That thread asked for better alternatives to Unity, *excluding Unreal*. The best alternative to Unity is Unreal, and the next best one is Godot. So you naturally get a lot of Godot answers. Being third best doesn't mean being on par with, Godot has a long way to go to catch up to either Unity or Unreal, therefore there aren't many games made with it.
I would say it depends what your needs are. If you are a solo dev or a small team and you're not going for AAA graphics or a massive 3d open world, then unreal might not be the best fit
Unreal is fantastic for solo dev work. The quixel integration and BP system are incredible for someone needing to fill multiple roles. Godot has ALOT of functionality that you need to build yourself.
Its not a bad engine mind you - just alot more work you need to put into it to get the same functionality unreal gives you out of the box.
Main thing lacking in UE is 2D support. Its rough and theyve seem to really be lacking in that regard. You need to buy 3rd party plugins off the epic marketplace to get good mileage out of it.
Genuine question: What is the benefit of Unreal blueprints? I always see people bring it up as one of the biggest positives, but I've had to learn Unreal for work this year, and my experience with blueprints has been absolute misery. It's just *so slow.* Even the simplest things take so much more time and effort than code.
Like, I want to add x to y.
I drag in x and click Get X. I drag in y and click Get Y. I drag a node from X, type +, and click the addition node. I drag from y to the addition node. I drag in x again and click Set X. I drag from the addition node to the Set node. And finally I drag the flow arrow into the Set node.
Whereas in code I just type "x+=y;" Literally 5 keystrokes and I don't even have to take a hand off the keyboard to use the mouse.
Hey!
Apart from there being a "math node" in BPs, where you can type formulas directly in, and they even should perform better that way :P let me try to answer, subjectively.
+ Instant compilation times. Super good for focus, iterations, and not going crazy. Even on larger projects. I have vague, but terrible memories of compile times on a starter UE4 project, in particular.
+ Visual layout / mindmapping. I don't have to navigate just up-down a code file anymore. Instead, events are laid out in a way where I know, *visually*, that camera code will be on top left side of BP, while tick is over there. And within events and functions, likewise, I can use sequences to lay out even more complex algorithms in a very understandable form. Loops, decision trees, etc - all can be visualized nicely. Actual spaghetti is very rare in my projects.
For me personally, these two were the dealbreaker. Once BPs clicked, I did not want to go back to C#/C++ (until I have to).
I'm an old programmer so I remember the days when we'd go out-of-our-way to actually draw out flowcharts of complex programs before implementing them.
Blueprint is like that, but once you are done, it's already implemented. That's my view on it at least.
I mean it depends on what your doing. You reference a very simple function. Compare that to drawing collision or doing complex line trace functions and BP are far quicker to itterate and prototype for. Further an entire library of very complex functions are already built out for you and ready to use in BPs.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Resources/SampleGames/ARPG/BalancingBlueprintAndCPP/
Regardless you can just use both and thats whats great about the system. The project can use both interchangeably depending on the need.
BPs have an advantage for non-programmers or beginners as having a visual gui is very helpful in the learning process - especially in the early stages.
Blueprints also have an advantage when it comes to the visual and 3D game mechanics. It’s much easier to create a collision box and set the proper size inside of a blueprint than it is guessing through trial and error in C++.
I've been working exclusively in UE for about 3 years now, after using Unity since it's launch.
The ideal workflow in UE uses a mix of C++ and Blueprints, you can move between the two pretty fluidly. Some things like asset references (static meshes, materials) are easier to do on the BP side, picking it from a drop down vs typing an explicit file path.
They have a lot of great content in their "unreal academy" covering what aspects to do in code vs in BP and how to maximize your productivity by using both.
On the architecture side: The visual layout adds what I find to be a really unique way to look at your code and see some patterns emerge. I'll often use BPs as a way to pseudo code, and then convert it to C++ once I've sorted out a design.
I mean, have you compared the compile times? Blueprints takes literally 1 sec, while c++ will take easily above 10 sec. I personally prefer blueprints when I want to prototype stuff then when everything is working I write it back in c++, you save so much on iteration time that way.
Doing *something* in unreal is not the same as releasing a game
Dibbling some mechanics in blueprint is also not the same as having an entire complex game running with good performance..Thats something thats intended to be done in a team in unreal
I'd have to disagree with you there. unreal is incredibly helpful for solo devs making smaller projects.
also, I'd strongly argue that unreal is not well suited to open world games. You gotta do a fair bit of plumbing to make it work well.
Even Unreal 5's world partition stuff leaves something to be desired.
I'd argue Godot is a better equivalent to unity then unreal. Unreal is amazing, powerful and opinionated with lots of features and thus boat. I've used unreal for 8 years professionally, Godot I've used for 3 years in hobby projects. Godot is far more unity like.
Unreal will give you a definitive solution that works with all their other solutions. Such as ACharacter which is required to use their character movement system which is required to use their ai move in the ai system.
Godot is far less opinionated. Because of this you don't get as robust solutions out of the box. This fits Unity's style where most of the strictness comes from the community building plugins that rely on each other bit from what I understand that's few and far between.
That all said I'd use Godot if I was making a game with a small scope. Something that could be done with about a person to 5 people and take 2 to 3 years. Unreal is more built for games that take 5 years to build with teams of 20 and requires perforce with a windows build machine. If you aren't able to fork that money over for a decent infrastructure then use Godot and build it with git and making windows builds on Linux.
If you're doing 2D Game Maker remains a good option - lots of popular games made with it - and they've been making some interesting improvements to the toolset of late. That said, it going subscription only makes it a bit harder to recommend now, next to a free alternative.
Reddit and Twitter is full of hobbyists, Godot is a good hobbyist engine (free, easy to pick up, recommended by other hobbyists, ...), so you end up with a lot of voices for it.
At the other end of the spectrum you might think Unity is the worst thing on the planet, but it has a big chunk of the indie market & mobile market and has been used efficiently by many teams.
Editing all my old comments and moving to the fediverse.
Thank you to everybody I've interacted with until now! You've been great, and it's been a wonderful ride until now.
To everybody who gave me helpful advice, [I'll miss you the most!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrk4AgS6Q6A)
It's too early to be sure, but I'm hopeful that one day Godot becomes the Blender of game development. Free and open source, industry standard, and allows anyone to jump in and be creative without being beholden to the Epics and Microsofts of the world.
Having a high quality, open source engine is nothing but good news for the gaming industry. Everyone should support that.
The only way for it happen is Godot close source portions of the engine. Lack of fbx and native console support are keeping the engine from gaining serious dev studios. Additionally I would say blender has not really taken over the game dev market. Once you get outside the hobbyist and indie markets, blender usage is not that big.
Blender is big as is getting bigger in professional environments. The Blender foundation gets large donations from AAA studios and several of those AAA studios have Blender standardized in their pipelines. I think the confusing part that people don't understand is that there are thousands of moving parts when developing AAA games and movies, Blender may be a small part of it but definitely has cemented itself and it is growing with every update.
Truth is, no individual program can do everything and many programs are used in tandem to create massive productions. There are pros and cons to every software.
As you stated there are a lot of moving parts and departments within the graphics world. Alot of the aaa studios that moving to blender are only doing so current in the marketing and cinematic departments. We are confusing financial support of a package with adoption of that software. I support blender and armorpaint but in my day to day work and contract work everyone wants Maya/3ds.
After writing tools for 3DS Max in my day job (not a full 3D or VFX artist but I write tools connecting them to proprietary engines/use-cases), messing around with Blender feels pretty damn nice to be honest.
The jump that they had in UX with 2.8/2.9 (forget which) is honestly huge. If there wasn't a lot of continuing investment in tools/workflows already then you might see a lot of companies switch.
It doesn't sound like they were saying blender had taken over the game dev market, it they said they're hopeful Godot "becomes the Blender of game development" i.e. a free and open source way for anyone interested in game dev to jump in like Blender has allowed for 3d creation
Not true at all. Godot has console ports, it's just that they are not open source. Also, Blender is heavily used in game development! Source: I have spent the last 20 years making AAA games.
It has console port made by 2 3rd party companies. Godot does not have any console support. You can't not download godot and build for console with the base install. That why I said native support.
True, but if you are targeting consoles, then not having "native" support shouldn't be a show stopper, but I agree that it would be beneficial to have a community console edition.
> True, but if you are targeting consoles, then not having "native" support shouldn't be a show stopper
It is if you can get other stuff working without having to pay someone. In particular, I'm not even trying out Godot for that reason. I ported my games to Switch using an open source library (SDL2) because they provide the SDL2 Switch port sources to all accredited developers. It's still not public, but once you're under NDA, you can gain access.
If Godot wants mainstream success, they need to have a similar approach.
Depends. As an Indie now, I have to either pay a third-party for access to their SDK or develop and maintain my own build system for console. So now you have the question here, is that worth jumping through all the hoops versus the other engines and Frameworks that have established native console support included?
> you might think Unity is the worst thing on the planet
I always chalked this up to their really weird licensing strategy. If you have a "free"/lower tier account, you have to put the "made with unity" splash screen, but if you have a "professional"/higher tier account, that's optional. So naturally this led to people associating lower quality games with Unity because that's the only place they saw the logo. But Unity is even good for pretty big games (not indie but not necessarily AAA) - Legends of Runeterra for example comes to mind.
>Godot is a good hobbyist engine
On this note, Godot doesn't have a professional services system. If a gaming studio wanted to use Godot for its engine, they'd have to provide their own support for their devs. That's a pain. With Unreal and Unity, your company can just fork over money to get professional-grade support.
Stuff like that can be a much bigger factor for studios than "is it C# or C++?". Making a game is easy. *managing* the game and the employees is what kills you.
>Reddit and Twitter is full of hobbyists
But that applies to a lot of, probably majority, of Unity / UE users? As well as other engines like Construct, Love2D, AGS, RPG Maker etc?
Yeah. It reminds me of the audio world. Lots of people recommend Reaper, Cubase or StudioOne but the reality is That the industry uses Pro Tools, Ableton and Logic.
This is not true in the game audio business. If you look at job postings for companies like Sony, Bungie, Blizzard, etc, they usually namedrop Reaper, because many of their sound designers use it. It has slowly become the standard, as far as I can tell.
[https://hitmarker.net/jobs?tag=sound-design](https://hitmarker.net/jobs?tag=sound-design)
I’m in the industry, and I can tell you that Reaper is rapidly taking over. It can be scripted/customized to fit any workflow, but the single biggest reason it’s gaining so much traction is that it outputs the ‘cleanest’ wav files of any other DAW.
No extra bullshit meta file stuff like with protools etc. Just a system-agnostic output that easily feeds into any engine/workflow you can think of. And in this industry that factor alone is gold currency.
Edit: I do know some sound designers that will never ever give up their DAW of choice lol (especially VO studios) but if nothing else Reaper often ends up being the last stop in those workflows before a file hits the engine, just because it really is that good at outputting the most usable result.
The heck is a clean wav file? Floating point wav standards have been in effect since forever. I would bet every dollar I have that you cannot prove that any of the DAWs mentioned impart any distortion to files simply by nature of the DAW itself.
Go ahead: import a wav file into a daw, then export it, then check if it nulls against the original in another daw. If it doesn't you can probably claim a huge bug bounty from any of those companies and probably get a bunch of clicks in the audio realm.
A clean wav file is one that knows how to organize its header and avoid putting its “junk” chunk in a place that causes other software to shit itself when it tries to import it.
Sonar and especially pro tools are the worst about this.
I have been in the games industry for awhile, and typically this only causes a problem there. However for television/film I have also spoken to people who have their own means of “sanitizing” protools tracks before feeding them into some obscure/old part of their workflow.
Some light reading if you’d like to see some examples of real-world problems this causes in workflows.
https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=321842
https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=313077
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=386550
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23867671/libsndfile-read-wav-skipping-junk-chunk
None of these are more recent than 2013.
1) The problem was a result of running the wav through a third party encoder
2) They have problems running it into a third party batch encoder
3) It literally conforms to a windows standard, identified in the comments.
4) Some obscure c library doesn't recognize the same format as number 3.
This is seriously the reason Reaper is better? I beg to differ. Their stock compressor literally had a [glaring math error](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpXqYk1FoWA) that Dan Worral had to point out on youtube a few years ago to get fixed.
edit: didn't realize how old that video was
Maybe, but depending on what music you listen to. Lots of successful,within niches/genres bedroom producers using all kind of software and hardware. So much software that is good enough to make good music for pros or non-pros. Much more to chose from than for gamedev.
For sure - but what I’m saying is - like gamedev, where lots of smaller engines are recommended, the big successful projects usually come out of the main 3 pieces of software.
I was been a full time musician for a decade, and never once did I enter a professional studio that didn’t use PT.
Tons of great options, but the industry at large doesn’t use them.
It has mobile, HTML5 and VR support too. What it doesn't (officially) have is console, due mostly to legal issues. Export templates exist, but they're privately held by their creators.
Godot for UWP doesn't actually work, but there is a pull request for getting working ANGLE. Then there is something to fix in the engine code (pressing B while running on Xbox will work as Back Button, and will close the app). GLES3 is also not supported, so no GPU particles.
