Ask HN: How many studios / developers have moved away from Unity?

22 points by 1000nettles 1 year ago | 12 comments

It's been over a year since the Unity runtime fee debacle, I'm curious for those in the games industry how many studios or individual developers you've seen that have moved on from Unity to something like Unreal or Godot.

I realize this is all anecdotal but I am still curious! Thanks.

jarsin 1 year ago |

I moved to Unreal after using unity for a long time. It wasn't only because of the price change, though in hindsight I see that was just another in a long list of decisions that screamed "run".

Unity went off in so many different directions and ended up back at square one imo. Everything just feels like they are chasing Unreal with 20 different teams all with their own quarks.

The direction unreal is going with everything built in from animation tools to texturing is the way to go. Its so nice not having to stress about decisions on what renderer to use, what package to use, and even what programming paradigm to use.

_mitterpach 1 year ago |

Famously the Mega Crit studios, makers of Slay the Spire, have moved on from Unity. Following statement was released on Twitter with a hand wave emoji aimed at Unity:

  "The Mega Crit team has been hard at work these past 2+ years on a new game. But unlike with Slay the Spire, the engine we have been developing it in is Unity.

  The retroactive pricing structure of Runtime Fees is not only harmful in a myriad of ways to developers—especially indies--it is also a violation of trust. We believe Unity is fully aware of this, seeing as they have gone so far as to remove their TOS from GitHub.

  Despite the immense amount of time and effort our team has already poured into development on our new title, we will be migrating to a new engine unless the changes are completely reverted and TOS protections are put in place.

  We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up."

Their newest game Slay the Spire 2 was developed in Godot.

huevosabio 1 year ago |

I started working on games around the time of the debacle.

I tried Unity before the footgun, and wasn't happy with how slow and bloated it felt. I did some web-based games first and then I landed in Godot and it felt much snappier and stuck to it.

Its clearly missing the massive community and the asset store that comes with it. It's also buggy in so many ways. But it is getting better and there is a feeling that the ecosystem is growing and improving quickly.

We're a tiny team though and unsure how this would look like for a big studio.

vunderba 1 year ago |

I wouldn't say I "moved away" necessarily - but as I've gotten more into developing 2D games Unity has just started feeling like overkill, so I've gone back to using the PhaserJS framework.

Massively reduced deployment bundles are always a nice side bonus as well.

cableshaft 1 year ago |

I was still working on a game outside of Unity when that happened but was having some issues and was highly considering shifting to Unity for my next one.

I played around with Godot for a bit, but wasn't really getting into it too much.

I started learning Love2D and decided to use that instead.

Except for certain native mobile features needing to have Lua hooks developed for it manually, and some issues getting the resolution changes working properly on iOS (figured that out eventually though, using the "push" library helped), it's been a pretty smooth experience so far.

hnthrowaway0328 1 year ago |

I would love to know, how many paying customers, especially big spenders, are leaving.

heigh 1 year ago |

I moved to GoDot, which has been surprisingly decent. The risk of the policy and price changes, along with a genuine curiosity of the progress of GoDot was the reason for the move.

the__alchemist 1 year ago | |

What drove that choice over Unreal?

deciduously 1 year ago | |

I've never seen it stylized like this, with a capital D, is that the preferred branding?

danielbarla 1 year ago | | |

I'm not the parent poster, but this was a fairly common misspelling of the name a few years back. I guess it makes more sense to a lot of people than the fairly obscure name and reference that Godot actually is [1].

> The name "Godot" was chosen due to its relation to Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but never will.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine)#History

bloomingkales 1 year ago |

Stock hasn’t recovered, if anyone wants to take that angle. What developers feel one day may not be the true value of this business.

"The Mega Crit team has been hard at work these past 2+ years on a new game. But unlike with Slay the Spire, the engine we have been developing it in is Unity. The retroactive pricing structure of Runtime Fees is not only harmful in a myriad of ways to developers—especially indies--it is also a violation of trust. We believe Unity is fully aware of this, seeing as they have gone so far as to remove their TOS from GitHub. Despite the immense amount of time and effort our team has already poured into development on our new title, we will be migrating to a new engine unless the changes are completely reverted and TOS protections are put in place. We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up."