this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I have been a developer professionally and exclusively using Unity for 17 years. Yesterday, I installed Unreal Engine. I’m doing as many tutorials as I can this weekend.
I have no faith now that there will be enough studios willing to use Unity to sustain a career based on it.
Godot is in terrific shape should you not wish to give any of your revenue away. Of course I wouldn’t use Godot for a project that requires advanced rendering features or high graphical fidelity.
Godot is also free software; if they tried to do something like Unity then 3rd parties can remove the offending code and even continue development without the them. Unreal is only source available, you ultimately could have the same issue with Unreal in the future.
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think you meant Godot is open source. Yeah, I agree.
Open source is the term the Godot website uses to refer to the engine. I'm using the term free software as I think about Unity being proprietary in terms of denying user freedom rather than weighing it up as a business decision.
Ah, free as in freedom, not free as in cost. Gotcha.
"Proprietary Software A is evil. I'm switching to Proprietary software B. I'm sure they won't eventually fuck me over for money"
Maybe check out an actual FOSS product like Godot
Godot is great, and in 5 years it could be Blender level of capable, but today it's not at the level that Unity and UE are. and Op is a working professional apparently so they probably need that capability.
It would be a shame if OP were out of a job because he is waiting for Godot.
Wow, what a long and meta meme it would be if the engine is simply created to never be ready on purpose, hence waiting for Godot.
Godot was created by its devs for internal projects and there was a sizeable gap between the time they announced that it would be open-sourced and made available to the public and the time they actually did it. Godot 4 also took a lot longer to release than anyone expected.
Godot devs are used to waiting.
Please don't trigger that kind of dread feeling 💀
😡 angry upvote 😡
Angry because you also suffered through the theater of the absurd in high school? (I studied The Caretaker by Harold Pinter... for a whole school year 😭)
Pinter and Abish. My favorite parts of Philosophy in Literature class, lol.
You've earned your rest, soldier.
It's not, but there are a LOT of games - particularly in the Indie or small-studio category - that don't actually need Unity/UE level features either.
Oh sure. But also it might not be obvious what features we are talking about. Unity and ue do a lot of things that are useful for developers, that you won't see as a player. So you might think that this game doesn't need to be on unity/ue, but also being on unity/ue halved the development time and costs
How many jobs require experience in Godot? We don't live in a fantasy world.
Enough? Main stream companies already accept it and it's easily a transferable skill from unreal, unity etc to Godot.
The software isn't new, like nocode and others, the industry quickly adapts.... It's not a fantasy world.. .
Yeahhhhh... wouldnt call much of anything transferable to Unreal... they are quite unique with their engine.
Right now, few, but in 6 months, 95% of the studios that used Unity will be using Godot, simply because it's much lighter and is much more suited for the Unity style of game (Hollow Knight, Celeste, Among US, etc) than unreal is.
(X) to doubt on that one, chief.
If all you were doing was a 2D game, maybe. But Unity's 3D stack is head and shoulders above Godot for anything past hobby projects. If you were working on a 3D Unity project professionally, Unreal is probably a better move than Godot, practically speaking.
Based on their comment, I don't think they're the person deciding what engine is used. They work for someone else that has already selected an engine. They need to keep their skills employable first and foremost here.
Hopefully Godot takes off a bit here, I think there's good room for it to advance with indie devs and maybe use that growth to be able to be more of an alternative to UE sometime afterwards.
The business is about making good games and making money. If Godot can actually support that don't you think devs would've switched to it in droves?
Since it's FOSS I would assume it's got no crazy financial legalese to bleed the devs dry. So it stands to reason that the Godot product is simply not ready. Devs are not stupid, if there is a tech that is better and free they'd switch to it in a heartbeat, or at least put it on the table for the next game.
The fact that they haven't done so says things about Godot itself.
It is possible for things that are objectively better to not be as popular. I'd say Firefox is one example. Linux is another.
Rust is maybe the closest parallel. I'm currently learning rust slowly, but even if I got to the point where I was as comfortable in rust as I am in c++, the code I work with at work will still be c++. Even if my whole team learns rust and agrees that it's better in every way, we'd still need to take the time to rewrite everything if we wanted to switch. That's already the case for Python vs Perl. Python is a better language but we still have a bunch of stuff going on in perl because it's still working so we might as well just keep it for now.
Not that I'm saying Godot is necessarily there right now, just that it's lack of popularity doesn't imply its not as good.
According to the other comments on this post, it definitely does not seem like Godot is ready for prime time.
What do they say about "waiting for Godot" again?
Many of the other comments on this post are misinformed and based on past versions of Godot. But Godot has recently had an update that has focused primarily on improving it's 3D support. I get the impression that many people looked into Godot version 3.x, and never bothered to look any further. It's true that it's not as mature as Unity, but that takes time and it will eventually get there. But people are unfairly disregarding, at the moment based on past versions being focused on excellent 2D support but mediocre 3D support.
It's also a bit of a chicken and egg situation because in order for them to mature significantly, games have to be made in Godot, but less people will even start if Godot doesn't look mature enough as a product.
On the other hand, Godot 4.x is really impressive. Like yeah you're not gonna be able to make the next million dollar open world action adventure 70 USD + DLC title in it, but for every one of those there's a hundred games that Godot is more than powerful enough for. But the new version only just came out earlier this year so it's gonna take a while before we see games coming out with the new tech.
Tell me you don’t understand how the industry works without telling me you don’t understand how the industry works. OP is learning another technology popular in demand. Like it or not, companies couldn’t care less about free software.
Godot please
Nothing will stop Unreal pulling the same thing
Unreal has explicit licensing terms that forbid them from doing this. Terms which people are going to pay very close attention to.
Not to mention that Epic gets their money from Fortnite, not necessarily the engine. They have no reason to squander their goodwill like that.
On top of that - if you want to release on a console, you need to write all the console-specific code yourself. This is quite a lot of work, especially for an indie developer.
Godot is a great start, but it's got a long way to go before it's a commercial-ready engine.