripting but the Javascript portion. It's a really good Javascript engine at its core. For some reason people don't know this? DragonRuby has also been pretty fun and hot reload is nice. Godot is the main answer for Unity but web support is just better with Construct, obviously since it's built on web technologies.
My main issue with Unity and why I never picked it up is, I have poor vision and the editor doesn't scale on Mac. You basically have to have perfect vision to see anything that's going on. A scalable editor is a must. Godot / Construct fit these. Game Maker looks so poor on 4k that it hurts my eyes.
Construct 3 moved away to a subscription model (I was a huge fan of C2 back in the day) and annual fee. I'd recommend checking out GDevelop, an open source 2d visual game engine which also exports for HTML5/mobile, and is completely free.
Selfishly, this will be a minor win for me. I occasionally like to try indie games from itch. For safety reasons, these are obviously run inside a VM. Unity games have always run like garbage on this setup, so the more developers migrating off the platform, the better for me.
I was once pulled on to a small unity mobile game that was being released by a small studio in the iPhone 4 days to help fix performance issues. After looking at the frame capture, I could see that the entire scene was being rendered about 5 times per frame from different angles. Turns out the team had a bunch of cameras enabled, but because they only saw the rendering from the last camera, they just edited that one.
I sometimes think Unity makes making games TOO easy, and you end up with people that have no technical knowledge of the way games work so they can’t fix/diagnose the most basic things. Obviously the game runs slower when you render the scene 5 times, but they didn’t even think to open a frame capture tool.
The fix for the issue that plagued them for months, was to uncheck the ‘enabled’ box for these unused cameras. Probably took 30mins to diagnose and fix.
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> Less than half their revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising.
That is to say, Unity makes most of its money from people PLAYING games made with Unity. The sales to the developers are secondary. Unity had to change their model, and that meant either making the engine cheaper to acquire more games to get more ads, or it meant raising the price of the engine at the likely cost of ads, and for some reason they chose option 2, which seems like a dumb idea.
The best explanation for that I can think of is that almost all of the advertising money should be coming from smaller mobile games, and so this is a move to try and make more money from the desktop games and the mobile games that don't use Unity's ad networks, which probably look like big, untapped sources of income to dumber product managers.
But now imagine that they did the opposite: they raise the maximum revenue requirements and "must show splash screen" requirements and generally make Unity more available for less. Engine revenue goes down a bit, but ad revenue goes up, which probably works out even better in the long run, but also solidifies the user base, garners good will, and generally leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.
Noob consumers may click ads, but after a while they program their brain to filter them out automatically. Or occasionally filter them out using technological measures. I bet that most ad clicks are by mistake or similar (especially ads in Unity games (which AFAIK are interstitial video ads)), or the user wasn't realizing what they were clicking on was an ad (noob users, or e.g. ads at the top of Google results, which used to be much easier to distinguish from actual results).
Most of my ad clicks are by mistake (due to bad page layout, or there just happened to be an ad where I happened to click), some (a handful of times per year at best) are to satisfy curiosity. And maybe a single one in my lifetime actually led to a purchase.
Google ads started out text-only, now they're pretty jarring on average. Guess why. However, there's a limit to how jarring you can make ads before consumers say bye-bye. Unity ads are probably way over the limit, Google are sort of tip-toeing along the line (or let's say they're over the line for a minority, and not quite for the rest).
You're right, but to expand: Apple's privacy changes at the beginning of 2022 screwed over a lot of adtech, and now the rise of AI is making ad providers even more speculative of certain types of content. I think Adtech is recovering now but for a company like Unity who relies on ads, it dealt them a huge blow for the last 18 months. That's probably what promtpted the merger/aquisition and started its plans into how it can extract more from its devs.
Ads are not just about clicks. Half of all spending is brand advertising.
Noobs don’t click random SMB ads, and yet that’s like 40% of spending on mobile.
There are people who are “superclickers” and also super buyers. They’re just a really expensive audience to target, obviously.
Anyway, you’re extrapolating from your sole experience with ads. It is a super big ecosystem with a lot of rationality, as ridiculous as that sounds. It is growing a lot still, digital ad spending grows like $130b a year around now, which is the highest it’s ever been. So I don’t know, you’re not saying stuff that is substantiated in truth.
True, and it’s not even just about the ads being annoying even.
Regulators are catching on to the privacy problems tied to online advertising.
Perhaps Unity is seeing this too, and have concluded that regulators might come for their ad revenue one day.
The ad market is more competitive and very crowded there is no reason to use Unity for your ads if someone else offers a better deal.
