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The decline of Unity is sad. Unity got so many things very right in their pre-IPO years. They made rapid prototyping and development of 3D games much easier tha

The decline of Unity is sad. Unity got so many things very right in their pre-IPO years. They made rapid prototyping and development of 3D games much easier than anything that came before. Being able to develop in C# was a huge win, especially for small teams and solo indie, and it made developing for multiple platforms easy, and took away a lot of the pain of native mobile development for Android/iOS. But Unity has been declared dead/dying before, I suspect it'll have a long future ahead in some form even if it's no longer the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers. A lot of people have invested a lot of years into their Unity skills as well as projects/codebases.

hadlock 3y ago
Bringing John Ricitiello on as CEO (former disgraced EA CEO) should have been a yellow (or red?) flag that things had reached their peak.
- gmerc 3y ago
  I wonder how many company funds went to reputation management to drive an obscure NY Pizza Palor on google above his name on a direct search after the molestation charges leveraged by one of their C-Levels
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
> the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers What do you think has taken it's place?
- bluescrn 3y ago
  There's a lot more indies talking about Unreal, and also Godot. Too early to see how much of that talk will translate to shipping finished games, though. Artists are excited by the potential of UE5, as Unity's rendering tech has stagnated somewhat. But making a UE5 Nanite/Lumen game is likely to be limiting your audience rather a lot, with high hardware requirements.
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    I've heard a lot about Godot but the last time I really looked into it, years ago at this point, it wasn't quite ready for prime time. Is it ready nowadays? Looking at their showcase it seems I've played a few games using it without knowing.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      > Is it ready nowadays? What does "ready" mean?
      - bluescrn 3y ago
        "Can you develop and ship a non-trivial game with it, ideally on multiple platforms, without spending loads of time debugging the internals of the engine?"
        badsectoracula 3y ago
        What does "non-trivial game" mean? Also what does "spending loads of time debugging the internals of the engine" mean? I have worked on small and large (AAA) games with both custom and 3rd party engines and all of them needed a lot of time both profiling (to make things faster) and debugging (to avoid/fix[0] bugs) the engine internals. Where is the threshold where that time is "loads"? Without being specific on the requirements how can one respond with "yes" or "no"? [0] "avoid" for the 3rd party engines that we tried to not change much as it'd affect engine upgrades later, "fix" for the custom engines
        squeaky-clean 3y ago
        For one example. > Projects written in C# using Godot 4 currently cannot be exported to iOS With unity or unreal it's one click as long as you're using a Mac. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/exporting_for_ios.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/expo...
- dkersten 3y ago
  Godot. For 2D (especially mobile) games Defold is a strong contender that can boast billion dollar have releases.
- minimaxir 3y ago
  Nothing has, yet. Even with the current announcement cost terms, switching engines mid-development could be more expensive. For new projects, Unreal Engine does have interesting terms for indies.
- __loam 3y ago
  Definitely Godot.

hadlock 3y ago

Bringing John Ricitiello on as CEO (former disgraced EA CEO) should have been a yellow (or red?) flag that things had reached their peak.

gmerc 3y ago
I wonder how many company funds went to reputation management to drive an obscure NY Pizza Palor on google above his name on a direct search after the molestation charges leveraged by one of their C-Levels

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

> the obvious go-to engine choice for indies and mobile developers What do you think has taken it's place?

bluescrn 3y ago
There's a lot more indies talking about Unreal, and also Godot. Too early to see how much of that talk will translate to shipping finished games, though. Artists are excited by the potential of UE5, as Unity's rendering tech has stagnated somewhat. But making a UE5 Nanite/Lumen game is likely to be limiting your audience rather a lot, with high hardware requirements.
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  I've heard a lot about Godot but the last time I really looked into it, years ago at this point, it wasn't quite ready for prime time. Is it ready nowadays? Looking at their showcase it seems I've played a few games using it without knowing.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > Is it ready nowadays? What does "ready" mean?
    - bluescrn 3y ago
      "Can you develop and ship a non-trivial game with it, ideally on multiple platforms, without spending loads of time debugging the internals of the engine?"
      - badsectoracula 3y ago
        What does "non-trivial game" mean? Also what does "spending loads of time debugging the internals of the engine" mean? I have worked on small and large (AAA) games with both custom and 3rd party engines and all of them needed a lot of time both profiling (to make things faster) and debugging (to avoid/fix[0] bugs) the engine internals. Where is the threshold where that time is "loads"? Without being specific on the requirements how can one respond with "yes" or "no"? [0] "avoid" for the 3rd party engines that we tried to not change much as it'd affect engine upgrades later, "fix" for the custom engines
        squeaky-clean 3y ago
        For one example. > Projects written in C# using Godot 4 currently cannot be exported to iOS With unity or unreal it's one click as long as you're using a Mac. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/exporting_for_ios.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/expo...
dkersten 3y ago
Godot. For 2D (especially mobile) games Defold is a strong contender that can boast billion dollar have releases.
minimaxir 3y ago
Nothing has, yet. Even with the current announcement cost terms, switching engines mid-development could be more expensive. For new projects, Unreal Engine does have interesting terms for indies.
__loam 3y ago
Definitely Godot.