The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point

My advice to anyone setting out making games would be to pick any major engine with a trackrecord (can be broadly construed), stick with it, and just start pumping out games. Start small, like your smallest idea then cut that in half. Complete the game and ship it to Steam. There's a lot you'll learn in the last 20%. Grow the scale for the next game slightly. Repeat. If you're dying to build a dream game, don't. Save that for the next decade. Yes, decade. That's when you're skills will match your ambition. Ultimately, the tech isn't that important. Project management, scope, persistence, and execution are more important. Flipping around will drain your time, and reduce the rate you get better.

If you've been working in Unity for a few years you'll also notice a trend about Unity's future:

- New versions of Unity offer more configuration options for your game or app, which make it hard to figure out which option to select. Choosing the wrong option will often result in incompatibility or other headaches down the road. Things like the proliferation of render pipelines, the new input system, etc.

- The experience of using the Unity editor itself has gotten much worse. The editor presents you with a progress bar much more often.

IMO these problems look like symptoms of a company culture where developers are rewarded for adding new features but not incentivized to work on things like editor stability, editor performance, or UX. Kind of a classic problem at lots of larger software companies.

This article is pretty shallow, but I agree with the broad strokes. I'm personally betting on Godot reaching an inflection point (I have $$$ personally invested in a startup betting on this), but I think it's totally a great outcome if the market is shared between Godot, Unity, and Unreal. I think the most likely scenario is that Godot enters in the indie/low-end market and moves up the ladder, Epic continues to dominate the AAA market, and Unity is squeezed somewhere between.

With that said, none of this is guaranteed and will require significant commercial support to make Godot remotely competitive. Some problems are immediately obvious like the lack of tutorials and an asset store (that's what we're working on in the near-term), but it also involves more sophisticated multiplayer options, a better asset pipeline, and much much more, so it's going to be a long road.

But I'm optimistic about Godot's future. I'm currently putting together a simple 2D RTS game with Godot 4 beta to use as a tutorial and template and it's been such a joy. Despite the bugs and the warts, I've gotten so much done in just two weeks. If you squint really hard, you can see an army of indies in the future making simple, but great games with Godot in half the time they do today and that gets me really excited.

Betting on Godot is appealing from a philosophical position, but there's not much indication that it won't be the Firefox to Epic's Chrome. Likewise, Blender didn't and won't kill commercial 3D suites.

In practice, Unreal is source available enough to satisfy the needs of commercial developers, and it's backed by a billion dollar incumbent that shows little or no sign of slowing down.

Without serious revenue generation to fund its developers, Godot will struggle to attract the top talent. It will get great talent, like Firefox, but not in the numbers and dedication that Epic can pay for and so won't be able to take the same risks with development time.

And then there's professional level support. Who can you pay six and seven figures a year to in order to acquire the services of a team of industry experts who work with Godot?

I've be enjoying Love2d for the last few months.

I've been apprehensive about building a large code base in Lua but it has been OK so far.

Love has a good feature set and rock solid performance.

https://love2d.org/

Bad article. This is an outsider's perspective looking in. Godot and Blender are no where near industry standards.

I am gobsmacked that the market share for Unity and Unreal is "only" 61%. I am interested to know if the remaining 39% is made up of other third party engines or independent engines predominantly.

Godot is definitely a positive light in the future of game engines, and I am hopeful for its future. At the very least, even if it all goes wrong, you could still use the standalone godot executables for years to come without any SaaS nonsense.

I've used Unity since around 2014 or so, for personal projects and also at work for a VR startup. The primary problem with Unity is: 1. The editor has become so slow and buggy, to the point where it is unusable, 2. Features are half-baked, like the new ECS which has failed to replace the old user scripts, lack of a networking solution despite years of development time, etc. My relatively small personal project causes the latest Unity versions to constantly freeze with loading bars that never complete. I think that peak Unity was 2019 or so, all versions since then have been worse.

With the ironSource acquisition complete, I don't think things will turn around. Unity didn't have a cashcow like Epic, so some sort of acquisition was pretty much inevitable. The profits from Unity licenses and the Unity asset store just isn't high enough to sustain development.

This really makes me want to try making something with Godot. I have too many projects already, dammit.

I'll bet $5 this inflection point never happens. Godot is good but it's no Unity/Unreal.

The font they've used on this website should be a little lighter. You can still almost see it.

I'm still a huge fan of irrlicht 3d.

Sadly it got less and less support and users.

The engine was amazingly designed, I loved how you managed the game loop and entities.

Blender gets a small shout out at the end, for completeness.

In my opinion Godot and Blender are symptomatic of the future, and also need healthy competitors.

I think this is a pretty insightful piece. Godot is a pretty strong completely-free alternative to Unity and Unreal and seems like a solid offering that is continuously improving. It's already seriously impressive compared to how the earliest versions of Unity were, if you ask me. It's also far more accessible since you can literally do whatever you want with it and never have to care about what artificially-imposed limits you're going to hit and have to start paying to make the most of what you've been investing dozens or hundreds of hours (or more) into. Every time I look into it I'm impressed how much it has improved. There's serious potential and already tons of neat stuff I'm seeing devs sharing on social media that they're making with Godot. Oh, the other awesome thing? This engine is on OpenBSD! Mind blown.

If you were hoping for an insightful article or analysis about game engines, you won't find it here. It's just FUD about Unity and Unreal then surprise turns out it's an advertisement for Godot.

Summarizing, both Unity and Unreal are damaging themselves with unsettling strategies and strategic partners, and if the trend continues other game engines, such as Godot, will replace them.

It's the circle of life, not an "inflection point".

OT: I find myself more and more closing pages that use bad font, text color, or layout choices. I could use Reader mode, but like with paywalls that protect nothing of value, choose to simply not read them. My life is not diminished in doing so.

So, why not O3DE?