Also Unity did try focusing on increasing ad revenue over the last several years, it didn’t work out that well.
> leaves everybody feeling great about Unity.
Making their engine entirely free would make most people feel even better.
> untapped sources of income to dumber product managers.
Why? Most Unity’s client’s don’t make much if anything at all a few make massive amounts. Due to the fixed licensing model the latter barely pay anything to Unity (e.g. compared to how much they pay storefronts/platform owners/ad networks). If they want to continue growing their revenue Unity has to get more from these customers, there aren’t that many other options.
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I'd really like to see how alternatives handle stuff such as:
- Editor tools for non-artists
- Editor API for customization/automation
- Profiling CPU/memory
- Integration with things like FMOD, Spine, whatever else
- Tools for debugging
- How does level editing work, what tools are present to assist with visualization, organization, construction
So he may not be the most appropriate person to ask for game engine advice (since he says in the article, he makes and rolls a lot of his own tech), but he will inevitably be asked for his thoughts and advice on the situation regardless.
I've tried Godot a few times and basic stuff like export to web didn't work at all out of the box, and it felt like alpha quality stuff. I would however like it to succeed.
Unity also has extensive documentation and training and it's an established tool for game devs who then migrate to industry jobs like industrial process/environment simulations. I have a feeling Godot is barely aware of these scenarios as it's rarely the engine of choice.
Maybe Godot is more seriously considered by indies and open source fans. But then, Unreal Engine is also practically open source for any licensee, including ones that won’t ever pay a cent to Epic. So even in indies, it’s rare to see Godot.
I champion all development in games. So I wish good luck to Godot. I’ve actually been thinking about contributing, too. I think in some ways, the ethics of Godot are a breath of fresh air. But contributing to UE looks much better on a resume.
There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent. No marketplace actually is the least of its concerns as we don’t use marketplace stuff much in AAA/AA. The engine makes a lot more sense on paper than in reality.
I find this an odd statement because from my perspective there aren't any AAA titles written in Unity either. They are all proprietary engines or Unreal nowadays.
So the question isn't if Godot can take over the AA, AAA games, it's can it take over the market currently served by Unity.
It probably can't right now, but probably not as far off as it seems either
> There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent.
Other than "instability" none of this is a criticism of the engine itself... so why is it a meme?
Edit: I'm actually really struggling to think of a game I would consider AAA that I know of made in Unity. Please help me out if you know of some I'm not aware of.
Once you make changes like that upleveling is a serious challenge. We had one dev who's responsibility was to pull latest, spend about a month getting to to compile, another 1-2 months fixing all the issues, checking it in only to them spend another 2 months fixing all the cases that weren't tested. With a ~6mo uplevel cadence it was just enough time to finish it in order to start the next uplevel. Once you've gone through that internal engines start to look appealing(although they have their own pitfalls, I.E. heavy dependency on MAX/Maya for editor support and other "fun" bits).
I’d also note that the ‘commercial games industry’ is much broader than AAA/AA, includes indie game developers and ships games making looooots of money on all sorts of weird tech stacks.
Godot might be a meme in terms of AAA games, but "Commercial games" is a lot more than AAA, both by revenue and just total games developed.
> Most of companies with above AA cash would rather write their own engines than use Godot
See previous statement. When did we start talking at "above AA" companies? Also most companies with "above AA" money aren't using Unity.
> So even in indies, it’s rare to see Godot.
This has more to do with age though. You see less people driving 2024 cars than 2020 cars.
> There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent. No marketplace actually is the least of its concerns as we don’t use marketplace stuff much in AAA/AA. The engine makes a lot more sense on paper than in reality.
Yeah again, it really feels like your perspective on game development is purely from the AAA BigCo game dev side. Which is a real perspective, but is certainly not even close to all encompassing with regard to game development.
Yes! I feel the same. As soon as you go beyond toy examples, working in Godot becomes very hard.
And the lack of an asset store is killing it. Sure you can get assets from other sources, but I found you have to do a lot of messing around to get it working properly. While with Unity, all assets work out the box.
Would be nice if Godot can access Unity assets. Someone posted a demo of a Unity loader few months back:
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/13io0bx/load_unitypa...
The sentiment of that thread appears to be that it's technically feasible and would be quite useful, but the legal issues are unclear.
Imports *.unitypackage files into Godot, supporting a smattering of Unity asset-types.
If you are a total beginner you can use Blueprints to write the game logic and use the existing out-of-the box tools. If you are a more experienced programmer you can use C++ to build custom components/plugins to get more customization.