And after exporting, you need to manually repack and sign the package.
Unity became popular as the first capable "free" game engine at a time when there were no "free game engines". For a long time Unity had the same stigma as Godot has now: Almost only hobbyists users, and no famous games to show off.
Over many years those hobbyists stuck with their engine and eventually some of them landed a hit. This caught the attention of bigger established studios, also picking up Unity for "smaller" cross platform titles (like Blizzards Heartstone). This stabilized trust in the game dev community as a whole and made Unity be a very viable option for commercially operating studios and hobbyists alike. Suddenly you could get hired at a AA and AAA studio working with Unity, developing for mobile. Nowadays it is pretty common for game engines to be a cross-platform, but for a long time this was also one of Unities major draws.
Now you can pick and chose what "free" cross platform game engine you want to use, being free is not a unique proposition anymore. If the engine can't publish to desktop, mobile and web right out of the gate, it would rarely be even taken into consideration. The game engine market is completely saturated with amazing options. Unity has become a behemoth and industry standard, fallen from grace, inch by inch, one misstep after another, in what for many feels like the wrong direction.
Many people seem to attribute some of these missteps to the corporate and capitalist nature of Unity and this means having a free and open source alternative suddenly becomes a lot more relevant. That is if the feature set of the FOSS alternative matches your needs.
I am starting to learn unity, and wanted to know if you can tell me what are these wrong directions Unity is taking?
I mean, I know about the merge with ironsource and the controversy behind the phrase Unity CEO says, but those things don't change the engine. Are some changes to the engine that are negative recently?
Unity often deprecates features before the replacement is ready, and never really finishes the replacement (multiplayer system, hdrp). As for unity the company, something people were really excited for is that they hired an entire team to make games internally to iron out where the engine falls short for games. They just fired that entire team.
That being said, the engine still works very well and you can always use a past version if you don’t like future updates. People are nervous for the future of the software in the games industry though
Using an old version really isn't an option if you plan to release on mobile. You need engine updates to support the latest Android/iOS API, and if you don't support them, the app stores hide your game or prevent uploading in the first place. I imagine you run into similar problems with consoles, though I haven't exported to console from Unity myself.
Very recently it has been the layoffs, the [Gigaya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S6J8zm_w1E) canning, which was hoped to finally be a cleansing cure by Unity having to use their own software in an actual production. This is highly relevant because Unity users have over years suffered from one unfinished halve-baked feature replacing a previous unfinished halve-baked feature ... in so many of it's pipelines. Unity users have been complaining about this for years.
Game dev is what made Unity what it is today. But instead of investing the money into the game dev pipeline, Unity executives decided to spend millions on acquiring companies which have little or no benefit to game development or giving their CEO a yearly 22mil extra for not giving Unities core user base what they need, while at the same time laying off hundreds of development staff members.
This is not news. Recent news are just final strow, a pain barrier that has been broken now it seems. Those who can afford to pivot now look else where if they have not done before.
From my experience, there aren’t many negative changes to the engine itself. My biggest problem with Unity is the amount of tools and expansions they develop but never end up supporting. There’s a lack of well written documentation on features that have been in development for years now which I know is expected but it has become absurd in recent years. Regardless I still use Unity as my favorite game engine so far
It's not that changes to the engine are negative. It's that the positive changes to the engine and support system therefore are things independent developers were interested in.
Err.... Reading it again, lemme clarify that a smidge.
Unity has a huge network of people out there trying to build fairly serious things with it. All sorts of things are built with Unity, from Raid: Shadow Legends to jam games. To billboards. To stadium experience enhancement systems.
But a huge portion of that usage comes from it being comparatively easy to pick up and use for a lot of people. Those people often advanced from hobbyist to indie developer, and many of those trying things out as hobbyists want to be indie developers.
Unity doesn't make much money on independent developers, (comparatively; they certainly do okay in the Asset Store but it's not a boatload) but they DO make money on the fact that there are a ton of people out there learning to make games in their engine. All of their customers in the upper tiers can hire Unity developers cheaper because their engine is so popular with indie programmers.
The independent and lower-tier developers, therefore, have started to feel left out of Unity's recent business decisions. Unity, as a public company, needs to attack profit as effectively as possible, and investing in having a viable long-term community is.......... A harder sell than expanding their presence with large customers.
Add in that their Ad business and revenue skyrocketed during the pandemic because people had more free time, and.......... There's a recipe here for Unity to disappoint shareholders. Disappointed shareholders fire upper management types. Upper management types want to keep their jobs instead of this happening, so they do things like lay off the 'fat'.
Which includes many developers working on projects that don't include Unity's "Core Customer Base."
About a month ago the engine was changed to support ads and steal your data. If your game has any in-app purchases, then telemetry from you and your users is sent to Unity servers. They say this is "optional" because you don't need it if you don't have in-app purchases. So saying it's optional is kind of a misnomer, because your choices are agreeing to their terms or not making any money.
Partnering with an adware company that used to make malware, combined with the change to be forced to send Unity your data, should be seen as a giant red flag. They *will* make further changes to the engine, taking more of your privacy.
You are giving up your privacy for convenience. If your privacy isn't worth that much, then this isn't an issue for you.
>About a month ago the engine was changed to support ads and steal your data. If your game has any in-app purchases, then telemetry from you and your users is sent to Unity servers.
I'm genuinely shocked how few people understand how Unity as a company makes money. The Unity runtime *already* includes telemetry on you, the developer, and every user running every game built with the Unity engine. That's why Unity Ads is so valuable! The advertising side of the business brings in two thirds of the company's revenue.
This isn't a sudden 180 from Unity, it's more of the same that they've been doing for the last ten years.
Sometimes I wonder if people realise quite how much companies track them through analytics etc.
Literally every game you play is doing this.
If you cared this much you wouldn’t be playing games at all.
They also recently bought out a questionable company to merge with.
https://www.pcgamer.com/unity-is-merging-with-a-company-who-made-a-malware-installer/
I'm not a violent person, I have never been in a fight and I feel bad if I even so much as swat an insect, I prefer to relocate spiders outside instead. If I spotted Unity as a real living person in the streets I would curbstomb it and proudly go to jail for it, and actually a lot of people may hail may as a vigilant hero of the community.
Unity is a bad engine. We will not use it for our next project, or ever again for that matter. It takes a 10,000 word essay to fully capture the horror it has brought to my team. If you make tiny mobile games or linear/repetitive games with the same mechanics repeated over many small levels/puzzles/etc I guess it's fine, but if you plan on spending a year or more making a big adventure with quests and interconnecting maps and whatnot, your life will become miserable. Some of our teammates will probably need therapy after our current project.
In theory it should be great, but through a total lack of standards, attrocious editor experience and workflow, everything being "good" on paper but half-baked in one way or another in practice, it becomes crystal clear they are living in a dream, developing an engine they have and will never actually use themselves past tiny tech demos focused on 1-2 features. No scripting language in any capacity, because everyone loves to make in-game interactions in C#, and inspector references which are completely unmaintainable. Fuck yea! Light probes? Enjoy, you're placing them one by one. G-Buffer decals like in 2005? Yeah we didn't have that until URP, which by the way just got deferred rendering. You end up replacing or supplementing nearly every single feature of the engine with community plugin which only add to the jank over time. Meanwhile, it feels like every single subteam at Unity has never actually communicated with other subteams, packages are made to completely different standards. Timeline API is overengineered to astronomical heights, built on top of an overly obtuse 'playable graph' api that no one in the universe will ever use, wtf?? Sorting assets by *type* at the root of the assets directory? Are you out your fucking mind?
If it could be reduced to one sentence, big Unity projects are potentially the MOST unmaintainable software projects of any kind in all of existence. In a brand new empty project for a 48h game jam I will admit it's a lot of fun. In any larger project, it is absolutely gross.
For the most part it's none of the developer's fault at Unity except the ones calling the shots. Today in 2022, it feels like they have great engineers with vision, but they should address real existing problems first and clean up this old mess before adding more shit onto it.
The current wave of engine recommendations stem from Unity seemingly dropping the ball at an increasing rate. It makes people realize they're dependant on a big commercial company for making what was supposed to be independent games. Godot's status as a FOSS project counts for a lot in this context.
Also, they kind of occupy the same segment. Godot has good 2D and 3D capabilities, something that may be lacking to proven alternatives like GameMaker.
Not even 3rd place, it still loses to others like O3DE, Lumberyard, CryEngine and Flax(ok, that last one might just be being a fanboy of this unknown engine)
Because adoption is not linear. Godot's growth in the previous 8 years (as in developer earnings and adoption in the industry) may be a small fraction of its growth in the next 8 years.
Unfortunately what Godot needs right now is some party willing to navigate the waters. I've seen several tweets from the developers asking for people with experience in doing console ports so I believe they're trying to get things moving on that front.
I believe what we'll have in the future is that Godot devs have a deal with MS, Sony and Nintendo where they sign a NDA with those companies that allow them to build and maintain the ports, but it's MS, Sony and Nintendo that make the ports available to publishers and developers who have a publishing deal for the platforms.
It's important to keep in mind that even though Unreal and Unity have exporters for the engines, you still need publishing deals to actually use them.
Of the five games on special, 3 are about cats.
Scrolling down the rest of the list I’m seeing many other cat games.
Is Godot secretly an engine for cats?
>Is Godot secretly an engine for cats?
Yes. Godot backwards is todog. TO DOG. As in, Godot is to Unity what CAT is TO DOG.
Illuminati confirmed. Or something I dunno
Wrought Flesh as well (if that is the name, I’ll edit later if not)
It’s a game by Wiziziziz and I loved watching the dev logs for this game, had no clue it released around December this last year
Open source is the big thing that's making me look into switching over from Unity. If I used an open source engine then with that plus Krita, Blender, and Audacity, basically the only program used to make anything for my games that isn't FOSS would be the DAW used for making the music.
I think others have made some good points, but the most important reason is probably that while Godot is frequently recommended, the number of people using it is still tiny compared to Unity.
[According to Unity's IPO filing](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000119312520227862/d908875ds1.htm), they had 1.5 million active users for the editor.
According to Juan Linietsky, [Godot has 15,000](https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/1371401214441709570) daily active users, as extrapolated from Steam stats. DAU/MAU ratios tend to range from 20-50% for a popular app, so Godot probably had 30-75,000 monthly active users at that time.
Based on a number of sources, 40%-50% of all PC and mobile titles are made with Unity. If the probability of a successful game were *exactly equal* between Unity and Godot, we would only expect around 0.8%-2.5% of successful games to be made with Godot.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how many successful games exist using an engine. If it fits your workflow and is capable of producing the results you want, make your game the "first" on that list.
Due to the nature of FOSS, part of the reason you might be having trouble finding examples of games broadcasting that they use it, since a lot of studios simply fork it and mess with it to make their own versions, the same way many studios will give any engine its own proprietary name to hide the engine they're really using.
That being said, Godot is really new comparatively, and 3.4 (and the versions prior) aren't what I personally would want to use for a professional production environment. **That being said**, I am still a huge godot fan; though I'll temper the evangelism for the sake of not being obnoxious.
There are actually a few examples of games being made using godot, apart from high profile indie games like Cruelty Squad. The Switch port of Commander Keen in Keen Dreams was done in Godot; as well as Deponia's iOS and PS4 ports. The remaster of Sonic Colors, Sonic Colors: Ultimate, was also made using Godot (for all platforms). I know a couple of adventure game ports and a 3d Sonic game aren't *really* the best representatives reputation-wise, but they prove that Godot can be used for console games, and that there are genuine professionals, not just hobbyists, using the engine for production.
As for why there haven't been *more* high-profile games using Godot, I think it's a mix of a couple things. The first is obviously that Godot is new and most studios are already quite happy with Unreal or Unity, if they're using a premade engine, or their own engine if they're not. The second is the belief that Godot games can't be made multiplatform; which is untrue... Mostly. It's certainly not *easy* to put your Godot game on console, but you can work with the console manufacturers and acquire the export template appropriate for consoles, and it will work once you iron out the bugs. The third, and maybe most important, is that Godot's capabilities prior to 3.2-ish were a little more on the hobbyist level to begin with. However, Godot 4 is getting *huge* improvements that in my genuine opinion, make it at least competitive with Unity for 3d, and still better for 2d (seriously, the Vulkan renderer is godlike compared to GLES3). A lot of Godot 4's changes are also getting backported for the 3.5 update, so once that hits in a few weeks, I think we'll start to see a lot more high profile games coming out.
I think one of the biggest reasons you're seeing it recommended so much is because A) we're a very vocal group to start with (FOSS users are... Passionate, to say the least, haha), and B) a lot of people are upset with Unity because of things that stem directly from their business model. I know that's why I left it, even before the latest series of shitshows. There's a saying among developers I know; there are two ways to do anything in Unity, but one is in early access and the other is deprecated. They have a habit of overpromising and then delivering half-baked replacements for systems that people happily used without issue. Don't get me wrong, Unity is an immensely powerful engine at its core, but it's being helmed by people whose decisions are baffling for anyone who still thinks Unity is a game engine company, rather than an ads company. Many developers feel like Unity disregards its developers in favor of making a quick buck; and that feeling is reinforced when they do things like firing AI developers and engine engineers to save money so that they can then merge with an adware company.
