It's the game engine equivalent of "why people use Maya if there's Blender who can do that stuff". There is a lot of middleware designed to work with Unity, there are many workflows defined on how to properly export models from 3D software to Unity preserving all the materials and special effects. There isn't as much for Godot yet. Yes, you can do it yourself, but most companies don't have time for that.

Answering "why use maya instead of blender?" is more challenging to answer than it used to be.

Replace maya with zbrush / houdini and it's easier to answer but gets harder every update. I say this with a decade of unity experience but I hope godot follows blender's trajectory!

For me it will always be the UI. No matter how much they say they have improved it, it is still my least favorite of all the 3D Programs I have ever used and I have used many 3D programs.

If it's really a game engine equivalent of "why people use Maya if there's Blender who can do that stuff", it means Godot has a bright future ahead :)

Okay, find something like Gaia Terrain for Godot ?

>, but surely pro shops are not using unity (on the whole)?

This is false, Unity is very popular, I've played several professional games made with it, for example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo:_The_World_Ends_with_You

> This is false, Unity is very popular, I've played several professional games made with it, for example.

This is true. Just look at statistics about which game engines were the most popular on Steam: https://steamdb.info/tech/

It's the most popular game engine out there by far.

Here's the top 10:

  Unity      29797
  Unreal     7665
  GameMaker  3173
  RPGMaker   2141
  RenPy      1392
  XNA        595
  Godot      504
  Adobe AIR  405
  Cocos2d    358
  MonoGame   293

Godot is a great engine that will continue to grow and improve. Unity too is excellent, with many useful professional and tutorial assets. Unity's 3D offerings and tooling are more mature, even as an indie. Some of my favorite professional games made in Unity are: Dyson Sphere Program, Cities Skylines, Pillars of Eternity and Disco Elysium. These are all elite tier for their genres.

Regarding tooling, there's a lot of cruft sure, but that's just Sturgeon's law at play with Unity's size and age. Another aspect of Unity's reputation is it faces a fate similar to web development: it's a lot of people's first experience with programming.

The Godot experience is cleaner, more streamlined and constantly adding more great features. Godot is newer compare to Unreal and Unity so hasn't had time to accumulate cruft. But as long as developers aim for some amount of backwards compatibility, it will happen. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

V Rising, Hollow Knight, The Stanley Parable, Valheim, and more mainstream successes are all Unity games.

Note, Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, the recent remake, is a Unity game, the original HL2 mod and 2013 version are both in the source engine.

Godot is nowwhere in the game industry whereas Unity is a standard.

I wonder how Godot's lack of official console support affects it's adoption.

I run a studio and as much as I want to consider Godot it’s off the table for exactly this reason (among a few others).

Games as a business are brutal, and not having a fast path to console releases is throwing potentially huge amounts of money away. Unity has its problems, but we had the first playable Switch and PS5 builds up and running in a matter of days.

Additionally, open source is great but it also means that for the most part everyone working on it is a volunteer. Partnering with Unity as an enterprise customer, I have a huge set of resources at my disposal to fix and address the 40000 things that can go wrong on 10 platforms and endless permutations of customer hardware. Godot just isn’t in the same league.