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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid this will be an unpopular opinion with how beloved Godot is... but this is how Unity ended up where they are.

Unity launched with a very similar mission to Godot, very similar energy of busting up big game engine: then the funding came in.

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To date, Godot follows the Blender story, not the Unity story: built originally as a proprietary tool, later open-sourced, but in a state where few could seriously use it. Then after years and years of gradually built momentum, you start to see industry backers appear.

Unity's story was always "plucky startup goes big". They never dogfooded an actual game in-house, they kept the source closed, broke everything as they went along, never fixed longstanding bugs. All the early goodwill was simply based on the fact that the IDE made the first 80% of a game easy to reach - the part where you have some collision logic wired up to input, things interact, assets appear, it runs on device. Actually finishing complex, featureful games in Unity has always been a dark art.

I feel like this is being insanely harsh by leveraging hindsight, so harsh you're actually ignoring reality at points.

Like Unity was originally born from the idea the two co-founders would build a game studio that would license their tech. And they did in fact release a game: https://www.macworld.com/article/174909/gooball.html

They were 100% that plucky startup (I mean the team started when two people met in an apartment off a forum and merged their codebases...) and before they started leveraging all of their funding to buy up middleware after middleware, they were actually pretty good about stability and quality.

They literally built their initial success on the quality of their editor) -

Godot also suffers from the exact same 80/20 problem Unity does (W4 Games is literally betting the farm on commercializing part that 20% in closed source tooling).

As far as I'm concerned that problem is inherent to any game engine that targets widespread accessibility, because making a game without an extremely deep level of discipline when it comes to organization will always be a recipe for a slog.

Yes Unity being more responsive to bugs would help, yes Godot is currently a million time better off in _that_ respect being open source... but again, to me funding is exactly where the train starts to jump the rails.

If you actually go back and research Unity's roots, they had the _exact_ inspiration and drive Godot did, but it was having to recoup investments that slowly pushed things off track, and eventually that snowballed into what we have today. From guy who wanted to make Mac games and tools for people who make Mac games... to a company that's merging with an ad corporation for their survival.

> If you actually go back and research Unity's roots, they had the _exact_ inspiration and drive Godot did

Are you sure? Was Unity's team inspired to release an open-source game engine like Godot's team? This might seem like a nit-pick, but you do emphasize that their motives were _exactly_ the same.

It's hard to argue Godot will follow the same path as unity when Godot is open-source and Unity is not.

I didn't realize I was prompting a diffusion model, so exact needed to mean Godot was actually conceived in the same apartment as Unity.

Democratizing game creation, that's the motivation they both shared.

No one is saying that Godot will merge with an ad company in X years, my entire original point is that taking on VC funding is what pushed the main vision of Unity's founders away from where it started.

Now you have the person who's title was "head of development" for Godot taking on the title of "CEO" of a profit VC funded entity and you really have trouble seeing any parallels?

Open Source is not a panacea for a project's leadership having shifting goals. It definitely doesn't hurt, but when you're talking about taking on incumbents like Unity and Unreal, it won't be easy to recover if "W4" starts losing focus because VCs want to do VC things.

The dynamics of open source and closed source software business is just very different. Try to understand that first before comparing apartments.

I mention that difference no less than 3 times across three comments.

Learn to read before typing.

If thats all there is your understanding of open source and closed source business, then youre a fool.

An ignorant hardheaded fool, with head in the sand like an ostrich

> Open Source is not a panacea for a project's leadership having shifting goals. It definitely doesn't hurt, but when you're talking about taking on incumbents like Unity and Unreal, it won't be easy to recover if "W4" starts losing focus because VCs want to do VC things.

> An ignorant hardheaded fool, with head in the sand like an ostrich

You can tell who in this conversation has an intelligent take pretty easily.

Funnily enough, I actually originally learned about Godot from using Blender. I had been using Unity for many years but was getting deeper into the Blender hole and thought, "managing all of these asset pipelines from Blender into Unity is such a pain, doesn't Blender have a game engine?"

But Blender removed their game engine, and in the release notes where they removed it they suggested Godot (https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/R...)

I messed around with Godot for a bit, but never did anything serious. Now that they're releasing Godot 4, I might give it another shot.

The key difference is that Unity was a commercial venture from the start and Godot is a FOSS project.

That's not to say FOSS development doesn't have its own challenges and potential issues, but I don't think it's fair to say they are resigned to follow in Unity's footsteps simply because they are now receiving funding.

By example, Blender is receiving a not-insignificant amount of funding from a variety of sources and they are doing better than ever.

godot started as a in-house engine, so commercial venture. (see https://godotengine.org/article/first-public-release ).

Just like Blender started as in-house tools ( https://www.blender.org/about/history/ )

The relevant point is that Godot and Blender are both open source now, and Unity remains closed source.

Original post said "To date, Godot follows the Blender story, not the Unity story" to which _manifold replied "The key difference is that Unity was a commercial venture from the start and Godot is a FOSS project."

My point was to point out that both Blender and Godot were commercial venture first and went FOSS. They did not start as FOSS ventures.

That Unity is not OpenSource yet is not really relevant to what I was trying to explain.

Well there's more hindsight for them to draw on and learn from the mistakes of the past. Im sure there were for Unity too, but its more immediate in this situation I think.

You're probably right though.

The concern with something like this is that chucking the early adopters under the bus once they were established is unlikely to be viewed as a mistake given it likely didn't affect the investors or owners

Unity started development for years as an open source project?

It's not about how you start, it's about how you end up. Only time will tell.

Unity became an open source project, or Godot became a commerical one?

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