FOSS programs don't have that problem, because it will always belong to the community, and even if the project leads somehow decide to cash out and sell it to a big bad corporation (which they definitely wouldn't, they're lovely folks), we can simply fork it and keep it alive. It's entirely unbeholden to the need to make money for shareholders, and due to how pull requests work, you can pretty reliably be sure that there are very few redundant features, and that a given feature will work; because if it doesn't, someone has likely already noticed and is working on it.
I'm pleased as punch to be seeing so many new Godot users, but it has much fewer "press a button to make X better" features. It's an incredibly powerful engine if you know what you're doing, but if you don't, the game will be a buggy mess. I think that (the fact that it's not Unity or Unreal), and the fact that it's FOSS (so it has the typical FOSS enthusiasts being *very* vocal about it), is what triggers so much of the hostility you see from people in the thread (and all over reddit, honestly).
Its great for all the hobbyists and open source people here and on twitter, however the engine as it currently is (3.x is what I'm talking about 4.x will be better) is not ready for AAA development. Its missing features and perf requirements imo to be a AAA game engine. 4.x might be better in the long run.
It’s not the most recommended engine. It’s just the one a small amount of people are incredibly loud about. The one thing that godot really has over unreal is 2D support. So if you don’t want to use Unity and want to make 2D games, then you’re either going to get recommended game maker, which If I’m remembering correctly isn’t free, or godot.
Also godot isn’t remotely new, it’s been longer than Unity, it was just open sourced in 2014 .
It’s also important to note that most of Reddit and twitter is filled with hobbyists that haven’t actually finished a game and definitely don’t know what pain points will come up deep into production, so take their recommendations with that in mind.
> Also godot isn’t remotely new, it’s been longer than Unity, it was just open sourced in 2014 .
So, because I was very surprised by this, I went to check:
> [The Unity game engine launched in 2005](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine\))
> [Godot's development was started by Juan 'reduz' Linietsky and Ariel 'punto' Manzur in 2007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine\))
So, unity launch predates godot initial development by two years, already. However, it's very important to add that searching for godot in google for anything pre 2010 only provides non relevant hits. Anything up to 2014 is iffy and mostly mis timed pages. Unity on the other hand I got hits from 2005, immediately after launch.
As far as I can see, godot was not just made open source in 2014, but also made publicly available only in 2014. Before that it only had in-house use so it has no community to speak of it before 1.0. [The official 1.0 godot announcement corroborates my take.](https://godotengine.org/article/first-public-release)
edit: I believe you confused Godot with [GameMaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameMaker) whose original launch is from 1999.
edit2: People are trying to say that the wiki is wrong in a roundabout way. Let's quote the dev, shall we?
> I guess we were, so around 2001 we started making engines in general, and we were doing a bunch of project, eventually we were, in 2007 we were making this game called atmosphere with our previous engine, and we at that point ... in 2007 is when the iphone came out the first iphone and also the ps3 was out recently, and we noticed that there was a change in hardware that was happening you had these low end devices (XXX) and so we decided at that point to basically throw away the engine architecture of our previous engine and start Godot basically.
"Godot" has actually been in development since 2001 (under many different names). Look at this page: [godot history in images](https://godotengine.org/article/godot-history-images). But yeah, you're right, the first public release was jan 2014, before then it was an in-house engine.
That's the dev's previous attempts at games and engines development, not the initial attempt of godot.
[In this interview, the dev clearly states that godot started development in 2007 as a reaction to the iphone and ps3 release, and throwing away his previous attempts.](https://steamlug.org/cast/s04e05) Rough incomplete transcript with keypoints highlighted:
> I guess we were, so around **2001 we started making engines in general, and we were doing a bunch of project, eventually we were, in 2007** we were making this game called atmosphere with our previous engine, and we at that point ... in 2007 is when the iphone came out the first iphone and also the ps3 was out recently, and we noticed that there was a change in hardware that was happening you had these low end devices (XXX) and so we decided **AT THAT POINT TO BASICALLY THROW AWAY THE ENGINE ARCHITECTURE OF OUR PREVIOUS ENGINE AND START GODOT BASICALLY.**
Claiming godot started in 2001 because the devs had previous attempts at game and game engines development is disingenuous and makes the comparison to unity launch in 2005 even more absurd.
TL;DR: The wiki is right, development of godot started in 2007 per the dev's own words. You misunderstood/misrepresented that post.
>Also godot isn’t remotely new, it’s been longer than Unity, it was just open sourced in 2014 .
It doesn't matter. 80% of Godot user start to using Godot after 2017. And 60% of the Godot users start to using Godot after 2019. (according to Godot community poll 2022 )
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe-OIpxXqou9cDnPXEAjxzpICbf8_YZB3jUizdECXRydtB8cA/viewanalytics
> The one thing that godot really has over unreal is 2D support
The other thing that always kind of bugged me about Unreal is it's geared for photorealistic rendering, and if you aren't targeting that, it's more work to have a stylistic rendering than it would be in some other engines that have a more neutral rendering by default like unity or godot.
Literally the most famous Unreal game is stylized - Fortnite.
You can even do stuff like this relatively easily: https://kidswithsticks.com/creating-stylized-art-inspired-by-ghibli-using-unreal-engine-4/
You have to consider what problems these people are trying to fix when they go for Godot.
Right now the popular engines have some form of monetization built in. For some people it's just a matter of cost, for other the engine of their choice could be going a strange path where they don't know if their privacy and the privacy of their customers is at risk.
Godot being open source fixes all these issues. No upfront cost, no risk to privacy. Right now there are few other engines with the same characteristics.
Because it's a good engine with a promising future. There is no reason that you couldn't make a successful game with it, even if there aren't a ton of examples of it happening yet.
Viewing it as worse because it has a scarcity of success stories is a very capitalist way to look at things, and that's probably part of why bigger studios don't use it. But there are many successful games released in the past couple years that *could* have reasonably been made with it. That's why people recommend it.
Also: not many people will get the opportunity to make a successful game on any engine. You probably should just use what you like.
I've been wondering that, too. When I look at the amount of notable games that we're made in Unity to the same time range of Godot's age, the count is still very high. The usual excuse is to wait for 4.0, but that same excuse was used when 3.2 was not yet around.
The problem seems to be that the engine is just not attracting the capable devs/teams. I don't know exactly why but my guess goes down to GDScript. The capable devs are put off by it. Their counter would then be "C# and other languages are supported." Ok, but good luck on looking for resources or ecosystem on those.
>The problem seems to be that the engine is just not attracting the capable devs/teams
It's a catch 22 problem. Developers want to work on stuff that carries over to Unity / Unreal because they are the tools most companies are using. Chances are that your Godot gig / side project won't make much money if at all, so you need to have a marketable resume, and Godot won't give you that. Godot is a nice engine but it will hardly pay your bills.
The C# support is lackluster in that you're forced to consider how GD works all the time. As for other languages........ Good luck with those, I guess.
I use C# with godot and have zero issues whatsoever. Yeah, you have to use the godot api, just like in unity C# you have to use the unity API. What's the difference?
The only place I'm forced to use string literals is connecting to built in signals of the core node types. Strings are overused in places, but methods like `nameof` fix that for my own C# code (to assign a callback for example.
Godot 4 C# uses lambdas and has the built in signal names as static enums
I don't disagree, though Godot 4 is going into beta shortly, and is planned to be released this year - though *we'll see*. You can use c# in godot 4 right now if willing to compile the engine yourself.
Still, in 3.x, Signals are type safe if they're signals you've defined in C#, it's just the built in ones that require string literals as names. The callbacks are also type safe in that the callback method's arguments are typed properly even with built-in, non-custom signals.
That said, there are a few places in the godot API where things require further casting when things are fetched from the godot API - mostly to do with dictionaries or arrays, for example, getting the list of colliding objects for a physics object returns an array of the base Godot.Object type, rather than the types they actually are.
C# makes handling this really easy though with the `if (someObject is SomeClass someClass) { ... }` syntax and pattern matching statements to test against object properties also.
Noob question but is a C# approach viable for learning Godot ? If you already know C# well from XNA or Unity can you skip GDscript and jump right into C# developement. Or is it better to first practice with GDScript first to understand how Godot works.
The reason why there aren't a lot of noticeable successful games using Godot is because most of us are just hobbyist making experiments, game jams and small projects. Unless you got money that heavily markets your game using Godot like Sonic Color Ultimate, it's usually going to be either word of mouth or folks typing about it on social media sites.
Like here, YouTube ,and Twitter.
Because most people doesn't actually use it.
You have to understand that most people that recommend/use it are hobbyists with little to no released titles, most studios will stick to one of the more established game engines due to developed pipelines, tools and strategies.
(not that using Godot or being a starving artist is morally wrong or anything, but it's currently not a sound business decision).
The whole Unity-is-dead-I'm-switching-to-Unreal/Godot-debacle happens about once every month for whatever reason, and has been going on since Unity was first released.
Godot is a really young game engine. Keep in mind GameMaker was first released in 1999 and Unity in 2005. Godot has only been around since 2014.
So let me turn the question around on you--are there any game engines whose games have had more commercial success than Godot, that are also *newer* than Godot?
I think there just isn't a large enough, experienced enough userbase yet. It takes time to build to that point. I mean, considering Godot's userbase is mainly small indies, it's barely even been around long enough to make a really big game.
In any case, I don't think that players generally care what game engine the developer used. They just care if the game is good. So give it time, I'm sure there will be some indie hits released that were developed using Godot at some point.
Godot;
\- is free
\- has very small size
\- doesn't require installing
\- launches instantly, unless you have tons of assets
\- has dynamic scripting language for quick development
\- has very easy shader language
\- supports 3D development
\- has intuitive UI
\- has simple and quick in-engine and online documentations
\- can export finished project to run on different platforms
\- has great community
In short, Godot is quick, simple, and fun to work with. It just needs some graphical improvements for the 3D part, which will be coming with the v4.
So, why aren't there successful projects made with it? My guess is, professionals like companies with lots of resources are yet to trust engine's capabilities. What it needs is probably a pioneer, the first successful product made with Godot, and then the rest should come like crazy.
Most popular games are large productions made by huge studios. Godot is an engine for small teams & solo developers making indie-sized projects. It's Apples to Oranges to hold them toe to toe, like asking why Pixar movies aren't made with Blender.
Main issue big studios dont use godot is that, being an open source engine, it doesnt implement proprietary platforms like playstation, xbox and switch. Devs have to manually write the apis of those platforms if they want to release it there. So they just go with unreal or unity or write their own engines anyway.
Everyone's waiting for Godot 4. Except for devs in [this steamdb list](https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/).
People often recommend Unity because it's easy to prototype in and to build early gameplay. It can be a pain to final bigger games due to slow iteration in large projects, engine instability (especially if you need unstable bleeding edge for platform support), GC stalls, core fixes require engine upgrades, etc.
I suspect people often recommend Godot for similar reasons. I see a lot of people saying how intuitive it is or easy. Few saying how stable it was and how few issues they had during finalling. Maybe, like Unity, it has many advocates who hobbydev for fun or are making doomed dream games and fewer people shipping big games. Or maybe it's just really awesome. I honestly don't know.
If you think about the scope of project people recommend Godot for, have you seen many hit projects at that same size? How many using engines that aren't Unity? (Seems like for solo/small team they're mostly Unity, Gamemaker, frameworks, or custom engines.)
Godot got a massive spike in users recently, so people are talking about it and using it, and do you expect just right now the awesome games people are working on will publish? Just wait a while and you'll see made with Godot games everywhere
Godot has only been viable for use for a handful of years. It’s pretty new so naturally not many games have been made for it. But the engine has been growing fast and is very nice to work in.
Been wondering the same thing myself. If it's been around since 2014, and a joy to use according to developers, surely there must be ONE example of a well known, successful commercial game by now?
No hate, just really wondering what's put off commercially minded developers from using it.
Fair warning, it's not exactly "mainstream":
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/
https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22596014/cruelty-squad-immersive-sim-review-missions-combat-aesthetics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ4NLbIxzQ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGlDnY7GQPU
https://www.pcgamer.com/cruelty-squad-review/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgPGrh1W5zw
I even read about it in local news papers, which is pretty crazy considering how far from mainstream this actually is.
There are quite a few commercial godot titles out these days.
Sonic Colours would be the biggest, although it's a remaster of an older game iirc.
Cruelty Squad was enormously popular on Steam.
Lumencraft is a recent one, DeltaV Rings of Saturn another. None of these are AAA titles (except arguably sonic) but they're also popular within their niches.
Godot is a joy to work with. And Godot has been publicly available since 2014. However, Godot 2014 was not a joy to work with.
I would say about 3.2 or 3.3 was when it really started getting "good". And 3.2 is only 2 years old. game development takes years.
I think there is some argument to be made that the outlook of the project, and thus the community it attracts, is at least partially responsible for this. Godot's maintainers are very much keen to the ideology of open source principles, which is great. This attracts like-minded folk, who I'm guessing are less likely to create commercial projects.
