I don’t think VC-backed engines can avoid enshittification. Unity is really demonstrating that now. OSS is the only way.
Can't blame the VCs for trying this model, but they've played society for suckers. We let them get away with this for too long, becoming dependent on their "free" offerings.
At this point I'd be willing to get rid of my free stuff altogether and pay a subscription for products I like/use as it would incentivize the companies to add features that benefit me.
For example, search on the web is dying. I would absolutely pay money to replace Google with a search engine I trust and that works for me.
It needs two sides for this to work:
1. a company attempting to "fish" customers with this approach
2. customers who fall for this trap, and did not create an emergency/backup plan when the respective company becomes "evil"/untenable.
Every company sooner or later becomes "evil" (and be it because of ownership changes because the original founders die or want to retire). Having made no "backup plan" for such a situation to happen is in my opinion gross negligence.
It's a problem. Whoever control search will control what we see hear and read. Dangerous times. Hoping that somebody can build a subscription search that works and returns real competitive-ness to the information marketplace
The devs using the OSS engine also wouldn't be stopped from spending resources on making the engine better for their uses (and in turn, making it also better for everyone), similarly how it works with Linux.
And you wont manage to achieve anything with that. Maybe Unity could spinoff its ad business (together with some major liabilities like Ricitelo and other execs) and then MS could buy the engine part.
Realistically that would still only be enough to get something you can make a cool looking demo and that only run on desktop.
Building a general purpose engine that is suitable for many different workflows and run on pretty much every singe platform like Unity is very trick and takes a lot of time (and trial an error). Dev UX, APIs, platform integration, QA, all the third party packages and infrastructure are much harder to solve than shiny graphics or advanced physics. Whatever you come up with that $30mm is only likely to cover a small subset of use cases.
$30mm is more than enough when you ditch legacy stuff like anything that isn't a Vulkan/DX11/Metal renderer.
With the right team it might. Realistically they'd just under promise and undeliver (or not deliver at all).
> stuff like anything that isn't a Vulkan/DX11/Metal renderer.
That's also not the complicated part.