(This comment is not an endorsement of the merger which I'm personally not a fan of - we get an ad/installer company merging with the biggest non-AAA game engine company which creates all sort of problematic incentives)
Whatever pushes people closer to Godot. Seriously though, the only thing I see that Unity has that Godot lacks is a rich asset / resource store, with lots and lots of options for whatever you want to build your game with. I would think the maintainers could produce such a store to facilitate funding the project and even provide their own offerings like code snippets for specific game types and then keep 100% of those proceeds (aside from payment vendor fees) towards the project.
It's either that or someone, somewhere with free time and energy builds their own and donates to Godot for every asset bought.
I really like Godot but I'm only a dev, I don't have time to design my own graphics, I just want to code different ideas to see how they go and go from there, I just want to download a few assets and get cracking, and right now that is far easier to do with Unity than it is with Godot it seems like. I think Godot adopting a Unity importer might help significantly.
- Doesn't handle 3D as well. Mostly optimisation stuff, though also things like procedural sky/sun is weaker I find with Godot than Unity. Though almost all of that are looking to change with Godot 4.
- As you mention asset store, but also just the size of the community. Can't really blame Godot for this though, their documentation is certainly very good which is about as much as they can do.
- GDScript is a great language, but I'm not a big fan of using engine-specific languages, rather than a generic one like C#. Of course it has its advantages, but it means you also miss out on whatever package manager comes with the language. Bindings remedy this, but they're not a simple out-the-box experience.
- Similar to above, GDScript and a lot of areas of the engine feel more strongly orientated towards fast and easy dev time rather than game performance. Its a personal choice so I can't complain much, and again bindings can help, but out the box GDScript of course isnt as fast as C# with ECS.
Thats about all I can think of, and as I say I use, and overall love, Godot so despite my complaints theres still more going for it than against it (for me)
I didn't even consider that! Good call out!
> Similar to above, GDScript and a lot of areas of the engine feel more strongly orientated towards fast and easy dev time rather than game performance.
Correct me if I'm wrong or way off, but isn't GDNative (or whatever it might be called now) basically for those moments where you need a little more beef, but don't want to rebuild the entire engine, so you bring in Rust or D or any other language you know and love and bridge it in through GDNative?
That being said, it could be a "grass is greener" issue. There are plenty of engines that offer better performance but a worse workflow, Unity for one, that I'm not using and instead using Godot, and I guess bindings are as close as reasonably feasible to getting the best of both worlds, so I cant complain much.
Seems like Unity isn't too proud of that either. I wasn't able to figure out what ironSource do from the first few paragraphs due to them dancing around the truth.