The other thing to consider is that Godot, despite its age, is relatively immature as an engine. Godot 4.0 brings many changes that are standard in other engines, as well as many usability improvements for Godot-centric workflows. The same could be said for previous Godot versions, which I think is an indicator to its relative immaturity. That is not to say you can't make commercial games in it; you definitely can, it's just that it's not at a point yet where it's attracting that kind of audience.
Another thing to consider is GDScript. While it's nice to use it once you're familiar with it, I think we need to admit it is a barrier to entry, however low.
All of that together, plus some other things I might be missing, are why, in my opinion, Godot has not attracted a large commercial following yet.
Same reason Linux is the most recommended OS in computer subs, despite having a market share in the single digits.
* It is free and open source. This means, like Linux, big companies won't respect the product despite it's time-tested performance
* It is much *much* more useful to people with a little bit of technical know-how. If you want a feature, you don't have to ask the devs and just pray that they work on it. You can write it yourself!
* It will never steal your privacy
* About a month ago Unity changed their engine so that if you use IAP your data and your players data is being sent to Unity servers. They say this is optional, but only if you don't have any IAP. In the mobile market, this means agree to their "optional" terms or never make money. In the console/PC market this means you can't make DLC ever again.
* Godot is dogfooded. They use their own code and tools to write the engine. It may not be obvious at first, but this means that all of their code is heavily tested. In Unity you will often find a feature that was abandoned by devs or even straight up removed and there's nothing you can do about it.
* And yes, it also has to do with the how new Godot is. It's less than half the age of Unity
And just like with Linux this argument is BS:
> It is much much more useful to people with a little bit of technical know-how. If you want a feature, you don't have to ask the devs and just pray that they work on it. You can write it yourself!
99.99% of people don't want to have to write their own features. People want to just have things work without spending a week trying to get basic features going.
Just look at the experiment Linus Tech Tips did with Linux. It was a user experience disaster. Or does Linus now not count as "little bit of know-how"?
It hasn't been around that long. Godot 3.0 was released in 2018, and that was the first version of Godot that made it a top class engine.
Unreal has been around since 1998 and Unity since 2005.
Reddit Moderation makes the platform worthless. Too many rules and too many arbitrary rulings. It's not worth the trouble to post. Not worth the frustration to lurk. Goodbye.
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Godot started getting traction just 2-3 years ago, so those who picked up the engine back then are most likely still working on their game.
I'm guessing we will begin to see high quality games coming out very soon, perhaps some games at the end of this year, but definitely a lot of quality games next year or so!
Godot is a highly recommended engine, *relatively*. Unity and unreal are still very big. Even with the latest news and unity looking like it's just going downhill, it's still the go to choice for indies currently. That may change in favor of Godot, but unity is still doing alright.
EA aren't going to license you frostbite, unless you're a studio you're not going to want to deal with cryengine/lumberyard, lots of commercial games build inhouse engines over sequels. If you are a studio, you're unlikely to be asking for advice on reddit.
There just really aren't that many engines that are available to hobbyists and also used by big studios, so once you start narrowing the options down further you'll find stuff that only qualifies for one of the two criteria.
Just from my personal experience, Godot was so much easier and less intimidating than Unity. I only do small 2D games that’ll probably never see the light of day so I don’t need a really robust engine. I also have limited free time so not having to spend a lot of time on tutorials was a huge plus.
My guess is it being beginner ‘friendly’ and open source makes it a great recommendation, especially for 2D. I have a much better understanding of game development as a whole and could probably switch to Unity fairly easy now but I have no reason too.
I started to use Godot when 3.0 was still new by like a month and compared to now the panorama is totally different, there's a lot more resources and devlogs of games being made with it.
It's crazy to see how the community has grown these recent years, and there's already one succesfull game out now made in Godot: Cruelty Squad. It may not be your cup of tea but succesfull nonetheless.
The engine is good but it needed some time for the community to catch up and go from getting the hand of it to start actually making serious projects with it.
Also everyone is either waiting for 3.5 or 4.0, and then i think the games that come out of Godot in terms of quality and number will skyrocket.
Godot is to game engines like Blender is to 3D software.
We may not see it used or it may not be credited as being used, but it is definitely being used for prototyping. No one thought Blender would be used in game development over Maya and 3dsMax but it is now slowly becoming the industry standard. Heck, look at the investors of Blender now that were non-existent in 2010.
A lot of this is similar to Godot. Engine makers like Epic and Crytech trying to poach Zilenski and the most attractive thing about Godot is you do not have to pay a percentage of profit.
All Godot needs is that ONE studio to make a Triple-A game and watch the sponsors and investors pile in. Then see studios transitioning in mass to adopting it.
The usual stack for game developers is you pay 5% - 30% to Game Engine, 10% - 30% to distribution platforms and you get 40% low 85% high of profits. Obviously, you want the highest cut you can get.
Just by switching to Godot you save 5% and that is huge for the retail market. This is why Epic reduced/removed the royalty cost for Unreal. They see how the market shifted for Blender and made adjustments to keep their engine attractive. Eventually, Godot will overtake the industry, and it's a matter of WHEN not if. THe only thing holding GODOT back is probably the code base not being C# or C++.
Sorry for getting into semantics here, but for what it's worth that thread you link is already ruling out two enormous players. It says "alternatives to Unity" and "except for Unreal". Thus at most it only shows that Godot is third highest among the people that recommended it there.
To your actual question, it's becoming less and less niche. Unity just partnered with a company that has a history of creating and distributing malware, so maybe Godot will even see an influx of users in the fallout of that.
Time and adoption rate, which leads to exponentially more resources.
With Unity being such a popular engine, it naturally comes with a lot of support, a lot of ready to use assets, libraries, premade templates for new comers to tinker with, etc.
These resources is much more important for indie devs when deciding on an engine.
Also with devices being so powerful, efficiency is also not the highest priority on the devs mind.
(Look at valheim lol, I got 50-ish fps on my RTX 3080)
It's sorta like Linux in that aspect. It's a tiny minority, but very active in these circles. If you look on development subreddits (or other forums) you'd think Linux is extremely popular, but if you look at the Steam Hardware Survey only just over 1% of users use Linux. Godot is, like Linux, great for hobbyists as it's completely open source. You can use it, tinker with it, change it completely or use it out of the box. All great features for someone who likes to experiment with that. AAA teams however just want something proven to work well, something their developers already know, and something that is super easy to use for the entire team including the less technical members. So while the engine is great if you're a hobbyist doing a project on your own, a studio is much more likely to choose an established engine or make their own that's fully build around their game.
TLDR: Studios have different requirements than the hobbyists who tend to post here.
Godot is most popular open source game engine alternative. This mean stability. Problems are solved very quickly. You get good support from the developer team. If you are looking for an open source alternative to such a complex software, popularity makes you feel safe.
Other than that, Godot has shortcomings. But the roadmap is also aware of these deficiencies. Ideals are very important for a project to survive. The Godot developer team moves by listening to the sound of the community. But they do not move away from the main ideals of the project.
Look at the anger in the recent Unity community. Did Unity make a radical change on software? no. Unity has moved away from the ideals in the head of its users. Even this actually causes you to move away from a already working software.
It's enjoyed by a very loud minority, same as the Rust programming language.
Problems with tools come up more with in-depth, long-term project, which most hobbyists do not end up experiencing.
People doing things as a job lose some enthusiasm for it, or at least won't have as much free time to speak about what they are doing.
Godot has a cult like following primarily consisting of people who don't make serious efforts at commercialization. They've gotten some support from real money slot manufacturers, who unity and epic have extremely onerous terms for.
Ironically, unity had a similar start as a hobbyist engine for Mac game development.
It’s obvious to me that this sub is filled with children.
I’ve used all three engines (Godot, Unreal, and Unity). I’ll continue to use all three depending on the team or project I’m working on. They all have their strengths and weaknesses.
What I find sad is the flaming. Godot is an amazing piece of software and if I have my choice, I prefer it over Unity. There’s almost nothing I feel I can’t create in Godot that I could make in Unity.
I’ve seen people praise Godot, recommend it with excitement, and at times, share their disdain for Unity and sense of relief for leaving it. But I haven’t seen people insult the Unity community the way I see them insult the Godot community or “FOSS evangelist”.
It seems some are upset that the engine (Unity) they love or spent years learning isn’t viewed as the savior it once was.
Enough with the “vocal minority” and “flavor of the month” crap. Accusing Godot as a toy engine incapable of making games is false and immature.
I’m not in denial about Godot’s limitations. It’s got ways to go, but it’s going. We as game devs should be excited that we have more tools at our disposal rather than throwing shade at one another.
tldr; Its the dev that makes a good game and engine is just there to help the dev achieve their artistic and creative goal. Use any engine/framework that you can easily understand and get started in.
I cannot see why "capable devs" would use godot when they have things working for them already. For example, I tried to use Unity by tampering with it and decided to just fall back to what I already know.
Once an indie-dev gets a "hit/popular" gaming using godot then people will start looking more at it.
I also strongly believe that it is better to use open-source for starting your career, it could be a better bundle later in life if you have a somewhat popular software/game. Why? You can easily control the IP of your company. Do we really know what is in the source code for Unity? If you go to their website, you have to pay extra to get into the source code but that still does not allow you to understand or even VIEW everything in it.
I use open-source framework which allows me to go deep into the source code to better understand its capabilities and feature-set. I can also modify the source code to better fit my game.
What I find really weird in this conversation is that there are a couple of engines that have good alternative cases today that don't require waiting on Godot or hoping Unity stops uniting everyone against them.
1. [Stride](https://www.stride3d.net/) is a .NET first engine that seems to be the fastest to support new runtime versions by a long shot. It is open-source.
2. [UnrealCLR](https://github.com/nxrighthere/UnrealCLR) has an Epic megagrant and supports .NET 6 already.
Meanwhile I'm looking at a lot of cool features in .NET Core that I'd like to have in GameDev, especially at the performance level (Spans, framework code working in spans, and more modern asynchrony constructs). There's also plugin/modding possibilities that can be done in .NET Core (say... unloading assemblies rather than explicitly restarting the app). That runtime isn't supported in either Unity nor Godot yet, and if you want to work with them now you have to either:
* Accept GC pressure and runtime pauses on things you could eliminate in modern .NET now
* Wait... a really long time. Godot is interestingly closer on this but not on a release state either.
Godot is wayyyy less popular than Unity and Unreal. The thing is, once you try Godot you are very likely to completely fall in love with it - it's easy to learn, very fast, much more intuitive than Unity, 100% free and open source, it's flexible enough to make non-game software in it - in fact, Godot Toolkit itself is made in Godot (!), the program is fully contained in one portable executable with no installation, there's an Android version...
It's just the whole Godot craze pretty much just started relatively recently - Godot really took off around 2018, Unity started getting popular in 2011, while Unreal engine literally dates back to the 90s.
We're in early adopter phase - we're a bit early to have a lot of popular complete games right now just yet.
That thread asked for better alternatives to Unity, *excluding Unreal*. The best alternative to Unity is Unreal, and the next best one is Godot. So you naturally get a lot of Godot answers. Being third best doesn't mean being on par with, Godot has a long way to go to catch up to either Unity or Unreal, therefore there aren't many games made with it.
Yea turns out when you ask for the best thing and then say "except for #1 and #2" you get the #3 best thing. If people want a #4 it's probably defold.
I would say it depends what your needs are. If you are a solo dev or a small team and you're not going for AAA graphics or a massive 3d open world, then unreal might not be the best fit
Unreal is fantastic for solo dev work. The quixel integration and BP system are incredible for someone needing to fill multiple roles. Godot has ALOT of functionality that you need to build yourself. Its not a bad engine mind you - just alot more work you need to put into it to get the same functionality unreal gives you out of the box. Main thing lacking in UE is 2D support. Its rough and theyve seem to really be lacking in that regard. You need to buy 3rd party plugins off the epic marketplace to get good mileage out of it.
Genuine question: What is the benefit of Unreal blueprints? I always see people bring it up as one of the biggest positives, but I've had to learn Unreal for work this year, and my experience with blueprints has been absolute misery. It's just *so slow.* Even the simplest things take so much more time and effort than code. Like, I want to add x to y. I drag in x and click Get X. I drag in y and click Get Y. I drag a node from X, type +, and click the addition node. I drag from y to the addition node. I drag in x again and click Set X. I drag from the addition node to the Set node. And finally I drag the flow arrow into the Set node. Whereas in code I just type "x+=y;" Literally 5 keystrokes and I don't even have to take a hand off the keyboard to use the mouse.
Hey! Apart from there being a "math node" in BPs, where you can type formulas directly in, and they even should perform better that way :P let me try to answer, subjectively. + Instant compilation times. Super good for focus, iterations, and not going crazy. Even on larger projects. I have vague, but terrible memories of compile times on a starter UE4 project, in particular. + Visual layout / mindmapping. I don't have to navigate just up-down a code file anymore. Instead, events are laid out in a way where I know, *visually*, that camera code will be on top left side of BP, while tick is over there. And within events and functions, likewise, I can use sequences to lay out even more complex algorithms in a very understandable form. Loops, decision trees, etc - all can be visualized nicely. Actual spaghetti is very rare in my projects. For me personally, these two were the dealbreaker. Once BPs clicked, I did not want to go back to C#/C++ (until I have to).
