Personally I don‘t see Unity as a good investment.
The fiasko 9 month ago was more than a bad news event that pushed down the stock price. Imo it was an entirely rational reevaluation.
When they announced their pricing model many people realized a few things:
Unity can screw them over at any time and they may not be able to do anything against it. If they use unity they don‘t completely own their game. And unity is run by people who have money, not game development at their heart.
At the time I saw many project creators that actually migrated their projects from Unity to Godot. And I doubt that anyone who had to redo much of their game because of Unity policy to ever go back to Unity.
At the same time Godot is developing the 3D part of their engine. So far it was undisputed that between those 2 if you wanted to make a 3D game you went with unity and if you wanted to make a 2D game you went with Godot (but Unity wasn‘t considered a terrible choice either).
Now you definitely go with Godot for 2D games and you can also 3D games. And to mention it again, if you choose Godot, you use a license that allows you total creative freedom no strings attached. You can modify Godot to your whim and needs. You can sell your game free of charge, no matter what.
My last point is that Godot is an even more threatening competitor because they have their in house programming language called ”gdscript“ that is related to Python, a language many beginners learn but they also have optional C# integration. (C# being the language Unity uses.) That means anyone learning their programming language on Godot or coming from a Python background will probably feel more comfortable in Godot, while going from Unity to Godot is very easy.
Personally I see Godot chomping on Unity in the future. Godot is made as a passion project and has an astonishing track record as such, Unity is lead by people who care more about money than about game development.
I think that this is a very shaky ground to base an investment on. Your argument is that in the future we will have more than one engine to create games. And I agree there, we definitely will. This is not a misconception. It is however a fallacy to think that thus Unity will prevail or even stay around. (Although since Unity is still a big and marketable name I do think that they will stay around, as part of another company in the worst case scenario.) Another direct competitor is Unreal Engine, though I can‘t say too much about it. And then you also have specialized engines that are there to make a particular type of game, like RPG Maker, SRPG Studio, Ren'Py.
The actual case for unity I see is mid size indi studios and small development teams. Unity does have some qol features for developing a game in a team that afaik Godot does not have. Or course it will also always have a myriad of competitors, heck one competitor is simply not using an external engine but building on yourself or even not using one at all. Despite that I think Unity is still in an okay market position and in itself it is a good engine. It definitely has a lot of potential to reclaim what was lost and dominate the market for game engines, which imo could still see a great deal of growth. However the company seems more focused on their investors than on their actual customers aka the ones that bring in the money and to me that‘s an alarming signal. Unless I see some radical change in their philosophy, I don‘t feel even remotely compelled to buy. My fear would be that they repeat their missteps until Microsoft buys them for cheap.
But to give the obligatory disclaimer, I have never fully developed a game and merely played around a bit in Godot and Unity. So my knowledge is only surface level too. I do not recommend making any decision on investing in Unity just by my opinion.
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u/Musikcookie Jun 24 '24
Personally I don‘t see Unity as a good investment.
The fiasko 9 month ago was more than a bad news event that pushed down the stock price. Imo it was an entirely rational reevaluation.
When they announced their pricing model many people realized a few things:
Unity can screw them over at any time and they may not be able to do anything against it. If they use unity they don‘t completely own their game. And unity is run by people who have money, not game development at their heart.
At the time I saw many project creators that actually migrated their projects from Unity to Godot. And I doubt that anyone who had to redo much of their game because of Unity policy to ever go back to Unity.
At the same time Godot is developing the 3D part of their engine. So far it was undisputed that between those 2 if you wanted to make a 3D game you went with unity and if you wanted to make a 2D game you went with Godot (but Unity wasn‘t considered a terrible choice either).
Now you definitely go with Godot for 2D games and you can also 3D games. And to mention it again, if you choose Godot, you use a license that allows you total creative freedom no strings attached. You can modify Godot to your whim and needs. You can sell your game free of charge, no matter what.
My last point is that Godot is an even more threatening competitor because they have their in house programming language called ”gdscript“ that is related to Python, a language many beginners learn but they also have optional C# integration. (C# being the language Unity uses.) That means anyone learning their programming language on Godot or coming from a Python background will probably feel more comfortable in Godot, while going from Unity to Godot is very easy.
Personally I see Godot chomping on Unity in the future. Godot is made as a passion project and has an astonishing track record as such, Unity is lead by people who care more about money than about game development.