Lots of activity on Godot’s social channels with existing Godot users welcoming their peer Unity users.
And already a number of Unity developers offering their services to contribute in improving Godot.
Godot’s new development fund is already reaching$70.000 reached $30.000 per month and counting in just one day.
Unity’s shares have dropped 8% so far.
I believe you will be right that this marketing ‘move’ will make it into all management books and courses.
The most amazing thing is that so far Unity management hasn’t responded yet. It’s almost as if they expect this all to blow over soon. But that’s not the case at all: the forum thread on Unity’s forum is still on fire and the fire is turning into a huge blaze all over the game dev communities.
It’s a literal exodus. I’ve never seen the like. It’s far worse than anything Adobe and AutoDesk pulled on their users.
i always wondered how unity could be sustainable. they grew much too big. the company and the engine (which seems to have become a bit of a bloated mess).
unreal still has fortnite money but will this work forever? hm… and epic games store…
Well, they’ve got Tencent. If Epic goes belly up Tencent will snap it up. There will be short lived complaints and protests because of authoritarian government but in the end people won’t care as long as they don’t get inconvenienced.
5000 posts of customers saying ‘screw you’ to Unity now on their forum. It is not a good sign when one of your longest ever threads is about a PR disaster rather than engine development or WIP projects.
Even if a lot of Unity developers were to switch to Godot and would start to support the development fund from the very first day, that’s the kind of income you likely don’t want in the long run, because they may jump ship at any point. This doesn’t allow for long term planning or anything like that.
It is very clear that this isn’t going to happen, because they would certainly first thoroughly check whether Godot is for them, before committing to supporting the development fund. In that process a lot of them will likely leave towards Unreal or maybe other options, because Godot might not be what they are looking for.
Edit: Just to be clear, I am aware you are pretty much sh*tposting against Unity. I still doubt that this will have a massive effect on Godot, at least for the 3D games, because Godot still feels very rough around the edges.
Keep in mind just how many people you are accusing of unwarranted comments against Unity then (which includes a lot of well-known Unity developers and longtime fans who have not outright spoken against the company in this manner until now). This is far more than just a core group of outspoken and disgruntled users unlike previous missteps.
Because of that, the damage has been done, backpedaling now and calling it a communication error might keep people like Code Monkey on board, but there is now a widespread skepticism over the company’s ability to not repeat this kind of mistake and to commit to openness (ie. not sneaking new charges in through the backdoor and making sure their blog posts are in plain English and not written with their marketing team and stockholders in mind). This will especially apply if the current executive board remains intact (because many are calling for new leadership now).
All they can do is at least ameliorate the damage by having the company fire on all cylinders to keep the current payment system intact and instead finish the pile of unfinished, experimental projects and packages that have been advertised as being modern replacements of older systems, but still fall short of actually being to do so (that is not to mention doing major performance work to resolve the accumulation of waiting dialogues even on the quit button).
Honestly, im not really expirienced, i.e. i didnt use unity and check performances for myself, but i saw tons of proves what unity can gives more fps and less packaging size. The reason i call unity optimization a “optimization” its the fact what a tons of things not really optimized but just cutted out entirely.
Like if we disable shadows - its not really optimization. If we do some smart tricks like depth map caching, change the way how scene prepared for rendering depth maps - when we really optimize it.
Its maybe just my way of describing things, but i really think what real optimization - its where we get same/almost the same results with noticeable less resources.
~7 years ago or so when i chosing the engine i saw some comparison, and i dunno, i cant call unity more optimized simply because they was have badly implemented (but probably more fast, but who cares in this case?..) reflection probes prefiltering, leaving you with pixelated reflections. Some kind of normalized phong which less costly than GGX using in unreal, but also looks worst. No tonemapping over it which make it looks like game from the 2000’s.
But yes, probably its not relevant for mobile games.
Wow, what a shitshow. As a community manager, I feel sorry for their CM team who will no doubt have to deal with the brunt of the fallout here. And as the anonymous employee above mentioned, it’s not like they didn’t warn against this change internally.
I was merely commenting on the potential impact this might have to Godot. I am confident some will switch to Godot, but I am skeptical this will have a massive impact.
In my experience, Godot’s 3D functionality is still lacking a lot compared to Unity and Unreal. Because of that, they might give Godot a try, but it is highly likely that most of them will move on to something else like Unreal.
I never like Unity. Even from the start. I had this feeling about them. Something with their strange updates and strange pricing. Like one of those sales people in the middle of the mall trying to lure you in.
I hope this is a plan to get rid of their current CEO as the dev team in Unity had enough of that guy.
Then they’ll say
“We got rid of the bad CEO and we are going back to our roots with indie developers. Sorry for the inconvinience”.
While it is true that the TOS could endanger the dream careers of many (even though many alternatives like Godot exist), issuing threats and calling for the death of the CEO will only ensure that your career is over (no such thing as a creative hobby inside a jail cell).
Ever read the comments section on sites like Gamespot or some Youtube Gaming channels? Death threats and threats of violence (especially before moderation tech. caught up) is commonly treated as casual speech, and it has been the case for decades.
Gamers have historically been a community that is very prone to anger and outrage (even if the news items cover things like a match 3 title becoming big) because for starters they have terms like “real game” and “true gamer”, so this is not really a left vs. right issue.
That is correct. Most of these casually uttered death threats are probably done by moody minors high on energy drinks with too much time on their hands.
But that doesn’t stop companies from trying to play dirty and attempting to use this rightful anger (that they often created in the first place) for advertising or propaganda.
It’s not a left and right issue, except that this method has been used more often by one political side.
I suspect this is part of their hastily mounted damage control strategy (and it will not work).
The Unity PR disaster is now on the verge of having more posts than threads for beloved assets like Corgi Engine, which means it is far and away the fastest growing thread in the history of that community and right now is also one of the largest. Even more remarkable, the company has made no move to shut it down in favor of a simple locked PR post with clarifications.
Even moves as dubious as the purchase of Iron Source did not attract much attention in comparison. This will definitely create major changes in the engine landscape.
