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Is this some VC's pouncing on Unity's missteps? How serious was the damage to Unity's credibility after the installation fee disaster? How big is the moat for u

Is this some VC's pouncing on Unity's missteps? How serious was the damage to Unity's credibility after the installation fee disaster? How big is the moat for unity?

truegoric 3y ago
It kinda does sound like EEE. „W4 Games will strengthen our role within the Godot ecosystem by supporting its open-source development and continuing to build products and services to facilitate Godot’s expansion, such as W4 Consoles (an approved middleware console porting solution for Godot games) and W4 Cloud (multi-tenant service to support millions of users).”
- arlcode 3y ago
  Getting game engines in console and providing support for developers is certainly a business. I've met some people who brought their custom (more simple ) engines/games to consoles and there is money in providing a ready made solution which, by the nature of it, cannot be open source or permissive. The main question is it the "10x in 3 years" kind of business or the "steady stream of a small medim profit" variety.
- SXX 3y ago
  It's not EEE because W4 Games actually founded by some of top Godot contributors who continue to work on FOSS version as well. There just some things you can't have open source like console platform support code.
arjonagelhout 3y ago
Unity still has a more mature product compared to Godot, so for many projects it won’t be feasible to switch to Godot. Unity is easier to use, has more fully featured and higher quality rendering pipelines, more integrations with other software, a larger asset store and the ability to quickly add advertisements to a game using Unity Ads. (etcetera) That said, we stopped using Unity because of the term changes and are now focusing on building a custom game engine, but our use case is way different than game studios. In game studios it’s a numbers game. e.g. How much does it cost to retrain our staff to switch to a different engine versus the benefits. From what I can see, Unity has not yet made its product so unattractive that it won’t be used for future productions.
pjmlp 3y ago
It is business as usual for big studios, maybe a couple of indies decided to port their games to GDScript or do not care about the platforms where C#/Godot isn't available.
broken_clock 3y ago
Godot currently doesn't even have good support for things like in-app purchases for iOS/Android. No one is willing to work on stuff like that for free/open-source fun. I think the big moat is that for studios, games are so risky to make, that there's no reason to take on tech risk by possibly running into issues like this. You know Unity will work for basically any non AAA game you want to make. Hopefully this $15m closes that gap.
- nightowl_games 3y ago
  Google Play IAP: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-google-play-billing https://github.com/godotengine/godot-google-play-billing iOS IAP: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-ios-plugins https://github.com/godotengine/godot-ios-plugins
  - username256 3y ago
    The iOS one is unmaintained and has been for a while (it still doesn't officially support Godot 4.x). Supposedly it should be maintained again by EOY but we've yet to see any progress on it.
    - nightowl_games 3y ago
      Maintaining this yourself is trivial. We sell IAPS on Android, iOS, Steam & XSolla in the Godot game engine. Android and iOS are the easiest. This is really, really minor stuff we're talking about here.
      - broken_clock 3y ago
        Maybe you can write a blog post or a reddit thread? There were a bunch of people asking about it on Discord for Godot 4, and some confused reddit threads offering to pay people for a tutorial: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/11vxeo7/can_i_please_pay_someone_to_show_me_how_they_got/ https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/11vxeo7/can_i_please... https://old.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/13ka6qc/will_pay_to_have_someone_walk_through_iap_in_app/ https://old.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/13ka6qc/will_pay_to_...
npinsker 3y ago
Their moat is massive for mobile apps. For PC + console, I think their clock is ticking. Godot has many disadvantages (fewer features, large performance problems, asset store, poor UI) but they'll eventually fix them and perhaps become the dominant engine. The only question is how much further ahead Unity will be.
- nightowl_games 3y ago
  The moat is massive for console games, mobile games on Godot work great. We have 2 high quality Godot based mobile games in production on iOS/google play/steam right now. Unity has very few advantages over Godot on mobile.

Is this some VC's pouncing on Unity's missteps? How serious was the damage to Unity's credibility after the installation fee disaster? How big is the moat for unity?

truegoric 3y ago

It kinda does sound like EEE. „W4 Games will strengthen our role within the Godot ecosystem by supporting its open-source development and continuing to build products and services to facilitate Godot’s expansion, such as W4 Consoles (an approved middleware console porting solution for Godot games) and W4 Cloud (multi-tenant service to support millions of users).”

arlcode 3y ago
Getting game engines in console and providing support for developers is certainly a business. I've met some people who brought their custom (more simple ) engines/games to consoles and there is money in providing a ready made solution which, by the nature of it, cannot be open source or permissive. The main question is it the "10x in 3 years" kind of business or the "steady stream of a small medim profit" variety.
SXX 3y ago
It's not EEE because W4 Games actually founded by some of top Godot contributors who continue to work on FOSS version as well. There just some things you can't have open source like console platform support code.

arjonagelhout 3y ago

Unity still has a more mature product compared to Godot, so for many projects it won’t be feasible to switch to Godot. Unity is easier to use, has more fully featured and higher quality rendering pipelines, more integrations with other software, a larger asset store and the ability to quickly add advertisements to a game using Unity Ads. (etcetera) That said, we stopped using Unity because of the term changes and are now focusing on building a custom game engine, but our use case is way different than game studios. In game studios it’s a numbers game. e.g. How much does it cost to retrain our staff to switch to a different engine versus the benefits. From what I can see, Unity has not yet made its product so unattractive that it won’t be used for future productions.

pjmlp 3y ago

It is business as usual for big studios, maybe a couple of indies decided to port their games to GDScript or do not care about the platforms where C#/Godot isn't available.

broken_clock 3y ago

Godot currently doesn't even have good support for things like in-app purchases for iOS/Android. No one is willing to work on stuff like that for free/open-source fun. I think the big moat is that for studios, games are so risky to make, that there's no reason to take on tech risk by possibly running into issues like this. You know Unity will work for basically any non AAA game you want to make. Hopefully this $15m closes that gap.

nightowl_games 3y ago
Google Play IAP: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-google-play-billing https://github.com/godotengine/godot-google-play-billing iOS IAP: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-ios-plugins https://github.com/godotengine/godot-ios-plugins
- username256 3y ago
  The iOS one is unmaintained and has been for a while (it still doesn't officially support Godot 4.x). Supposedly it should be maintained again by EOY but we've yet to see any progress on it.
  - nightowl_games 3y ago
    Maintaining this yourself is trivial. We sell IAPS on Android, iOS, Steam & XSolla in the Godot game engine. Android and iOS are the easiest. This is really, really minor stuff we're talking about here.
    - broken_clock 3y ago
      Maybe you can write a blog post or a reddit thread? There were a bunch of people asking about it on Discord for Godot 4, and some confused reddit threads offering to pay people for a tutorial: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/11vxeo7/can_i_please_pay_someone_to_show_me_how_they_got/ https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/11vxeo7/can_i_please... https://old.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/13ka6qc/will_pay_to_have_someone_walk_through_iap_in_app/ https://old.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/13ka6qc/will_pay_to_...

npinsker 3y ago

Their moat is massive for mobile apps. For PC + console, I think their clock is ticking. Godot has many disadvantages (fewer features, large performance problems, asset store, poor UI) but they'll eventually fix them and perhaps become the dominant engine. The only question is how much further ahead Unity will be.

nightowl_games 3y ago
The moat is massive for console games, mobile games on Godot work great. We have 2 high quality Godot based mobile games in production on iOS/google play/steam right now. Unity has very few advantages over Godot on mobile.