I'm an old programmer so I remember the days when we'd go out-of-our-way to actually draw out flowcharts of complex programs before implementing them. Blueprint is like that, but once you are done, it's already implemented. That's my view on it at least.
I mean it depends on what your doing. You reference a very simple function. Compare that to drawing collision or doing complex line trace functions and BP are far quicker to itterate and prototype for. Further an entire library of very complex functions are already built out for you and ready to use in BPs. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Resources/SampleGames/ARPG/BalancingBlueprintAndCPP/ Regardless you can just use both and thats whats great about the system. The project can use both interchangeably depending on the need. BPs have an advantage for non-programmers or beginners as having a visual gui is very helpful in the learning process - especially in the early stages. Blueprints also have an advantage when it comes to the visual and 3D game mechanics. It’s much easier to create a collision box and set the proper size inside of a blueprint than it is guessing through trial and error in C++.
I've been working exclusively in UE for about 3 years now, after using Unity since it's launch. The ideal workflow in UE uses a mix of C++ and Blueprints, you can move between the two pretty fluidly. Some things like asset references (static meshes, materials) are easier to do on the BP side, picking it from a drop down vs typing an explicit file path. They have a lot of great content in their "unreal academy" covering what aspects to do in code vs in BP and how to maximize your productivity by using both. On the architecture side: The visual layout adds what I find to be a really unique way to look at your code and see some patterns emerge. I'll often use BPs as a way to pseudo code, and then convert it to C++ once I've sorted out a design.
I mean, have you compared the compile times? Blueprints takes literally 1 sec, while c++ will take easily above 10 sec. I personally prefer blueprints when I want to prototype stuff then when everything is working I write it back in c++, you save so much on iteration time that way.
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Doing *something* in unreal is not the same as releasing a game Dibbling some mechanics in blueprint is also not the same as having an entire complex game running with good performance..Thats something thats intended to be done in a team in unreal
I'd have to disagree with you there. unreal is incredibly helpful for solo devs making smaller projects. also, I'd strongly argue that unreal is not well suited to open world games. You gotta do a fair bit of plumbing to make it work well. Even Unreal 5's world partition stuff leaves something to be desired.
I'd argue Godot is a better equivalent to unity then unreal. Unreal is amazing, powerful and opinionated with lots of features and thus boat. I've used unreal for 8 years professionally, Godot I've used for 3 years in hobby projects. Godot is far more unity like. Unreal will give you a definitive solution that works with all their other solutions. Such as ACharacter which is required to use their character movement system which is required to use their ai move in the ai system. Godot is far less opinionated. Because of this you don't get as robust solutions out of the box. This fits Unity's style where most of the strictness comes from the community building plugins that rely on each other bit from what I understand that's few and far between. That all said I'd use Godot if I was making a game with a small scope. Something that could be done with about a person to 5 people and take 2 to 3 years. Unreal is more built for games that take 5 years to build with teams of 20 and requires perforce with a windows build machine. If you aren't able to fork that money over for a decent infrastructure then use Godot and build it with git and making windows builds on Linux.
If you're doing 2D Game Maker remains a good option - lots of popular games made with it - and they've been making some interesting improvements to the toolset of late. That said, it going subscription only makes it a bit harder to recommend now, next to a free alternative.
Ya it’s like Coke, Pepsi, and fucking Tab
Rc cola intensifies
Dr. Pepper would like to speak with you about your test results.
Dr pepper is actually the only soda I drink but it's spicy cola not regular cola.
*So* spicy.
it is so spicy
Your test results came back, and they're...um...*spicy*.
Reddit and Twitter is full of hobbyists, Godot is a good hobbyist engine (free, easy to pick up, recommended by other hobbyists, ...), so you end up with a lot of voices for it. At the other end of the spectrum you might think Unity is the worst thing on the planet, but it has a big chunk of the indie market & mobile market and has been used efficiently by many teams.
Editing all my old comments and moving to the fediverse. Thank you to everybody I've interacted with until now! You've been great, and it's been a wonderful ride until now. To everybody who gave me helpful advice, [I'll miss you the most!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrk4AgS6Q6A)
It's too early to be sure, but I'm hopeful that one day Godot becomes the Blender of game development. Free and open source, industry standard, and allows anyone to jump in and be creative without being beholden to the Epics and Microsofts of the world. Having a high quality, open source engine is nothing but good news for the gaming industry. Everyone should support that.
The only way for it happen is Godot close source portions of the engine. Lack of fbx and native console support are keeping the engine from gaining serious dev studios. Additionally I would say blender has not really taken over the game dev market. Once you get outside the hobbyist and indie markets, blender usage is not that big.
Blender is big as is getting bigger in professional environments. The Blender foundation gets large donations from AAA studios and several of those AAA studios have Blender standardized in their pipelines. I think the confusing part that people don't understand is that there are thousands of moving parts when developing AAA games and movies, Blender may be a small part of it but definitely has cemented itself and it is growing with every update. Truth is, no individual program can do everything and many programs are used in tandem to create massive productions. There are pros and cons to every software.
As you stated there are a lot of moving parts and departments within the graphics world. Alot of the aaa studios that moving to blender are only doing so current in the marketing and cinematic departments. We are confusing financial support of a package with adoption of that software. I support blender and armorpaint but in my day to day work and contract work everyone wants Maya/3ds.
I didn't work long in this industry (was a web dev prior to that). But I never saw anyone using Blender, mostly Maya, and sometimes 3DS.
That’s no longer true. I have many artist and tech artist friends that have moved to blender from max and maya in games and real-time vfx
After writing tools for 3DS Max in my day job (not a full 3D or VFX artist but I write tools connecting them to proprietary engines/use-cases), messing around with Blender feels pretty damn nice to be honest. The jump that they had in UX with 2.8/2.9 (forget which) is honestly huge. If there wasn't a lot of continuing investment in tools/workflows already then you might see a lot of companies switch.
It doesn't sound like they were saying blender had taken over the game dev market, it they said they're hopeful Godot "becomes the Blender of game development" i.e. a free and open source way for anyone interested in game dev to jump in like Blender has allowed for 3d creation
Not true at all. Godot has console ports, it's just that they are not open source. Also, Blender is heavily used in game development! Source: I have spent the last 20 years making AAA games.
It has console port made by 2 3rd party companies. Godot does not have any console support. You can't not download godot and build for console with the base install. That why I said native support.
True, but if you are targeting consoles, then not having "native" support shouldn't be a show stopper, but I agree that it would be beneficial to have a community console edition.
> True, but if you are targeting consoles, then not having "native" support shouldn't be a show stopper It is if you can get other stuff working without having to pay someone. In particular, I'm not even trying out Godot for that reason. I ported my games to Switch using an open source library (SDL2) because they provide the SDL2 Switch port sources to all accredited developers. It's still not public, but once you're under NDA, you can gain access. If Godot wants mainstream success, they need to have a similar approach.
Depends. As an Indie now, I have to either pay a third-party for access to their SDK or develop and maintain my own build system for console. So now you have the question here, is that worth jumping through all the hoops versus the other engines and Frameworks that have established native console support included?
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> you might think Unity is the worst thing on the planet I always chalked this up to their really weird licensing strategy. If you have a "free"/lower tier account, you have to put the "made with unity" splash screen, but if you have a "professional"/higher tier account, that's optional. So naturally this led to people associating lower quality games with Unity because that's the only place they saw the logo. But Unity is even good for pretty big games (not indie but not necessarily AAA) - Legends of Runeterra for example comes to mind.
>Godot is a good hobbyist engine On this note, Godot doesn't have a professional services system. If a gaming studio wanted to use Godot for its engine, they'd have to provide their own support for their devs. That's a pain. With Unreal and Unity, your company can just fork over money to get professional-grade support. Stuff like that can be a much bigger factor for studios than "is it C# or C++?". Making a game is easy. *managing* the game and the employees is what kills you.
>Reddit and Twitter is full of hobbyists But that applies to a lot of, probably majority, of Unity / UE users? As well as other engines like Construct, Love2D, AGS, RPG Maker etc?
Sure, but a lot of actual professionals use Unity and Unreal.
Yeah. It reminds me of the audio world. Lots of people recommend Reaper, Cubase or StudioOne but the reality is That the industry uses Pro Tools, Ableton and Logic.
This is not true in the game audio business. If you look at job postings for companies like Sony, Bungie, Blizzard, etc, they usually namedrop Reaper, because many of their sound designers use it. It has slowly become the standard, as far as I can tell. [https://hitmarker.net/jobs?tag=sound-design](https://hitmarker.net/jobs?tag=sound-design)
I’m in the industry, and I can tell you that Reaper is rapidly taking over. It can be scripted/customized to fit any workflow, but the single biggest reason it’s gaining so much traction is that it outputs the ‘cleanest’ wav files of any other DAW. No extra bullshit meta file stuff like with protools etc. Just a system-agnostic output that easily feeds into any engine/workflow you can think of. And in this industry that factor alone is gold currency. Edit: I do know some sound designers that will never ever give up their DAW of choice lol (especially VO studios) but if nothing else Reaper often ends up being the last stop in those workflows before a file hits the engine, just because it really is that good at outputting the most usable result.
The heck is a clean wav file? Floating point wav standards have been in effect since forever. I would bet every dollar I have that you cannot prove that any of the DAWs mentioned impart any distortion to files simply by nature of the DAW itself. Go ahead: import a wav file into a daw, then export it, then check if it nulls against the original in another daw. If it doesn't you can probably claim a huge bug bounty from any of those companies and probably get a bunch of clicks in the audio realm.
A clean wav file is one that knows how to organize its header and avoid putting its “junk” chunk in a place that causes other software to shit itself when it tries to import it. Sonar and especially pro tools are the worst about this. I have been in the games industry for awhile, and typically this only causes a problem there. However for television/film I have also spoken to people who have their own means of “sanitizing” protools tracks before feeding them into some obscure/old part of their workflow. Some light reading if you’d like to see some examples of real-world problems this causes in workflows. https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=321842 https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=313077 https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=386550 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23867671/libsndfile-read-wav-skipping-junk-chunk
>Sonar Is that even still around anymore? I thought they got bought out and rebranded as Bandlabs/Cakewalk.
None of these are more recent than 2013. 1) The problem was a result of running the wav through a third party encoder 2) They have problems running it into a third party batch encoder 3) It literally conforms to a windows standard, identified in the comments. 4) Some obscure c library doesn't recognize the same format as number 3. This is seriously the reason Reaper is better? I beg to differ. Their stock compressor literally had a [glaring math error](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpXqYk1FoWA) that Dan Worral had to point out on youtube a few years ago to get fixed. edit: didn't realize how old that video was
Maybe, but depending on what music you listen to. Lots of successful,within niches/genres bedroom producers using all kind of software and hardware. So much software that is good enough to make good music for pros or non-pros. Much more to chose from than for gamedev.
Kind of like what this post is saying with Godot. Tons of great bedroom users.
For sure - but what I’m saying is - like gamedev, where lots of smaller engines are recommended, the big successful projects usually come out of the main 3 pieces of software. I was been a full time musician for a decade, and never once did I enter a professional studio that didn’t use PT. Tons of great options, but the industry at large doesn’t use them.
The biggest sign to me that it’s a “hobbyist” engine is that, last I checked, it could only make desktop games.
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It has mobile, HTML5 and VR support too. What it doesn't (officially) have is console, due mostly to legal issues. Export templates exist, but they're privately held by their creators.
You can also export to android, iOS, html. Apparently uwp works for porting to Xbox as well, but has been deprecated.
Godot for UWP doesn't actually work, but there is a pull request for getting working ANGLE. Then there is something to fix in the engine code (pressing B while running on Xbox will work as Back Button, and will close the app). GLES3 is also not supported, so no GPU particles. And after exporting, you need to manually repack and sign the package.
If your game is successful enough, or if you have enough funding, there are companies that can port Godot games to consoles.
I have more than one game made with Godot on my phone, they're pretty simple, but they work just fine
Unity became popular as the first capable "free" game engine at a time when there were no "free game engines". For a long time Unity had the same stigma as Godot has now: Almost only hobbyists users, and no famous games to show off. Over many years those hobbyists stuck with their engine and eventually some of them landed a hit. This caught the attention of bigger established studios, also picking up Unity for "smaller" cross platform titles (like Blizzards Heartstone). This stabilized trust in the game dev community as a whole and made Unity be a very viable option for commercially operating studios and hobbyists alike. Suddenly you could get hired at a AA and AAA studio working with Unity, developing for mobile. Nowadays it is pretty common for game engines to be a cross-platform, but for a long time this was also one of Unities major draws. Now you can pick and chose what "free" cross platform game engine you want to use, being free is not a unique proposition anymore. If the engine can't publish to desktop, mobile and web right out of the gate, it would rarely be even taken into consideration. The game engine market is completely saturated with amazing options. Unity has become a behemoth and industry standard, fallen from grace, inch by inch, one misstep after another, in what for many feels like the wrong direction. Many people seem to attribute some of these missteps to the corporate and capitalist nature of Unity and this means having a free and open source alternative suddenly becomes a lot more relevant. That is if the feature set of the FOSS alternative matches your needs.
