This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)

Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they’re switching engines on social media.

    • gencha@lemm.ee
      0·
      1 year ago

      People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games, they just want the easy route today and a marketplace to monetize on. These are poisoned gifts, and always have been.

      • adriaan@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        1 year ago

        It’s not “the easy route”. Making a game engine is a tremendous investment these days. If you are making anything other than a game that looks like early 2000s or earlier, you need a pretty capable engine that takes years to develop. That’s on top of the time it costs to make a game, which is also typically years. Not to mention that your proprietary engine will have subpar tooling and make your game development slower.

        For anyone but industry giants it’s not feasible to make a modern engine. Unless your game is not aiming to play and feel like a modern game, you have to run with an off-the-shelf engine.

        • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz
          0·
          1 year ago

          Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s hard, the companies that did it are using it to control you and so now you don’t have a choice.

          So get cracking or don’t complain.

          Also Godot is a thing.

          • adriaan@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            1 year ago

            You’re not listening. It’s not that it’s hard (although it definitely is), it’s literally just infeasible financially and time wise. You cannot spend millions developing an engine unless you are a large AAA studio. You can’t pull up your bootstraps your way into making a modern game engine within the budget you have to make a game.

            As for Godot:

            1. While games like Domekeeper and Luck Be a Landlord are great, they are made by two people and one person respectively. It has not proven itself as an engine capable of supporting the type of development cycle and team necessary for larger projects.
            2. The best games released in Godot are visually vastly inferior to anything you can whip up in other commercial engines. Its focus has been on 2D, and the 3D games released in it don’t look great. Users expect more from bigger budget games.
            3. Godot is very new. Many games started development in its infancy, and some before it was even released as open source. Not to mention that most studios have existed much longer and are already established in an older engine, with lots of capital and knowledge locked up in those softwares. There is a lot of inertia to adapting new technology.
            • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz
              0·
              1 year ago

              It’s not that it’s hard (although it definitely is), it’s literally just infeasible financially and time wise.

              And yet somehow Godot exists.

              Somehow, they managed to build a viable 2D and 3D open source engine without a massive AAA studio so clearly your assumptions are just wrong.

              You just don’t like being told you have to take responsibility for a problem someone else caused, and to that, I don’t blame you. It’s not right that we have to go through any of this. But honestly, it’s time for us millennials to realize that putting in the elbow grease to build alternatives to what others have done to us isn’t doing that, it’s us building the infrastructure to allow us to move on from the powers that be, and if you want to break away from them, you have to. Your abusers will not liberate you for you.

              It’s time to nut up and do it now.

              • Little1Lost@feddit.de
                0·
                1 year ago

                You sound like you dont know anything about programming (at least engine programming). Most Engines have to run in something like assembly, else they would be too slow. (They use others too but Assembly is in like all, i am a junior dev so i could be wrong)

                Assembly is already a large hurdle.
                I mean it is “simple” as the arch linux type of “simple”. (Nothing more than you need to run it and nothing more)

                So the option is to learn assembly or hire someone (or multiple) who can, good luck by finding one that is capable of developing an engine that does not suck and does not cost a fortune.

                Then you need to know what the engine should do.
                If you “only” need 2D or even only some system to interact with the console you will be fine, maybe.
                3D is a bit more complicated, the reason why there are so much 2D/2,5D games out supports this claim.

                Then particle support if you want it…
                Every feature you want has to be supported!
                And every feature costs and maybe needs maintenance when bugs occur. Supporting an operating system is a feature too :)

                So the engine has to be updated when a mayor OS update comes out

                There are more points for why not to make an own engine and use one of the marked that fits ones needs even if it is closed source.

                You where so fond of Godot so trying to help them might be a good starting point for you to life your ideals. I sincerely dont want to mock you with the sentence. If you can successfully help a larger open source project everyone is happy. If you can learn something new i am sure it can benefit you. I was only a bit mad because it felt like you are comparing engines with “weekend projects” what they are definitely not in the slightest.