Is this some VC's pouncing on Unity's missteps? How serious was the damage to Unity's credibility after the installation fee disaster? How big is the moat for unity?
I think the big moat is that for studios, games are so risky to make, that there's no reason to take on tech risk by possibly running into issues like this. You know Unity will work for basically any non AAA game you want to make.
Hopefully this $15m closes that gap.
There were a bunch of people asking about it on Discord for Godot 4, and some confused reddit threads offering to pay people for a tutorial:
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/11vxeo7/can_i_please...
https://old.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/13ka6qc/will_pay_to_...
„W4 Games will strengthen our role within the Godot ecosystem by supporting its open-source development and continuing to build products and services to facilitate Godot’s expansion, such as W4 Consoles (an approved middleware console porting solution for Godot games) and W4 Cloud (multi-tenant service to support millions of users).”
The main question is it the "10x in 3 years" kind of business or the "steady stream of a small medim profit" variety.
Unity is easier to use, has more fully featured and higher quality rendering pipelines, more integrations with other software, a larger asset store and the ability to quickly add advertisements to a game using Unity Ads. (etcetera)
That said, we stopped using Unity because of the term changes and are now focusing on building a custom game engine, but our use case is way different than game studios.
In game studios it’s a numbers game. e.g. How much does it cost to retrain our staff to switch to a different engine versus the benefits. From what I can see, Unity has not yet made its product so unattractive that it won’t be used for future productions.
For PC + console, I think their clock is ticking. Godot has many disadvantages (fewer features, large performance problems, asset store, poor UI) but they'll eventually fix them and perhaps become the dominant engine. The only question is how much further ahead Unity will be.
Unity has very few advantages over Godot on mobile.