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Comment by pathless | Hacker News Reader

Unity has become an unfocused, poorly optimized, half-baked mess. This WAS bad for the independent and small developer market that actually uses their engine for final builds, but they've begun a mass exodus to Godot, which happened to go from "ok" to "great" JUST as Unity ruined their platform with their short lived "20 cents per install" policy.

Someday soon, we will see Godot eclipse Unity in the same fashion that so many other proprietary juggernauts were slowly cannibalized by laser-focused open source projects over the years:

In 2022, the split among GMTK participants was 16% Godot to 61% Unity. In 2023, it was 22% Godot to 49% Unity. This year, it was a whopping 37% Godot to 43% Unity: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GVfo5-0WQAAIMAQ?format=jpg

This is major, because Godot has just had another round of home run improvements that brought in even more developers. I think 2025 is the year that Godot effectively replaces Unity for new developers.

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> In 2022, the split among GMTK participants was [...] This year [...] 37% Godot to 43% Unity:

Jam and commercial games have different requirements.

> I think 2025 is the year that Godot effectively replaces Unity for new developers.

For game jams, possibly. Unity and Unreal have still a very large market share for commercial games.

Yeah but people use the tools they know. Commercial may follow

> Jam and commercial games have different requirements.

Indeed, but it's a clear signal that something is shifting. In jam game environment, the shift is obviously faster, as the timeframes are different. But you extrapolate that things will change for mainstream games as well, it'll just take way longer time.

It would be interesting to see the number of jam games being done at Unity when it first appears, although I think the whole "game jam" thingy wasn't as big then as it is now. But maybe that could give some indication on how long it'll take before we see a difference in mainstream game engine marketshare.

Commercial developers and jam participants want the same thing. And even if they weren't much alike, this is still a huge indicator of trajectory.

The 'thing', be it a game engine or whatever else, of choice for small projects often end up taking over for commercial products too, devs bring their favourite tools into their work and slowly corporate adoption of it grows. It happened with Slack, it's very quickly happening with Blender, hell it even happened with Unity itself I'm not sure I'd be as optimistic as OP in terms of how quickly Godot will take over Unity, but I do believe it will happen, or at least something similar

This is the sort of thing people said about Blender for a long time, and my understanding is that it’s now often used in commercial contexts.

Not a given by any means, but it’s happened before and it will happen again.

I think Unity just publicly figured out what has always been the case - there is no market for a game engine targeted to developers that want to make PC games. They all have no money, don't want to pay license fees, and are rarely successful enough to pay their success forward back to Unity.

However for realtime applications other than "standalone games", Unity has absolute (and growing) dominance outside of where Unreal is carving out a niche (Film/TV). Automotive, simulation, robotics, etc. are all leading Unity adoption.

If you're (royal "You") the type of dev that wants to make games for Steam, Godot is definitely leaning more in that direction these days than Unity, but I think Unity isn't seeing anything really "bad" coming out of that besides lack of good PR in places where game developers post screenshots/etc.

> lived "20 cents per install" policy

Funnily enough nobody who paid attention was going to pay the $0.2 since it was only there to funnel developers to the pro tier which would have given them a significant discount on the per install fee (IIRC there weren't even any current customers who would have paid that much because the personal tier had a $100k limit which was removed and the fee only applied after it).

Unity just had such a horrible PR release and did an inconceivably bad job at explaining the changes that they mad an already horrible pricing model seem 5x worse than it actually war. It was so incoherent that nobody read past the $0.2 per install...

It wasn't the quantity of money that was the issue for most people. It was the "I am changing the deal. Pray I do not change it any further"

They were asserting their ability to unilaterally bring in new terms, and specifically with the per-install issue bring in terms that require data that was poorly defined and could potentially be arbitrarily decided.

It wasn't a money issue. It was a trust issue.

The quantity of money legitimately is an issue too though. Especially for mobile games -- which rely heavily on advertising and scaling up thin margins -- 2.5% of revenue (plus $2,000/yr/seat) could be quite a significant percentage of profit.

To be fair that % of revenue Unity was historically getting from most of its customer that were actually making meaningful amounts of money (i.e. enough to have a permanent paid workforce) relative to the value it provides (especially compared to Apple's 30%) was very low. Of course not surprising given how relatively little pricing power it always had.

But I don't really buy the pricing argument. Most of that type of games are all made with Unity meaning that it wouldn't be too hard for all of them to raise prices by a few % with minimal impact. That mostly only applies to IAP not to ads but then again Unity was offering a discount/waiving the fee if you were using their platform (which is of course scummy and predatory but probably wouldn't have had a massive financial impact).

Overall yeah... they completely messed up with aligning their pricing model with their long term goals as a company. It was always highly suboptimal (the per seat license is almost insignificant for some companies while a significant barrier for smaller ones, contractors etc). They would probably still have been fine if they hadn't started almost literally burning money like complete madmen after the IPO for no reason. Instead they now have >$2 billion in debt (albeit low/zero interest) and nothing to show for it whatsoever (well besides IronSource to some extent I guess..) in addition to a still extremely bloated but also unproductive and heavily demoralized workforce.

Yeah certainly, changing the terms retroactively was just something else.

However I still think that the $0.20 headlines did a lot of reputational damage (even if most medium-major customers did the math) and that could easily have been avoided.

The way they introduced the already the hardly fathomable changes was IMHO as amateurish and half backed as it gets. Literally a corporate suicide attempt, can't imagine what were they thinking...

Any such policy can not work and would have been gamed heavily to damage competitors.

> Unity has become an unfocused, poorly optimized, half-baked mess.

Unity has always been a relatively unfocused, poorly optimized, half-baked mess.

It's just that there used to be no concurrence in this segment and their overall attitude towards makers made the mess somewhat endearing. Now that they act like a typical listed company, well, people feel less inclined to give them a pass.

I tried Godot, unity is light-years ahead of Godot for small team game dev

If you start using Unity, you're not an independent developer any more : has there been a point where Unity did not require a subscription yet ? And when did it became a platform ?

> If you start using Unity, you're not an independent developer any more

How so? The usual definition is that if you're self-publishing, you're independent, but you seem to go by some other heuristic.

> has there been a point where Unity did not require a subscription yet ?

Yes, up until 2016 Unity sold "normal" paid licenses (as well as offering a free version), meaning pay once and keep using, rather than subscription-based like it is now.

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