AppLovin’s attempts to acquire Unity last year turned sour when Unity opted for a merger with rivals ironSource instead . Now, in the ongoing shockwave of Unity's unpopular introductio...
AppLovin’s attempts to acquire Unity last year turned sour when Unity opted for a merger with rivals ironSource instead . Now, in the ongoing shockwave of Unity's unpopular introductio...
Wow well I guess I'll eat crow. I never thought that was possible to automate but given the use of LLMs I guess it is... Excited to see how it turns out
From their GitHub, they use this prompt to ChatGPT:
You are professional Unity engineer who is migrating a large project from Unity platform to Godot 4.1. Migrate code to GDScript, which you are an expert in. Follow the following rules:
1. Output code only, put explanations as comments.
2. Do not skip any logic.
3. Preserve all comments without changing.
4. If migration is impossible leave "TODO [Migrate]" comment.
5. Use GDScript best practices.
6. Convert camelCase variable names and method names to snake_case.
7. Unity namespaces should migrate into 'class_name' directive.
8. Unity class should migrate into 'class_name' directive.
Personally I find this kind of thing adorable and I hope it works out for them
There are certain indicators for enshittification, and Epic (like Valve) doesn't meet any of them.
It is a privately held company with no plans for IPO and no dealings with venture capitalists. Conversely, Unity made their IPO in 2020 under the auspices of a notorious EA villain.
It is still lead by one of it's founders.
Said founder is very famously big on equity and pro-developer & pro-consumer policies.
Now, you may not like Epic for some reason, but they are currently a very stable, reliable, and trustworthy company that is focused on sustaining their business through dedication to quality and reputation. Personally, I respect & trust them every bit as much as I respect Valve.
The conspiracy theorist in me always thought stuff like this was the result of corporate espionage; a loyal employee of a rival firm joins their competitor's ranks and works their way up and finally gets the commanding role, only to announce something this dumb and then take it back (losing their reputation without anything in return) and then the guy leaves the company and finds a comfortable position on the board of their original rival company.
But... No? These people really are that stupid and actually did that to themselves.
And these are the people being paid 300x the salary of ordinary, hard working people!
Epic allows devs to stay under the license terms for specific versions of the engine. If they started charging for installs, devs can just use the older engine versions and avoid the charges.
One of the big reasons to have picked Unity over Unreal in the first place was because Unity was royalty free. Unreal Engine, despite being absolutely amazing, is not.
To preserve your existing business model, Godot just makes the most sense for many former Unity developers, and I say that as an unapologetic UE zealot.
However it's currently difficult for games made for Godot to port to consoles (XBox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch,... not those non-Switch "gaming handhelds" since they are all just Windows/Linux handheld PCs) while keeping Godot open source since the SDKs, APIs, porting kits of these consoles are proprietary and you have to sign in NDAs. If most of your games' revenues are from consoles, you don't have much choice currently.
Unreal Engine royalties only start after you make $1 million from a project. Even then, it's 5%, and waived for sales done on the Epic Store (whose 13% cut is almost a third of what Steam takes). If you are a small indie dev, you won't be paying Epic a dime unless you start rolling in some serious dough, and even when you do, 5% of your revenue for using one of the most powerful 3D game engines is pretty fair
That's because both Unity and Godot use C# while Unreal uses C++ for development. It is much easier to move from Unity to Godot since they use the same language for development. Moving to Unreal basically means starting over.