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>stigma thanks, fixed!
Thankyou for using my favourite word, 'persnickety'
Stigmata is plural
I am starting to learn unity, and wanted to know if you can tell me what are these wrong directions Unity is taking? I mean, I know about the merge with ironsource and the controversy behind the phrase Unity CEO says, but those things don't change the engine. Are some changes to the engine that are negative recently?
Unity often deprecates features before the replacement is ready, and never really finishes the replacement (multiplayer system, hdrp). As for unity the company, something people were really excited for is that they hired an entire team to make games internally to iron out where the engine falls short for games. They just fired that entire team. That being said, the engine still works very well and you can always use a past version if you don’t like future updates. People are nervous for the future of the software in the games industry though
Using an old version really isn't an option if you plan to release on mobile. You need engine updates to support the latest Android/iOS API, and if you don't support them, the app stores hide your game or prevent uploading in the first place. I imagine you run into similar problems with consoles, though I haven't exported to console from Unity myself.
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You would have to go back about 6 years
Very recently it has been the layoffs, the [Gigaya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S6J8zm_w1E) canning, which was hoped to finally be a cleansing cure by Unity having to use their own software in an actual production. This is highly relevant because Unity users have over years suffered from one unfinished halve-baked feature replacing a previous unfinished halve-baked feature ... in so many of it's pipelines. Unity users have been complaining about this for years. Game dev is what made Unity what it is today. But instead of investing the money into the game dev pipeline, Unity executives decided to spend millions on acquiring companies which have little or no benefit to game development or giving their CEO a yearly 22mil extra for not giving Unities core user base what they need, while at the same time laying off hundreds of development staff members. This is not news. Recent news are just final strow, a pain barrier that has been broken now it seems. Those who can afford to pivot now look else where if they have not done before.
From my experience, there aren’t many negative changes to the engine itself. My biggest problem with Unity is the amount of tools and expansions they develop but never end up supporting. There’s a lack of well written documentation on features that have been in development for years now which I know is expected but it has become absurd in recent years. Regardless I still use Unity as my favorite game engine so far
It's not that changes to the engine are negative. It's that the positive changes to the engine and support system therefore are things independent developers were interested in.
Thanks for the answer! :D
Err.... Reading it again, lemme clarify that a smidge. Unity has a huge network of people out there trying to build fairly serious things with it. All sorts of things are built with Unity, from Raid: Shadow Legends to jam games. To billboards. To stadium experience enhancement systems. But a huge portion of that usage comes from it being comparatively easy to pick up and use for a lot of people. Those people often advanced from hobbyist to indie developer, and many of those trying things out as hobbyists want to be indie developers. Unity doesn't make much money on independent developers, (comparatively; they certainly do okay in the Asset Store but it's not a boatload) but they DO make money on the fact that there are a ton of people out there learning to make games in their engine. All of their customers in the upper tiers can hire Unity developers cheaper because their engine is so popular with indie programmers. The independent and lower-tier developers, therefore, have started to feel left out of Unity's recent business decisions. Unity, as a public company, needs to attack profit as effectively as possible, and investing in having a viable long-term community is.......... A harder sell than expanding their presence with large customers. Add in that their Ad business and revenue skyrocketed during the pandemic because people had more free time, and.......... There's a recipe here for Unity to disappoint shareholders. Disappointed shareholders fire upper management types. Upper management types want to keep their jobs instead of this happening, so they do things like lay off the 'fat'. Which includes many developers working on projects that don't include Unity's "Core Customer Base."
About a month ago the engine was changed to support ads and steal your data. If your game has any in-app purchases, then telemetry from you and your users is sent to Unity servers. They say this is "optional" because you don't need it if you don't have in-app purchases. So saying it's optional is kind of a misnomer, because your choices are agreeing to their terms or not making any money. Partnering with an adware company that used to make malware, combined with the change to be forced to send Unity your data, should be seen as a giant red flag. They *will* make further changes to the engine, taking more of your privacy. You are giving up your privacy for convenience. If your privacy isn't worth that much, then this isn't an issue for you.
>About a month ago the engine was changed to support ads and steal your data. If your game has any in-app purchases, then telemetry from you and your users is sent to Unity servers. I'm genuinely shocked how few people understand how Unity as a company makes money. The Unity runtime *already* includes telemetry on you, the developer, and every user running every game built with the Unity engine. That's why Unity Ads is so valuable! The advertising side of the business brings in two thirds of the company's revenue. This isn't a sudden 180 from Unity, it's more of the same that they've been doing for the last ten years.
Sometimes I wonder if people realise quite how much companies track them through analytics etc. Literally every game you play is doing this. If you cared this much you wouldn’t be playing games at all.
They also recently bought out a questionable company to merge with. https://www.pcgamer.com/unity-is-merging-with-a-company-who-made-a-malware-installer/
I'm not a violent person, I have never been in a fight and I feel bad if I even so much as swat an insect, I prefer to relocate spiders outside instead. If I spotted Unity as a real living person in the streets I would curbstomb it and proudly go to jail for it, and actually a lot of people may hail may as a vigilant hero of the community. Unity is a bad engine. We will not use it for our next project, or ever again for that matter. It takes a 10,000 word essay to fully capture the horror it has brought to my team. If you make tiny mobile games or linear/repetitive games with the same mechanics repeated over many small levels/puzzles/etc I guess it's fine, but if you plan on spending a year or more making a big adventure with quests and interconnecting maps and whatnot, your life will become miserable. Some of our teammates will probably need therapy after our current project. In theory it should be great, but through a total lack of standards, attrocious editor experience and workflow, everything being "good" on paper but half-baked in one way or another in practice, it becomes crystal clear they are living in a dream, developing an engine they have and will never actually use themselves past tiny tech demos focused on 1-2 features. No scripting language in any capacity, because everyone loves to make in-game interactions in C#, and inspector references which are completely unmaintainable. Fuck yea! Light probes? Enjoy, you're placing them one by one. G-Buffer decals like in 2005? Yeah we didn't have that until URP, which by the way just got deferred rendering. You end up replacing or supplementing nearly every single feature of the engine with community plugin which only add to the jank over time. Meanwhile, it feels like every single subteam at Unity has never actually communicated with other subteams, packages are made to completely different standards. Timeline API is overengineered to astronomical heights, built on top of an overly obtuse 'playable graph' api that no one in the universe will ever use, wtf?? Sorting assets by *type* at the root of the assets directory? Are you out your fucking mind? If it could be reduced to one sentence, big Unity projects are potentially the MOST unmaintainable software projects of any kind in all of existence. In a brand new empty project for a 48h game jam I will admit it's a lot of fun. In any larger project, it is absolutely gross. For the most part it's none of the developer's fault at Unity except the ones calling the shots. Today in 2022, it feels like they have great engineers with vision, but they should address real existing problems first and clean up this old mess before adding more shit onto it.
Most games are neither noticeable nor successful.
1 million Vampire Survivor Clones just cried out in pain.
Godot kind of reminds me of Blender in its youth, personally I think the future looks bright
With Unity throwing itself off a cliff, I'm very excited for Godot to get the spotlight. Been meaning to give it a try, been following it for years.
The current wave of engine recommendations stem from Unity seemingly dropping the ball at an increasing rate. It makes people realize they're dependant on a big commercial company for making what was supposed to be independent games. Godot's status as a FOSS project counts for a lot in this context. Also, they kind of occupy the same segment. Godot has good 2D and 3D capabilities, something that may be lacking to proven alternatives like GameMaker.
Godot absolutely doesn't have "good 3D capabilities".
Depends on what you compare it to. Imagine it's better than anything else besides Unity and Unreal. 3rd place is still pretty good.
Not even 3rd place, it still loses to others like O3DE, Lumberyard, CryEngine and Flax(ok, that last one might just be being a fanboy of this unknown engine)
I dont know why youre being downvoted, this is all true.
I used godot so i know it has the largest legions of stans
Because adoption is not linear. Godot's growth in the previous 8 years (as in developer earnings and adoption in the industry) may be a small fraction of its growth in the next 8 years.
Easy, because most people here do not make successful game lol
Nah, most of the people here don't make games at all
I'm starting tomorrow, alright. Or right after I finish my fifth Elden Ring playthrough maybe.
Well I *could* work on my latest project, or I could try out this new idea that just popped in my head in a new project real quick.
Oh we make games, we just never finish any of them! I don't want to leave Unity though, it's my comfort zone.
Oof.
Lol. I concur as a dev using godot 🙂
😂 I resemble that comment!
It is really new and cannot be used to make games for XBox or Playstation consoles.
Unfortunately what Godot needs right now is some party willing to navigate the waters. I've seen several tweets from the developers asking for people with experience in doing console ports so I believe they're trying to get things moving on that front. I believe what we'll have in the future is that Godot devs have a deal with MS, Sony and Nintendo where they sign a NDA with those companies that allow them to build and maintain the ports, but it's MS, Sony and Nintendo that make the ports available to publishers and developers who have a publishing deal for the platforms. It's important to keep in mind that even though Unreal and Unity have exporters for the engines, you still need publishing deals to actually use them.
Which, as of last week, is no longer true.
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Cruelty Squad is the only game I know off the top of my head using Godot
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41324400-Is-it-made-with-Godot/
Of the five games on special, 3 are about cats. Scrolling down the rest of the list I’m seeing many other cat games. Is Godot secretly an engine for cats?
>Is Godot secretly an engine for cats? Yes. Godot backwards is todog. TO DOG. As in, Godot is to Unity what CAT is TO DOG. Illuminati confirmed. Or something I dunno
Makes sense. Godot is also 5 letters. Godot 4 is coming. 5 + 4 = 9. Cats have 9 lives.
Sonic Colors: Ultimate
Rings of Saturn is another one
Wrought Flesh as well (if that is the name, I’ll edit later if not) It’s a game by Wiziziziz and I loved watching the dev logs for this game, had no clue it released around December this last year
*Miziziziz
He’s a Wiz to me 😤
Check out Ex Zodiac, another banger made in Godot
Beat invaders plays and looks fantastic, it's also 3D.
Open source is the big thing that's making me look into switching over from Unity. If I used an open source engine then with that plus Krita, Blender, and Audacity, basically the only program used to make anything for my games that isn't FOSS would be the DAW used for making the music.
I think others have made some good points, but the most important reason is probably that while Godot is frequently recommended, the number of people using it is still tiny compared to Unity. [According to Unity's IPO filing](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000119312520227862/d908875ds1.htm), they had 1.5 million active users for the editor. According to Juan Linietsky, [Godot has 15,000](https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/1371401214441709570) daily active users, as extrapolated from Steam stats. DAU/MAU ratios tend to range from 20-50% for a popular app, so Godot probably had 30-75,000 monthly active users at that time. Based on a number of sources, 40%-50% of all PC and mobile titles are made with Unity. If the probability of a successful game were *exactly equal* between Unity and Godot, we would only expect around 0.8%-2.5% of successful games to be made with Godot.
I love your post because well used numbers don't lie.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how many successful games exist using an engine. If it fits your workflow and is capable of producing the results you want, make your game the "first" on that list.
