Picture taken from their Twitter
Why stay at all whether they revert it or not? They’re egregiously incompetent and if they’ve done this sort of thing once, they’re going to do it again. Developers should go where their support will help make something better (Godot) and not stick with the crusty old Unity hag that is constantly pawing at their pockets hoping for the jingle of coins.
- It’s a significant effort to change engines
- Even though it’s just one dev, they’re giving Unity a reason to revert. If you just say “Yo, I’m OUT!” then they’ve already lost you and they have no reason to revert on your behalf.
Because changing the engine in an existing project is a huge pita that requires many, many hours and possibly in some cases a full rewrite.
This also applies to games that would be released in 2023 or 2024.
Nobody should be considering Unity for a new project, but it’s understandable to make either decision for many existing projects.
Ripping out the engine of your game isn’t a trivial thing.
Many many hours is a massive understatement.
Thousands and thousands of hours is more appropriate
I don’t know how you could change the engine without rewriting the entire thing basically from scratch.
In this case it sounds like they were talking about their next game rather than a current project.
“has been hard at work these past 2+ years”
That doesn’t sound like a current project to you?
I agree, although a lot of the work going into a game is the game design, art, and iteration, and not just the programming and rigging. And it may actually be a catalyst to rewrite parts better
Strongly disagree. While a lot of work does go on to art assets which should be simpler to migrate, the code is absolutely what makes the game. There are tons of very successful games with low quality or stock assets, there are very few popular games with broken code.
Even then, it’s still a lot of effort to check every asset you’re using to ensure they work as expected in your new engine.
Cause it’s probably not worth it for them to migrate and learn/train on a new engine unless Unity goes forward with their plans.
But you’re right, this completely destroyed Unity’s reputation. Even if they revert, who’s to say they won’t try something like this in the future.