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I'm surprised that their attempt at double-dipping their customer's revenue backfired into only 25% in expected revenue loss. Among my acquaintances, they are

I'm surprised that their attempt at double-dipping their customer's revenue backfired into only 25% in expected revenue loss. Among my acquaintances, they are now actively being avoided as an engine. Their asset store is still helpful, though. And with good open source competition like Stride (shown at GDC and C# + visual editor like Unity), I'm guessing that getting anyone to buy into a financially unpredictable and technically unstable engine like Unity is a very tough sell.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
I think Unity still has a large moat. There are many amazing features of Unity that a lot of people take for granted, and its not until you go shopping around that you realize how far ahead Unity is. Don't get me wrong, I would rather be working on any other engine. Unreal is great, but its very heavy, and blueprints - yuck. The core team at Godot don't understand the needs of developers and it's very buggy. You wouldn't choose it if you don't want to be in the business of fixing bugs in your engine.
- kramerger 3y ago
  > The core team at Godot don't understand the needs of developers Didn't godot start as an in-house engine in a gamedev company?
  - bootloop 3y ago
    Yes but from the big picture perspective Unity does get paid by bigger companies for features which trickle down to users. On the other side Godot does not have this bandwidth so at the moment you have to bring your own engine team for your own needs. And because of that many "unsexy" features are not as good as they could be. That said, I see a lot of movement and the Fund raised significantly in the last months. And the fact that stuff is open source helped me so much compared to Unity where you might have documentation but the feature just doesn't work and you can't figure out why..
    - neonsunset 3y ago
      I'd rather prefer to see Stride win, GDExtensions leave room for improvement and the sentiment within Godot community which perceives C# as second class citizen to be avoided in favour of much inferior (first and foremost slower!) GDScript does not help.
      - bootloop 3y ago
        Please correct me if I am wrong, but from a bit of looking around it seems Stride is using Mono as a runtime for on mobile platforms like iOS. [0] So similar to Unity (which worked around this using their IL2CPP backend) it actually is behind Godot in terms of C# language / feature support. It is true that Godot community only started to get serious about C#, but they have a good pace, and already have support for the latest .NET with AOT. Personally I have no interest in GDScript, but I recently ported a rather large C# code-base from Unity to Godot and I never had to touch GDScript. So it can happily be ignored. In general it took me less time to rewrite the code-base then implementing some of the workarounds for missing features in Unity (e.g. HTTP2) in the first place. [0] https://github.com/stride3d/stride/issues/2069 https://github.com/stride3d/stride/issues/2069
- zilti 3y ago
  The only thing Unity is ahead in is bloat. I don't know of another engine in which even simple 2D games have laughable loading times and feel sluggish and stuttery. I am glad they're losing market share finally.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  > The core team at Godot don't understand the needs of developers and it's very buggy. I heard the exact same complaint from plenty of Unity users about Unity though ;)
  - Snow_Falls 3y ago
    Isn't that pretty much every product though? "They just don't understand what _real_ [insert career here] needs!"
realusername 3y ago
It's because its very hard to switch engines. What they are doing now is a short term cash grab at the expense of the long term stability.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  To be fair it’s still very cheap. Even quite a bit cheaper than Unreal, it’s how they implemented their pricing model and their overall communication that’s the real issue
  - realusername 3y ago
    I agree with you that the PR has been even more disastrous than the pricing change but it's hard to not see this hard turn of business strategy as a short term brand squeeze. The change of CEO and layoffs at the same time are also hinting to that.
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      The massively over hired during 2020-2022. So IMHO the layoffs seem like a good sign (aside from the obvious issue in cases like this, firing the ”right” people is hard if not almost impossible unless you’re removing specific product teams/departments)
LeFantome 3y ago
Give it time. Many tact cannkt switch away quickly will still do it eventually. It will be hard to measure though as the biggest impact over time will be lost growth.
- Snow_Falls 3y ago
  There is going to be a very long tail of games being worked on in unity. It can takes years to make a game and the cost of switching engines is very high. I expect that the number of unity yes will slowly decline over time as the gamesget released and studios clamour for a different, more predictable engine for their next projects. Being screwed in the middle of production is not something many will want to risk twice. If Godot gets better than it is currently, we could see it eating more and more of unity's market share over time.
pjmlp 3y ago
Stride is nice, but doesn't have the market coverage, AOT toolchains, or the education market that Unity has. In game development universities there are only three game engines that count, Unity, Unreal, and the one students have to develop during their studies.
- krapp 3y ago
  "game development universities" are a grift. You can learn what you need to online, for free. Especially if you're an American, and not personally wealthy enough to be able to float the debt for a degree that no one will care about, going to school to learn any kind of software development would be idiotic. That said, it would probably be best to focus on the most popular game engines just because that experience is more valuable and the community around them more developed, but encouraging vendor lock-in only leads to the normalization of exploitative practices. People should experiment and try new frameworks when they can. A lot of the people who switched to Godot after Unity's license debacle remained. A lot left for Unity as soon as they started acting reasonable again, and they had a lot of complaints about Godot which have only made the framework better, and more competitive, and Godot will be more attractive to them the next time Unity screws them over, which it now knows it can do. That can only happen if developers take a risk on investing in alternatives.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Those that remained weren't taking advantage of Unity features anyway.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I mean, AOT got full support in .NET 8 and that is... 2 months old. you could get some support in .NET 7 but you'd be locked out of many libraries. Despite that, Stride 4.2 launched very recently and (claims to) has full .NET 8 support, so I imagine they will be taking advantage of such features very quickly. That's one of the biggest pluses for me in how quickly they keep up with and commit to being fully .NET compliant. As for the other points, sure. the marketing wave hasn't hit yet and that wave can be a bit ephemeral. I feel that educational coverage defeats the point on why people would use Stride as of now. Maybe one day that will be important, but it's contingent on the marketing, and part of that will be contingent on people who decide to dive in and make some impressive games with the engine. People doing that obviously won't have 5 years of Stride experience on their resume, so they have to rely on fundamentals in both software engineering and engine programming to do that.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
> backfired into only 25% in expected revenue loss. Where did you get that from? They just got a new CEO who is not as delusional/incompetent/x as the last one? Even if their revenue keeps growing at 30% YoY these cuts still make perfect sense considering how bloated the company was

