Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

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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.

vs

> 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.

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