I realize this is all anecdotal but I am still curious! Thanks.
Unity went off in so many different directions and ended up back at square one imo. Everything just feels like they are chasing Unreal with 20 different teams all with their own quarks.
The direction unreal is going with everything built in from animation tools to texturing is the way to go. Its so nice not having to stress about decisions on what renderer to use, what package to use, and even what programming paradigm to use.
"The Mega Crit team has been hard at work these past 2+ years on a new game. But unlike with Slay the Spire, the engine we have been developing it in is Unity.
The retroactive pricing structure of Runtime Fees is not only harmful in a myriad of ways to developers—especially indies--it is also a violation of trust. We believe Unity is fully aware of this, seeing as they have gone so far as to remove their TOS from GitHub.
Despite the immense amount of time and effort our team has already poured into development on our new title, we will be migrating to a new engine unless the changes are completely reverted and TOS protections are put in place.
We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up."
I tried Unity before the footgun, and wasn't happy with how slow and bloated it felt. I did some web-based games first and then I landed in Godot and it felt much snappier and stuck to it.
Its clearly missing the massive community and the asset store that comes with it. It's also buggy in so many ways. But it is getting better and there is a feeling that the ecosystem is growing and improving quickly.
We're a tiny team though and unsure how this would look like for a big studio.
Massively reduced deployment bundles are always a nice side bonus as well.
I played around with Godot for a bit, but wasn't really getting into it too much.
I started learning Love2D and decided to use that instead.
Except for certain native mobile features needing to have Lua hooks developed for it manually, and some issues getting the resolution changes working properly on iOS (figured that out eventually though, using the "push" library helped), it's been a pretty smooth experience so far.
> The name "Godot" was chosen due to its relation to Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but never will.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine)#History