jay_kyburz 3y ago

I think Unity still has a large moat. There are many amazing features of Unity that a lot of people take for granted, and its not until you go shopping around that you realize how far ahead Unity is. Don't get me wrong, I would rather be working on any other engine. Unreal is great, but its very heavy, and blueprints - yuck. The core team at Godot don't understand the needs of developers and it's very buggy. You wouldn't choose it if you don't want to be in the business of fixing bugs in your engine.

kramerger 3y ago
> The core team at Godot don't understand the needs of developers Didn't godot start as an in-house engine in a gamedev company?
- bootloop 3y ago
  Yes but from the big picture perspective Unity does get paid by bigger companies for features which trickle down to users. On the other side Godot does not have this bandwidth so at the moment you have to bring your own engine team for your own needs. And because of that many "unsexy" features are not as good as they could be. That said, I see a lot of movement and the Fund raised significantly in the last months. And the fact that stuff is open source helped me so much compared to Unity where you might have documentation but the feature just doesn't work and you can't figure out why..
  - neonsunset 3y ago
    I'd rather prefer to see Stride win, GDExtensions leave room for improvement and the sentiment within Godot community which perceives C# as second class citizen to be avoided in favour of much inferior (first and foremost slower!) GDScript does not help.
    - bootloop 3y ago
      Please correct me if I am wrong, but from a bit of looking around it seems Stride is using Mono as a runtime for on mobile platforms like iOS. [0] So similar to Unity (which worked around this using their IL2CPP backend) it actually is behind Godot in terms of C# language / feature support. It is true that Godot community only started to get serious about C#, but they have a good pace, and already have support for the latest .NET with AOT. Personally I have no interest in GDScript, but I recently ported a rather large C# code-base from Unity to Godot and I never had to touch GDScript. So it can happily be ignored. In general it took me less time to rewrite the code-base then implementing some of the workarounds for missing features in Unity (e.g. HTTP2) in the first place. [0] https://github.com/stride3d/stride/issues/2069 https://github.com/stride3d/stride/issues/2069
zilti 3y ago
The only thing Unity is ahead in is bloat. I don't know of another engine in which even simple 2D games have laughable loading times and feel sluggish and stuttery. I am glad they're losing market share finally.
flohofwoe 3y ago
> The core team at Godot don't understand the needs of developers and it's very buggy. I heard the exact same complaint from plenty of Unity users about Unity though ;)
- Snow_Falls 3y ago
  Isn't that pretty much every product though? "They just don't understand what _real_ [insert career here] needs!"

