4 ms·
They don't have to be bad guys to be at the forefront of a growing monoculture, precisely because Unity shit the bed and the remaining competition for indie dev
by ljm 2y ago
They don't have to be bad guys to be at the forefront of a growing monoculture, precisely because Unity shit the bed and the remaining competition for indie devs tapers off.
I love Godot for game dev, but it's not the full stack package, and last time I checked it wasn't great for 3D, but it's basically the best you have short of modding Doom.
RPG Maker and Adventure Game Studio corner the market on a niche genre of pixel-art RPGs and point-and-clicks if you want to stay 2D.
It's expensive to build a new engine from scratch, especially when Unreal says it can cross-build to PC, Xbox, PS4/PS5, Switch, Mobile, etc.
The problem is that making a generic does-anything engine means it can't be optimal, and more and more these days studios are using the engine but don't understand how to optimise within it. So now you're downloading shader caches from Steam because you can pull a pre-compiled shader across the network faster than it will build at runtime, and you still expect the game to run smooth as butter.
I build shit for the web, and this is the exact trade-off you make when you, say, choose Rails for your server over a more hands-on setup. I can spin up web apps in Rails with my eyes closed, it's that easy, but the performance has a high floor.