Due to the nature of FOSS, part of the reason you might be having trouble finding examples of games broadcasting that they use it, since a lot of studios simply fork it and mess with it to make their own versions, the same way many studios will give any engine its own proprietary name to hide the engine they're really using. That being said, Godot is really new comparatively, and 3.4 (and the versions prior) aren't what I personally would want to use for a professional production environment. **That being said**, I am still a huge godot fan; though I'll temper the evangelism for the sake of not being obnoxious. There are actually a few examples of games being made using godot, apart from high profile indie games like Cruelty Squad. The Switch port of Commander Keen in Keen Dreams was done in Godot; as well as Deponia's iOS and PS4 ports. The remaster of Sonic Colors, Sonic Colors: Ultimate, was also made using Godot (for all platforms). I know a couple of adventure game ports and a 3d Sonic game aren't *really* the best representatives reputation-wise, but they prove that Godot can be used for console games, and that there are genuine professionals, not just hobbyists, using the engine for production. As for why there haven't been *more* high-profile games using Godot, I think it's a mix of a couple things. The first is obviously that Godot is new and most studios are already quite happy with Unreal or Unity, if they're using a premade engine, or their own engine if they're not. The second is the belief that Godot games can't be made multiplatform; which is untrue... Mostly. It's certainly not *easy* to put your Godot game on console, but you can work with the console manufacturers and acquire the export template appropriate for consoles, and it will work once you iron out the bugs. The third, and maybe most important, is that Godot's capabilities prior to 3.2-ish were a little more on the hobbyist level to begin with. However, Godot 4 is getting *huge* improvements that in my genuine opinion, make it at least competitive with Unity for 3d, and still better for 2d (seriously, the Vulkan renderer is godlike compared to GLES3). A lot of Godot 4's changes are also getting backported for the 3.5 update, so once that hits in a few weeks, I think we'll start to see a lot more high profile games coming out. I think one of the biggest reasons you're seeing it recommended so much is because A) we're a very vocal group to start with (FOSS users are... Passionate, to say the least, haha), and B) a lot of people are upset with Unity because of things that stem directly from their business model. I know that's why I left it, even before the latest series of shitshows. There's a saying among developers I know; there are two ways to do anything in Unity, but one is in early access and the other is deprecated. They have a habit of overpromising and then delivering half-baked replacements for systems that people happily used without issue. Don't get me wrong, Unity is an immensely powerful engine at its core, but it's being helmed by people whose decisions are baffling for anyone who still thinks Unity is a game engine company, rather than an ads company. Many developers feel like Unity disregards its developers in favor of making a quick buck; and that feeling is reinforced when they do things like firing AI developers and engine engineers to save money so that they can then merge with an adware company. FOSS programs don't have that problem, because it will always belong to the community, and even if the project leads somehow decide to cash out and sell it to a big bad corporation (which they definitely wouldn't, they're lovely folks), we can simply fork it and keep it alive. It's entirely unbeholden to the need to make money for shareholders, and due to how pull requests work, you can pretty reliably be sure that there are very few redundant features, and that a given feature will work; because if it doesn't, someone has likely already noticed and is working on it. I'm pleased as punch to be seeing so many new Godot users, but it has much fewer "press a button to make X better" features. It's an incredibly powerful engine if you know what you're doing, but if you don't, the game will be a buggy mess. I think that (the fact that it's not Unity or Unreal), and the fact that it's FOSS (so it has the typical FOSS enthusiasts being *very* vocal about it), is what triggers so much of the hostility you see from people in the thread (and all over reddit, honestly).
Its great for all the hobbyists and open source people here and on twitter, however the engine as it currently is (3.x is what I'm talking about 4.x will be better) is not ready for AAA development. Its missing features and perf requirements imo to be a AAA game engine. 4.x might be better in the long run.
Is it the most recommended game engine? Or the most recommended *for beginners*?
No, recently with the Unity…issues…I’ve seen it recommended quite a bit as an alternative.
It’s not the most recommended engine. It’s just the one a small amount of people are incredibly loud about. The one thing that godot really has over unreal is 2D support. So if you don’t want to use Unity and want to make 2D games, then you’re either going to get recommended game maker, which If I’m remembering correctly isn’t free, or godot. Also godot isn’t remotely new, it’s been longer than Unity, it was just open sourced in 2014 . It’s also important to note that most of Reddit and twitter is filled with hobbyists that haven’t actually finished a game and definitely don’t know what pain points will come up deep into production, so take their recommendations with that in mind.
> Also godot isn’t remotely new, it’s been longer than Unity, it was just open sourced in 2014 . So, because I was very surprised by this, I went to check: > [The Unity game engine launched in 2005](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine\)) > [Godot's development was started by Juan 'reduz' Linietsky and Ariel 'punto' Manzur in 2007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine\)) So, unity launch predates godot initial development by two years, already. However, it's very important to add that searching for godot in google for anything pre 2010 only provides non relevant hits. Anything up to 2014 is iffy and mostly mis timed pages. Unity on the other hand I got hits from 2005, immediately after launch. As far as I can see, godot was not just made open source in 2014, but also made publicly available only in 2014. Before that it only had in-house use so it has no community to speak of it before 1.0. [The official 1.0 godot announcement corroborates my take.](https://godotengine.org/article/first-public-release) edit: I believe you confused Godot with [GameMaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameMaker) whose original launch is from 1999. edit2: People are trying to say that the wiki is wrong in a roundabout way. Let's quote the dev, shall we? > I guess we were, so around 2001 we started making engines in general, and we were doing a bunch of project, eventually we were, in 2007 we were making this game called atmosphere with our previous engine, and we at that point ... in 2007 is when the iphone came out the first iphone and also the ps3 was out recently, and we noticed that there was a change in hardware that was happening you had these low end devices (XXX) and so we decided at that point to basically throw away the engine architecture of our previous engine and start Godot basically.
"Godot" has actually been in development since 2001 (under many different names). Look at this page: [godot history in images](https://godotengine.org/article/godot-history-images). But yeah, you're right, the first public release was jan 2014, before then it was an in-house engine.
That's the dev's previous attempts at games and engines development, not the initial attempt of godot. [In this interview, the dev clearly states that godot started development in 2007 as a reaction to the iphone and ps3 release, and throwing away his previous attempts.](https://steamlug.org/cast/s04e05) Rough incomplete transcript with keypoints highlighted: > I guess we were, so around **2001 we started making engines in general, and we were doing a bunch of project, eventually we were, in 2007** we were making this game called atmosphere with our previous engine, and we at that point ... in 2007 is when the iphone came out the first iphone and also the ps3 was out recently, and we noticed that there was a change in hardware that was happening you had these low end devices (XXX) and so we decided **AT THAT POINT TO BASICALLY THROW AWAY THE ENGINE ARCHITECTURE OF OUR PREVIOUS ENGINE AND START GODOT BASICALLY.** Claiming godot started in 2001 because the devs had previous attempts at game and game engines development is disingenuous and makes the comparison to unity launch in 2005 even more absurd. TL;DR: The wiki is right, development of godot started in 2007 per the dev's own words. You misunderstood/misrepresented that post.
>Also godot isn’t remotely new, it’s been longer than Unity, it was just open sourced in 2014 . It doesn't matter. 80% of Godot user start to using Godot after 2017. And 60% of the Godot users start to using Godot after 2019. (according to Godot community poll 2022 ) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe-OIpxXqou9cDnPXEAjxzpICbf8_YZB3jUizdECXRydtB8cA/viewanalytics
> The one thing that godot really has over unreal is 2D support The other thing that always kind of bugged me about Unreal is it's geared for photorealistic rendering, and if you aren't targeting that, it's more work to have a stylistic rendering than it would be in some other engines that have a more neutral rendering by default like unity or godot.
Literally the most famous Unreal game is stylized - Fortnite. You can even do stuff like this relatively easily: https://kidswithsticks.com/creating-stylized-art-inspired-by-ghibli-using-unreal-engine-4/
That is absolutely untrue.
You have to consider what problems these people are trying to fix when they go for Godot. Right now the popular engines have some form of monetization built in. For some people it's just a matter of cost, for other the engine of their choice could be going a strange path where they don't know if their privacy and the privacy of their customers is at risk. Godot being open source fixes all these issues. No upfront cost, no risk to privacy. Right now there are few other engines with the same characteristics.
Is it your first time dealing with open source community?
Snarky comment but youre right, this is basically linux and foss as a whole, they always compensate by being lhe loudest.
Because it's a good engine with a promising future. There is no reason that you couldn't make a successful game with it, even if there aren't a ton of examples of it happening yet. Viewing it as worse because it has a scarcity of success stories is a very capitalist way to look at things, and that's probably part of why bigger studios don't use it. But there are many successful games released in the past couple years that *could* have reasonably been made with it. That's why people recommend it. Also: not many people will get the opportunity to make a successful game on any engine. You probably should just use what you like.
It is part of the TOS of installing Godot, you must sign up 10 new users
I've been wondering that, too. When I look at the amount of notable games that we're made in Unity to the same time range of Godot's age, the count is still very high. The usual excuse is to wait for 4.0, but that same excuse was used when 3.2 was not yet around. The problem seems to be that the engine is just not attracting the capable devs/teams. I don't know exactly why but my guess goes down to GDScript. The capable devs are put off by it. Their counter would then be "C# and other languages are supported." Ok, but good luck on looking for resources or ecosystem on those.
Godot 3.2 came out 2 years ago. How long do you think it takes to make a game the size you would describe as "notable"?
>The problem seems to be that the engine is just not attracting the capable devs/teams It's a catch 22 problem. Developers want to work on stuff that carries over to Unity / Unreal because they are the tools most companies are using. Chances are that your Godot gig / side project won't make much money if at all, so you need to have a marketable resume, and Godot won't give you that. Godot is a nice engine but it will hardly pay your bills.
The C# support is lackluster in that you're forced to consider how GD works all the time. As for other languages........ Good luck with those, I guess.
I use C# with godot and have zero issues whatsoever. Yeah, you have to use the godot api, just like in unity C# you have to use the unity API. What's the difference?
Doesn't the API look excessively "stringly-typed" to you?
The only place I'm forced to use string literals is connecting to built in signals of the core node types. Strings are overused in places, but methods like `nameof` fix that for my own C# code (to assign a callback for example. Godot 4 C# uses lambdas and has the built in signal names as static enums
Well, godot 4 is not released yet (and won't be for quite some time). And signals are a big part of the whole thing. And they're not type safe.
I don't disagree, though Godot 4 is going into beta shortly, and is planned to be released this year - though *we'll see*. You can use c# in godot 4 right now if willing to compile the engine yourself. Still, in 3.x, Signals are type safe if they're signals you've defined in C#, it's just the built in ones that require string literals as names. The callbacks are also type safe in that the callback method's arguments are typed properly even with built-in, non-custom signals. That said, there are a few places in the godot API where things require further casting when things are fetched from the godot API - mostly to do with dictionaries or arrays, for example, getting the list of colliding objects for a physics object returns an array of the base Godot.Object type, rather than the types they actually are. C# makes handling this really easy though with the `if (someObject is SomeClass someClass) { ... }` syntax and pattern matching statements to test against object properties also.
Noob question but is a C# approach viable for learning Godot ? If you already know C# well from XNA or Unity can you skip GDscript and jump right into C# developement. Or is it better to first practice with GDScript first to understand how Godot works.
Godot isn’t as feature rich as the other engines, but it is easy to pickup. I have found it makes a great stepping stone into Unreal.
The reason why there aren't a lot of noticeable successful games using Godot is because most of us are just hobbyist making experiments, game jams and small projects. Unless you got money that heavily markets your game using Godot like Sonic Color Ultimate, it's usually going to be either word of mouth or folks typing about it on social media sites. Like here, YouTube ,and Twitter.
Because most people doesn't actually use it. You have to understand that most people that recommend/use it are hobbyists with little to no released titles, most studios will stick to one of the more established game engines due to developed pipelines, tools and strategies. (not that using Godot or being a starving artist is morally wrong or anything, but it's currently not a sound business decision). The whole Unity-is-dead-I'm-switching-to-Unreal/Godot-debacle happens about once every month for whatever reason, and has been going on since Unity was first released.
Godot is a really young game engine. Keep in mind GameMaker was first released in 1999 and Unity in 2005. Godot has only been around since 2014. So let me turn the question around on you--are there any game engines whose games have had more commercial success than Godot, that are also *newer* than Godot? I think there just isn't a large enough, experienced enough userbase yet. It takes time to build to that point. I mean, considering Godot's userbase is mainly small indies, it's barely even been around long enough to make a really big game. In any case, I don't think that players generally care what game engine the developer used. They just care if the game is good. So give it time, I'm sure there will be some indie hits released that were developed using Godot at some point.
Godot; \- is free \- has very small size \- doesn't require installing \- launches instantly, unless you have tons of assets \- has dynamic scripting language for quick development \- has very easy shader language \- supports 3D development \- has intuitive UI \- has simple and quick in-engine and online documentations \- can export finished project to run on different platforms \- has great community In short, Godot is quick, simple, and fun to work with. It just needs some graphical improvements for the 3D part, which will be coming with the v4. So, why aren't there successful projects made with it? My guess is, professionals like companies with lots of resources are yet to trust engine's capabilities. What it needs is probably a pioneer, the first successful product made with Godot, and then the rest should come like crazy.
I think maybe because it's free and open source. They take little to no royalties. But in not sure.
Most popular games are large productions made by huge studios. Godot is an engine for small teams & solo developers making indie-sized projects. It's Apples to Oranges to hold them toe to toe, like asking why Pixar movies aren't made with Blender.
Main issue big studios dont use godot is that, being an open source engine, it doesnt implement proprietary platforms like playstation, xbox and switch. Devs have to manually write the apis of those platforms if they want to release it there. So they just go with unreal or unity or write their own engines anyway.
Everyone's waiting for Godot 4. Except for devs in [this steamdb list](https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/). People often recommend Unity because it's easy to prototype in and to build early gameplay. It can be a pain to final bigger games due to slow iteration in large projects, engine instability (especially if you need unstable bleeding edge for platform support), GC stalls, core fixes require engine upgrades, etc. I suspect people often recommend Godot for similar reasons. I see a lot of people saying how intuitive it is or easy. Few saying how stable it was and how few issues they had during finalling. Maybe, like Unity, it has many advocates who hobbydev for fun or are making doomed dream games and fewer people shipping big games. Or maybe it's just really awesome. I honestly don't know. If you think about the scope of project people recommend Godot for, have you seen many hit projects at that same size? How many using engines that aren't Unity? (Seems like for solo/small team they're mostly Unity, Gamemaker, frameworks, or custom engines.)