realusername 3y ago

It's because its very hard to switch engines. What they are doing now is a short term cash grab at the expense of the long term stability.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
To be fair it’s still very cheap. Even quite a bit cheaper than Unreal, it’s how they implemented their pricing model and their overall communication that’s the real issue
- realusername 3y ago
  I agree with you that the PR has been even more disastrous than the pricing change but it's hard to not see this hard turn of business strategy as a short term brand squeeze. The change of CEO and layoffs at the same time are also hinting to that.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    The massively over hired during 2020-2022. So IMHO the layoffs seem like a good sign (aside from the obvious issue in cases like this, firing the ”right” people is hard if not almost impossible unless you’re removing specific product teams/departments)

LeFantome 3y ago

Give it time. Many tact cannkt switch away quickly will still do it eventually. It will be hard to measure though as the biggest impact over time will be lost growth.

Snow_Falls 3y ago
There is going to be a very long tail of games being worked on in unity. It can takes years to make a game and the cost of switching engines is very high. I expect that the number of unity yes will slowly decline over time as the gamesget released and studios clamour for a different, more predictable engine for their next projects. Being screwed in the middle of production is not something many will want to risk twice. If Godot gets better than it is currently, we could see it eating more and more of unity's market share over time.

pjmlp 3y ago

Stride is nice, but doesn't have the market coverage, AOT toolchains, or the education market that Unity has. In game development universities there are only three game engines that count, Unity, Unreal, and the one students have to develop during their studies.

krapp 3y ago
"game development universities" are a grift. You can learn what you need to online, for free. Especially if you're an American, and not personally wealthy enough to be able to float the debt for a degree that no one will care about, going to school to learn any kind of software development would be idiotic. That said, it would probably be best to focus on the most popular game engines just because that experience is more valuable and the community around them more developed, but encouraging vendor lock-in only leads to the normalization of exploitative practices. People should experiment and try new frameworks when they can. A lot of the people who switched to Godot after Unity's license debacle remained. A lot left for Unity as soon as they started acting reasonable again, and they had a lot of complaints about Godot which have only made the framework better, and more competitive, and Godot will be more attractive to them the next time Unity screws them over, which it now knows it can do. That can only happen if developers take a risk on investing in alternatives.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Those that remained weren't taking advantage of Unity features anyway.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I mean, AOT got full support in .NET 8 and that is... 2 months old. you could get some support in .NET 7 but you'd be locked out of many libraries. Despite that, Stride 4.2 launched very recently and (claims to) has full .NET 8 support, so I imagine they will be taking advantage of such features very quickly. That's one of the biggest pluses for me in how quickly they keep up with and commit to being fully .NET compliant. As for the other points, sure. the marketing wave hasn't hit yet and that wave can be a bit ephemeral. I feel that educational coverage defeats the point on why people would use Stride as of now. Maybe one day that will be important, but it's contingent on the marketing, and part of that will be contingent on people who decide to dive in and make some impressive games with the engine. People doing that obviously won't have 5 years of Stride experience on their resume, so they have to rely on fundamentals in both software engineering and engine programming to do that.

ffgjgf1 3y ago

> backfired into only 25% in expected revenue loss. Where did you get that from? They just got a new CEO who is not as delusional/incompetent/x as the last one? Even if their revenue keeps growing at 30% YoY these cuts still make perfect sense considering how bloated the company was