I remember a time that game engines were these precious secret tools that you had to pay millions of dollars to get a license for. Now you can get the full source of UE5 on Github for free. And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue. This is just a no-brainer folks. IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. In fact it's a bargain and you save money by paying Epic 5% compared to anything else out there. Use UE5 unless you have a really really really good reason not to.
The only place Unity really shines (both IME and in industry) is mobile games. Unreal IIRC doesn't really have even close to comparable support for mobile platforms. Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry, so I would say the ">90% of use cases" thing is just untrue.
> And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue.
> IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified.
Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_.
In retrospect this comment feels like some form of advertisement for UE5 more than actual discussion.
I've said this already in another recent thread but mobile games and pc/console games are two entirely separate markets, with different potential customer pools.
Conflating them together makes about as much sense as conflating console/pc games with accounting software.
Not necessarily, let's do the math:
for 1m downloads, UE depends on how much money you make. But regardless of how much money you made, Unity's new plan on Enterprise (in the worst case, because they have not specified if the charges start after 1m installs or applies to the first million as well) will cost you $46,500, on top of the per seat pricing of enterprise. in this case, the cutoff point for when Epic costs more is if you made more than $930k in revenue. But since Epic waives the first million, this actually means you need to make $1.93m in revenue before it cancels out.
and if we go further along (where Unity's prices for enterprise start to stabilize at $0.01 per install), if you hit 5m downloads you are charged a total of $106k, the breakpoint here for UE is if you made $3.1m in revenue (again, waiving the first million).
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By the looks of things, for a mid-revenue game UE looks better, but higher revenues mean Unity start to win out. In particular, mobile games tend to utilize whales that can make the attach rate MUCH higher than $2/user (you may not have 99 users paying anything, but a whale dropping $1000 balances the arithmetic mean to $10/user), so Unity will win out. Funnily enough, the less ethical f2p games may still prefer Unity over unreal.
For games that rely on ads or subscriptions, though? Absolutely fucked over. Drastically. You simply cannot make an ethical mobile app with Unity anymore as every user that visits and leaves in 10 minutes after a certain threshold is costing you money. If you had a bad launch with lots of users but barely any revenue, you can legitimately end up in the red for using Unity. As it would be better to shut down your app and relaunch under a different name than to try and recoup the costs with the current app.
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I won't ramble on too much longer, but I do want to add one more tidbit to keep in mind. Gamepass and Apple Arcade are also factors, and Unity said they would charge the distributors for this. In the worst case, this can mean that Microsoft/Apple can remove your existing games from these services and disallow Unity games to be hosted. So if you want to one day utilize these kinds of subscription services, you may not even have such a choice to begin with.
Fortnite is also a top selling mobile game developed with UE5. You can make great mobile games with UE5 now. Mobile hardware right now is comparable to last gen consoles.
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5% of 70%? Or 30% + 5%?
Regardless, price your game in a way that makes you money.
How? That’s significantly more expensive that Unity if you make more than $2 per user or so.
[0] https://www.panda3d.org/
It's already happened for 3d modelling (Blender) and digital painting (Krita), and it feels like gamedev is an even better market for this to happen in than those because all the users are also going to be capable of contributing to development of the engine.
From the outside Godot looks like it's the closest to ready for building proper AAA quality 3d games.
I've also actually used Bevy and if you're a fan of rust and ECS based development it's really nice for building procedurally generated stuff that doesn't need a level editor, or for building 2d games and relying on a 3rd party editor like Tiled or LDtk. However there's plenty of places where it's still a bit rough around the edges, like dealing with more complex multi stage asset loading pipelines.
Office is the rough one, though. There's LibreOffice, but it never seemed to improve on its UX. and in the meantime Google docs came and became the big competitor.
The reason it's so popular is because there wasn't anything else for a long time, and also probably because it's still lobbied to unis.
Although I would love to see how far a code only engine core + separate third party level editor tooling model could go, it appeals to my intuitive feel of what the "right" way to build software is.
My main issue with Unity and why I never picked it up is, I have poor vision and the editor doesn't scale on Mac. You basically have to have perfect vision to see anything that's going on. A scalable editor is a must. Godot / Construct fit these. Game Maker looks so poor on 4k that it hurts my eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDevelop
I sometimes think Unity makes making games TOO easy, and you end up with people that have no technical knowledge of the way games work so they can’t fix/diagnose the most basic things. Obviously the game runs slower when you render the scene 5 times, but they didn’t even think to open a frame capture tool.
The fix for the issue that plagued them for months, was to uncheck the ‘enabled’ box for these unused cameras. Probably took 30mins to diagnose and fix.