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

10 points by 1000nettles 13 hours ago

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.

_mitterpach 2 hours 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.
heigh 5 hours 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.

  • deciduously 3 hours ago

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

    • danielbarla 3 hours 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

      • solardev 30 minutes ago

        This whole time I thought it was a gaming engine for the Go language...

jarsin 13 hours 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.