This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they’re switching engines on social media.
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games, they just want the easy route today and a marketplace to monetize on. These are poisoned gifts, and always have been.
It’s not “the easy route”. Making a game engine is a tremendous investment these days. If you are making anything other than a game that looks like early 2000s or earlier, you need a pretty capable engine that takes years to develop. That’s on top of the time it costs to make a game, which is also typically years. Not to mention that your proprietary engine will have subpar tooling and make your game development slower.
For anyone but industry giants it’s not feasible to make a modern engine. Unless your game is not aiming to play and feel like a modern game, you have to run with an off-the-shelf engine.
Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s hard, the companies that did it are using it to control you and so now you don’t have a choice.
So get cracking or don’t complain.
Also Godot is a thing.
You’re not listening. It’s not that it’s hard (although it definitely is), it’s literally just infeasible financially and time wise. You cannot spend millions developing an engine unless you are a large AAA studio. You can’t pull up your bootstraps your way into making a modern game engine within the budget you have to make a game.
As for Godot:
- While games like Domekeeper and Luck Be a Landlord are great, they are made by two people and one person respectively. It has not proven itself as an engine capable of supporting the type of development cycle and team necessary for larger projects.
- The best games released in Godot are visually vastly inferior to anything you can whip up in other commercial engines. Its focus has been on 2D, and the 3D games released in it don’t look great. Users expect more from bigger budget games.
- Godot is very new. Many games started development in its infancy, and some before it was even released as open source. Not to mention that most studios have existed much longer and are already established in an older engine, with lots of capital and knowledge locked up in those softwares. There is a lot of inertia to adapting new technology.
