> Please would you mind elaborating on this? I am just curious.
Godot is pretty easy to learn (their GDScript language is also well integrated), has decent performance, is pretty great for 2D, passable for 3D, has a low runtime footprint (the whole install is also <100 MB, unlike Unity which goes into multiple GB) and it being open source is an important factor for many people out there.
Plus, Unity had that whole fiasco of the editor slowing down immensely for larger projects in the last 3 or so versions, the whole deprecated networking thing, the unfinished DOTS development, the legacy/URP/HDRP split with assets that are breaking and lots of other things that make using it more difficult in this transition period - like the whole package management functionality having things randomly break sometimes due to missing packages, but no information to automatically install and enable them. Oh, and the input system change and the UI framework change are both for the better in the long time but are annoying in the short term.
Compared to that, it's understandable why people might go for Godot instead, which has neither the larger system requirements, not the closed source nature of the project and it hasn't been taken into random directions just to sell new features yet. Even the 4.0 branch is being worked on a lot until a time when it will finally be good enough. In the mean time, the 3.X branch also receives a lot of love: performance improvements, bug fixes and even lots of backported features. 4.0 not really supporting OpenGL (at least initially) will be cumbersome, but in the mean time you can just use 3.X instead which scales back all the way to super old mobile devices with OpenGL ES 2. The only thing that might make you want to hold off of Godot is its relative newness: things like terrain functionality is only available as an external plugin, for example, but on the whole it's in a pretty great and promising position, especially due to the Mono support!
That said, Unity still has the best platform support out there, is an excellent choice for most kinds of game development and even some software development (though Godot already feels better in that particular regard), has a large marketshare and lots of jobs for it, as well as has an amazing asset store that is helpful for rapid prototyping, getting pre-made functionality when you need it (billboards, advanced LOD solutions, advanced pathfinding, shaders etc.) though also gets used for asset flips a lot as well.
In short:
- the Unity experience is a bit worse now than it was a few years ago
- if they manage to sort everything out, Unity will be great in the long term
- this means precisely nothing for Unity's market share, because it will still be widely used
- Godot is a newcomer, but is essentially doing what jMonkeyEngine, Xenko/Stride, NeoAxis and other engines failed to do
- there is a lot of community work put into it and somehow it still is pretty stable and has a gradually growing list of features
- the deprecation policy isn't entirely clear yet for old versions, but there definitely are also a lot of backports
- furthermore, Godot is just easy to use and there are already *some* plugins that one can use for their projects (e.g. terrain)
- the whole open source nature of it really helps, though
Godot is pretty easy to learn (their GDScript language is also well integrated), has decent performance, is pretty great for 2D, passable for 3D, has a low runtime footprint (the whole install is also <100 MB, unlike Unity which goes into multiple GB) and it being open source is an important factor for many people out there.
Plus, Unity had that whole fiasco of the editor slowing down immensely for larger projects in the last 3 or so versions, the whole deprecated networking thing, the unfinished DOTS development, the legacy/URP/HDRP split with assets that are breaking and lots of other things that make using it more difficult in this transition period - like the whole package management functionality having things randomly break sometimes due to missing packages, but no information to automatically install and enable them. Oh, and the input system change and the UI framework change are both for the better in the long time but are annoying in the short term.
Compared to that, it's understandable why people might go for Godot instead, which has neither the larger system requirements, not the closed source nature of the project and it hasn't been taken into random directions just to sell new features yet. Even the 4.0 branch is being worked on a lot until a time when it will finally be good enough. In the mean time, the 3.X branch also receives a lot of love: performance improvements, bug fixes and even lots of backported features. 4.0 not really supporting OpenGL (at least initially) will be cumbersome, but in the mean time you can just use 3.X instead which scales back all the way to super old mobile devices with OpenGL ES 2. The only thing that might make you want to hold off of Godot is its relative newness: things like terrain functionality is only available as an external plugin, for example, but on the whole it's in a pretty great and promising position, especially due to the Mono support!
That said, Unity still has the best platform support out there, is an excellent choice for most kinds of game development and even some software development (though Godot already feels better in that particular regard), has a large marketshare and lots of jobs for it, as well as has an amazing asset store that is helpful for rapid prototyping, getting pre-made functionality when you need it (billboards, advanced LOD solutions, advanced pathfinding, shaders etc.) though also gets used for asset flips a lot as well.
In short: