“The loss of a formerly-leading and user-friendly game engine to the darker forces that negatively impact so much of the gaming industry has left us dismayed to put it mildly,” wrote the Re-Logic team. “We unequivocally condemn and reject the recent TOS/fee changes proposed by Unity and the underhanded way they were rolled out.”
I hope they are not serious about this moralizing , unity is making 1.8B but losing almost a billion a year, either they cut back on expenses or they somehow increase income, i think they might not want to cut back on expenses because they are feeling the heat of open source game engines like gadot or even gdevelop (and that will lead to a inferior product ). I think the same thing is happening with RISC-V and ARM.
Hopefully there is enough of real financial support for godot and other open source gaming software and not just feel good talk. godot fund almost doubled in funding but that is not close to 1B dollar (but maybe companies are allocating full time developers).
The dynamics of open source development are very different from commercial ventures. For example, Mastodon is basically developed by a single person with a few contributors. Yet, from user perspective it’s superior to Twitter in many ways which is a company that used to have around 3k employees. The fact that Unity is a big company that has a lot of money doesn’t directly translate into doing much higher quality development over Godot. It’s a more polished product right now, but even a few hundred thousand can make a huge difference for Godot because that would mean full time development for at least a year.
Bucky was right once again with his theory of “Ephemeralization” https://dbpedia.org/page/Ephemeralization … The only reason we’re concerned with these companies employing Devs and spending Billions to do what small teams of FOSS are able to achieve is simply a bad economic system that requires “make work” or Bullshit jobs for wages to feed the parasite class, instead of us living like the Jetson’s. Time to move one!
The Jetsons still lived in a world with class exploitation, George works on a bulshit job btw.
But yes, to your point, I have a somewhat controversial theory that given enough time, relatively niche proprietary software like Unity will not be able to compete with open-source software (if the latter is well-managed). Look at the growth that Blender has had over the last few years and what effect that has had in the 3D creation market. It seems that the game engine market is going to follow similar footsteps if Godot doesn’t fall into some major pitfall.
I completely agree, once an open source project reaches a certain point of polish there’s very little incentive for people to favor proprietary options over it. Blender is one of the best examples of this. Krita is another project that’s increasingly displacing commercial options. I definitely think Godot has this potential as well.
I hope they are not serious about this moralizing , unity is making 1.8B but losing almost a billion a year, either they cut back on expenses or they somehow increase income, i think they might not want to cut back on expenses because they are feeling the heat of open source game engines like gadot or even gdevelop (and that will lead to a inferior product ).
Let’s be real here, they’ve hit market saturation but profits have to keep going up, forever into infinity, no matter how shitty it makes their product or service.