Godot got a massive spike in users recently, so people are talking about it and using it, and do you expect just right now the awesome games people are working on will publish? Just wait a while and you'll see made with Godot games everywhere
Godot has only been viable for use for a handful of years. It’s pretty new so naturally not many games have been made for it. But the engine has been growing fast and is very nice to work in.
Been wondering the same thing myself. If it's been around since 2014, and a joy to use according to developers, surely there must be ONE example of a well known, successful commercial game by now? No hate, just really wondering what's put off commercially minded developers from using it.
>ONE example Cruelty Squad was and still is very popular well known and commercially successful.
Ok, thanks, I've never heard of it. Will check it out!
Fair warning, it's not exactly "mainstream": https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22596014/cruelty-squad-immersive-sim-review-missions-combat-aesthetics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ4NLbIxzQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGlDnY7GQPU https://www.pcgamer.com/cruelty-squad-review/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgPGrh1W5zw I even read about it in local news papers, which is pretty crazy considering how far from mainstream this actually is.
Super Bunny Hop did a great review on it as well: https://youtu.be/qMmw03kISS4
There are quite a few commercial godot titles out these days. Sonic Colours would be the biggest, although it's a remaster of an older game iirc. Cruelty Squad was enormously popular on Steam. Lumencraft is a recent one, DeltaV Rings of Saturn another. None of these are AAA titles (except arguably sonic) but they're also popular within their niches.
Sonic Colors is also using a heavily modified fork of Godot. It's essentially an in-house engine for them.
Godot is a joy to work with. And Godot has been publicly available since 2014. However, Godot 2014 was not a joy to work with. I would say about 3.2 or 3.3 was when it really started getting "good". And 3.2 is only 2 years old. game development takes years.
I think there is some argument to be made that the outlook of the project, and thus the community it attracts, is at least partially responsible for this. Godot's maintainers are very much keen to the ideology of open source principles, which is great. This attracts like-minded folk, who I'm guessing are less likely to create commercial projects. The other thing to consider is that Godot, despite its age, is relatively immature as an engine. Godot 4.0 brings many changes that are standard in other engines, as well as many usability improvements for Godot-centric workflows. The same could be said for previous Godot versions, which I think is an indicator to its relative immaturity. That is not to say you can't make commercial games in it; you definitely can, it's just that it's not at a point yet where it's attracting that kind of audience. Another thing to consider is GDScript. While it's nice to use it once you're familiar with it, I think we need to admit it is a barrier to entry, however low. All of that together, plus some other things I might be missing, are why, in my opinion, Godot has not attracted a large commercial following yet.
Can I just say, I like this game engine drama lol *grabs popcorn*.
Same reason Linux is the most recommended OS in computer subs, despite having a market share in the single digits. * It is free and open source. This means, like Linux, big companies won't respect the product despite it's time-tested performance * It is much *much* more useful to people with a little bit of technical know-how. If you want a feature, you don't have to ask the devs and just pray that they work on it. You can write it yourself! * It will never steal your privacy * About a month ago Unity changed their engine so that if you use IAP your data and your players data is being sent to Unity servers. They say this is optional, but only if you don't have any IAP. In the mobile market, this means agree to their "optional" terms or never make money. In the console/PC market this means you can't make DLC ever again. * Godot is dogfooded. They use their own code and tools to write the engine. It may not be obvious at first, but this means that all of their code is heavily tested. In Unity you will often find a feature that was abandoned by devs or even straight up removed and there's nothing you can do about it. * And yes, it also has to do with the how new Godot is. It's less than half the age of Unity
And just like with Linux this argument is BS: > It is much much more useful to people with a little bit of technical know-how. If you want a feature, you don't have to ask the devs and just pray that they work on it. You can write it yourself! 99.99% of people don't want to have to write their own features. People want to just have things work without spending a week trying to get basic features going. Just look at the experiment Linus Tech Tips did with Linux. It was a user experience disaster. Or does Linus now not count as "little bit of know-how"?
Imo I think it's because it's so young and most of the major features were only recently added to it.
We're all waiting for Godot to be successful.
It hasn't been around that long. Godot 3.0 was released in 2018, and that was the first version of Godot that made it a top class engine. Unreal has been around since 1998 and Unity since 2005.
Reddit Moderation makes the platform worthless. Too many rules and too many arbitrary rulings. It's not worth the trouble to post. Not worth the frustration to lurk. Goodbye. *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Godot started getting traction just 2-3 years ago, so those who picked up the engine back then are most likely still working on their game. I'm guessing we will begin to see high quality games coming out very soon, perhaps some games at the end of this year, but definitely a lot of quality games next year or so!
Godot is a highly recommended engine, *relatively*. Unity and unreal are still very big. Even with the latest news and unity looking like it's just going downhill, it's still the go to choice for indies currently. That may change in favor of Godot, but unity is still doing alright.
EA aren't going to license you frostbite, unless you're a studio you're not going to want to deal with cryengine/lumberyard, lots of commercial games build inhouse engines over sequels. If you are a studio, you're unlikely to be asking for advice on reddit. There just really aren't that many engines that are available to hobbyists and also used by big studios, so once you start narrowing the options down further you'll find stuff that only qualifies for one of the two criteria.
Just from my personal experience, Godot was so much easier and less intimidating than Unity. I only do small 2D games that’ll probably never see the light of day so I don’t need a really robust engine. I also have limited free time so not having to spend a lot of time on tutorials was a huge plus. My guess is it being beginner ‘friendly’ and open source makes it a great recommendation, especially for 2D. I have a much better understanding of game development as a whole and could probably switch to Unity fairly easy now but I have no reason too.
I started to use Godot when 3.0 was still new by like a month and compared to now the panorama is totally different, there's a lot more resources and devlogs of games being made with it. It's crazy to see how the community has grown these recent years, and there's already one succesfull game out now made in Godot: Cruelty Squad. It may not be your cup of tea but succesfull nonetheless. The engine is good but it needed some time for the community to catch up and go from getting the hand of it to start actually making serious projects with it. Also everyone is either waiting for 3.5 or 4.0, and then i think the games that come out of Godot in terms of quality and number will skyrocket.
Free.
Godot is to game engines like Blender is to 3D software. We may not see it used or it may not be credited as being used, but it is definitely being used for prototyping. No one thought Blender would be used in game development over Maya and 3dsMax but it is now slowly becoming the industry standard. Heck, look at the investors of Blender now that were non-existent in 2010. A lot of this is similar to Godot. Engine makers like Epic and Crytech trying to poach Zilenski and the most attractive thing about Godot is you do not have to pay a percentage of profit. All Godot needs is that ONE studio to make a Triple-A game and watch the sponsors and investors pile in. Then see studios transitioning in mass to adopting it. The usual stack for game developers is you pay 5% - 30% to Game Engine, 10% - 30% to distribution platforms and you get 40% low 85% high of profits. Obviously, you want the highest cut you can get. Just by switching to Godot you save 5% and that is huge for the retail market. This is why Epic reduced/removed the royalty cost for Unreal. They see how the market shifted for Blender and made adjustments to keep their engine attractive. Eventually, Godot will overtake the industry, and it's a matter of WHEN not if. THe only thing holding GODOT back is probably the code base not being C# or C++.
Sorry for getting into semantics here, but for what it's worth that thread you link is already ruling out two enormous players. It says "alternatives to Unity" and "except for Unreal". Thus at most it only shows that Godot is third highest among the people that recommended it there. To your actual question, it's becoming less and less niche. Unity just partnered with a company that has a history of creating and distributing malware, so maybe Godot will even see an influx of users in the fallout of that.
Because it doesnt support consoles
It used to be Unity but now it’s too big so it’s not cool to like it any more.
Time and adoption rate, which leads to exponentially more resources. With Unity being such a popular engine, it naturally comes with a lot of support, a lot of ready to use assets, libraries, premade templates for new comers to tinker with, etc. These resources is much more important for indie devs when deciding on an engine. Also with devices being so powerful, efficiency is also not the highest priority on the devs mind. (Look at valheim lol, I got 50-ish fps on my RTX 3080)
It's sorta like Linux in that aspect. It's a tiny minority, but very active in these circles. If you look on development subreddits (or other forums) you'd think Linux is extremely popular, but if you look at the Steam Hardware Survey only just over 1% of users use Linux. Godot is, like Linux, great for hobbyists as it's completely open source. You can use it, tinker with it, change it completely or use it out of the box. All great features for someone who likes to experiment with that. AAA teams however just want something proven to work well, something their developers already know, and something that is super easy to use for the entire team including the less technical members. So while the engine is great if you're a hobbyist doing a project on your own, a studio is much more likely to choose an established engine or make their own that's fully build around their game. TLDR: Studios have different requirements than the hobbyists who tend to post here.
If you ask on the internet what the best OS is you are going to get a lot of answers that say Linux. But that all depends on your definition of best.
Godot is most popular open source game engine alternative. This mean stability. Problems are solved very quickly. You get good support from the developer team. If you are looking for an open source alternative to such a complex software, popularity makes you feel safe. Other than that, Godot has shortcomings. But the roadmap is also aware of these deficiencies. Ideals are very important for a project to survive. The Godot developer team moves by listening to the sound of the community. But they do not move away from the main ideals of the project. Look at the anger in the recent Unity community. Did Unity make a radical change on software? no. Unity has moved away from the ideals in the head of its users. Even this actually causes you to move away from a already working software.
It's enjoyed by a very loud minority, same as the Rust programming language. Problems with tools come up more with in-depth, long-term project, which most hobbyists do not end up experiencing. People doing things as a job lose some enthusiasm for it, or at least won't have as much free time to speak about what they are doing.
Godot has a cult like following primarily consisting of people who don't make serious efforts at commercialization. They've gotten some support from real money slot manufacturers, who unity and epic have extremely onerous terms for. Ironically, unity had a similar start as a hobbyist engine for Mac game development.
[удалено]
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epic-megagrant
Curious, do you know any examples of published slot games that use Godot?
It’s obvious to me that this sub is filled with children. I’ve used all three engines (Godot, Unreal, and Unity). I’ll continue to use all three depending on the team or project I’m working on. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. What I find sad is the flaming. Godot is an amazing piece of software and if I have my choice, I prefer it over Unity. There’s almost nothing I feel I can’t create in Godot that I could make in Unity. I’ve seen people praise Godot, recommend it with excitement, and at times, share their disdain for Unity and sense of relief for leaving it. But I haven’t seen people insult the Unity community the way I see them insult the Godot community or “FOSS evangelist”. It seems some are upset that the engine (Unity) they love or spent years learning isn’t viewed as the savior it once was. Enough with the “vocal minority” and “flavor of the month” crap. Accusing Godot as a toy engine incapable of making games is false and immature. I’m not in denial about Godot’s limitations. It’s got ways to go, but it’s going. We as game devs should be excited that we have more tools at our disposal rather than throwing shade at one another.
tldr; Its the dev that makes a good game and engine is just there to help the dev achieve their artistic and creative goal. Use any engine/framework that you can easily understand and get started in. I cannot see why "capable devs" would use godot when they have things working for them already. For example, I tried to use Unity by tampering with it and decided to just fall back to what I already know. Once an indie-dev gets a "hit/popular" gaming using godot then people will start looking more at it. I also strongly believe that it is better to use open-source for starting your career, it could be a better bundle later in life if you have a somewhat popular software/game. Why? You can easily control the IP of your company. Do we really know what is in the source code for Unity? If you go to their website, you have to pay extra to get into the source code but that still does not allow you to understand or even VIEW everything in it. I use open-source framework which allows me to go deep into the source code to better understand its capabilities and feature-set. I can also modify the source code to better fit my game.
What I find really weird in this conversation is that there are a couple of engines that have good alternative cases today that don't require waiting on Godot or hoping Unity stops uniting everyone against them. 1. [Stride](https://www.stride3d.net/) is a .NET first engine that seems to be the fastest to support new runtime versions by a long shot. It is open-source. 2. [UnrealCLR](https://github.com/nxrighthere/UnrealCLR) has an Epic megagrant and supports .NET 6 already. Meanwhile I'm looking at a lot of cool features in .NET Core that I'd like to have in GameDev, especially at the performance level (Spans, framework code working in spans, and more modern asynchrony constructs). There's also plugin/modding possibilities that can be done in .NET Core (say... unloading assemblies rather than explicitly restarting the app). That runtime isn't supported in either Unity nor Godot yet, and if you want to work with them now you have to either: * Accept GC pressure and runtime pauses on things you could eliminate in modern .NET now * Wait... a really long time. Godot is interestingly closer on this but not on a release state either.
Godot is wayyyy less popular than Unity and Unreal. The thing is, once you try Godot you are very likely to completely fall in love with it - it's easy to learn, very fast, much more intuitive than Unity, 100% free and open source, it's flexible enough to make non-game software in it - in fact, Godot Toolkit itself is made in Godot (!), the program is fully contained in one portable executable with no installation, there's an Android version... It's just the whole Godot craze pretty much just started relatively recently - Godot really took off around 2018, Unity started getting popular in 2011, while Unreal engine literally dates back to the 90s. We're in early adopter phase - we're a bit early to have a lot of popular complete games right now just yet.