Wouldn't be that certain... there is a lot of stuff built on Unity. The most common theme I heard was that they're trying to capitalize off of Genshin Impact [1], but there's also a ton of other highly successful games like Among Us or Untitled Goose Game that won't/can't (easily) be ported to another engine.
In other words, they want to become the IBM of game engines. Rent seekers for sub-par service.
[1] https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/will-genshin-impact-affe...
[2] https://www.create-learn.us/blog/top-games-made-with-unity/
I would love to track new releases for the next N months and see how it compares vs historical. Does utilization fall off a cliff?
I've been making a Unity VR game, and I can assure you, with a bit blood, sweat, tears, and some ChatGPT assistance, it can be done, especially for the vanilla 2d games which represent the majority of Unity games in the wild.
The developers of Genshin is a major shareholders in Unity China which is an offshot company based in China which has different terms. They are separate entity from Unity Technologies.
Source: https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manag...
The good numbers will be in just in time to calculate the bonuses and the bad numbers won't show up until the decision makers work somewhere else, after all they are the guys who doubled the profitability of Unity, so they will have lots of options.
This is pretty unfortunate, because Unity is partly responsible for the surge of Linux gaming over the last 10 years. Supporting Linux comes nearly for free on Unity (compared to many other engines), and fewer Unity games will likely mean fewer Linux games.
Actual godot does not, and never will.
From their own docs:
“ Godot does not officially support consoles (save for XBox One via UWP) currently.
The reasons for this are:
To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. Godot, as an open source project, does not have such a legal figure. Console SDKs are secret, and protected by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the code as open-source. Consoles require specialized hardware to develop for, so regular individuals can’t create games for them anyway”
The difference is that lots of Unity and Unreal developers go through the trouble to do this.
Having access to the SDK doesn't give you unfettered access to publish on their stores. It only allows you to write and compile code targeting their hardware/runtime.
TLDR A game market flooded with shovelware crap is a disaster for everyone.
Modern day consoles intentionally add hurdles/friction/cost to publishing in order to weed out the less serious studios.
And in the meantime, there's already tons of crap shovelware on the Switch storefront. Nintendo doesn't filter for quality.
To dismiss Godot because you, a solo hobby dev, can’t target PS5 is hilarious.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
To paraphrase the docs : You can ship games on consoles, but the tools required to do so will never be included in the open source code.
Eg. Just because you need to buy a tin opener to open your can of beans, doesn't mean you don't have any beans
I imagine >50% of video game development is art. And I imagine some decent percentage of code can be translated without nearly as much effort as the original implementation.
Still, I doubt many developers are going to switch engines mid or late development.
But a lot of times, developers re-use much from their old games in development of their new games.
Is this realistically going to hold developers back from moving future development to a new engine?
Let’s take art as an example. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s targeted to explicit engine behaviour. It’s symbiotic with the code. You can’t just go from Unity’s universal pipeline to Unreals.
And code is even harder. Forget language choice for a second, but logic itself is very tied to the engine. Unity’s monobehaviour architecture is very different to how one would write it in Unreal or Godot. That’s not even getting into engine specific optimization.
what might be fast in one render pipeline will be slow in another. Scheduling is different.
Also many developers rely on third party tools that aren’t engine agnostic either.
For us, it's a huge deal. It's that people have spent the best part of a decade working with Unity, their support and enterprise training is very good. Also we have a game out in December which is also Unity based.
As of yet we haven't made a decision on what to do but legal are looking at it, so, it's business as usual for now.
I think being a AA game engine was just one early part of their long term business strategy, and this last move is them ejecting that stage of their rocket as a necessary part of moving on to the next stage of their strategy.
Most of the value of stock comes from the ability to sell it to someone else who wants to buy it. Who wants to buy stock in a company that has presented a plan to self-immolate?
The current stockholders may see some returns from short term profits, but then they'll be left holding the bag.
This seems like a case where the shareholders are incentivized to oust the board, because the company is going to screw them.
I'm sure this will make their company a short term gain in profits, but in very short order no more Unity games will be made. Even if you accept the terms they're proposing, you know damn well they are willing to change the rules at any time at your expense.
Unity just became an extinction-level-event liability for any game company. Who would dare touch it with a ten foot pole?
The leadership will be ousted by their shareholders quickly enough, I expect.