Trying to figure out what Epic's incentives are here (contributing to a competitor that doesn't make them money in any roundabout way I can see)
Edit: Here's a weird theory, maybe Epic doesn't see Godot as a competitor to Unreal, but does see it as a competitor to Unity, and hopes it'll spell doom for Unity (which is Unreal's only real competitor)
Godot is no threat at all to Unreal, at the high end of AAA development you really need the dialed-in horsepower of either an in-house engine, or something like Unreal, which has been increasingly consolidating market share over the last decade.
Godot competes squarely with mid-market stuff: Indie, so-called "Triple-I" (high budget """indie""") and AA development, where Unity is the dominant engine. Unity has very little penetration share among the big AAA games.
Godot and other open source engines squeeze Unity from the bottom, and Unreal squeezes it from the top.
Particularly when it comes to 2D games development! Fracturing that space is far more beneficial for Unreal than it is for Unity. Unreal, at least from my understanding, is awful for 2D. I'm playing around with 2D game development in Unity now and it's insanely easy to get started. I think the same goes for Godot where 2D dev work is a first-class citizen.
I've worked on a few "high end" games, and used to work for Epic.
Epic dogfoods the engine with _real_ games. Fortnite, Paragon, Battle Breakers, Robo Recall are all titles written in UE4, by Epic, which have had active contributions to the engine in their development. Whether you like the game or not doesn't have much of a bearing on the impact the game has on the engine.
They did the same with older games too, and the remnants of games like UT and GoW are very visible in the source of the engine itself.
Unity, generally makes money by convincing more people that they could make video games, and keeping up that belief so they keep paying for versions or subscription fees.
Epic only makes money after games have actually shipped.
That's not actually true, the royalty only license for Unreal only started with UE4, and there is still "contact us" licensing available too.
On the unity side, an increasing amount of their revenue comes from "grow solutions" [0] which is basically their ad networks. Game engine development is a funny business
It's not exactly true, but the incentives still align in practice.
"Contact Us" Licensing has always existed as you state, but has often included the possibility of royalties, and even when it doesn't it's always been at the price ranges where shipping a game was more likely than not.
And in-fact, a problem with early Unreal licensing has been Epic's approach to support of "If it's not a problem in an Epic game, it's not our problem" Which has improved dramatically since changing their licensing model.
And regarding Unity, yes, their ad networks are becoming more important, but that still doesn't do as good a job at aligning incentives, but more importantly, Unity has 15+ years of development in a model with unaligned incentives, which when you're talking about technical decisions, those are really important.
And to be clear, I'm not arguing against the point that Epic being a game developer first is an important factor, I think it very much is, however I'm suggesting there are also other contributing factors.
I'm a daily user of UE but not a game dev, so my perspective might be skewed, but nearly everything in UE targets high end dev (even the clunky parts, haha). The materials and rendering stuff are stellar, but also things like their asset pipeline and content workflows all have a "big project" vibe.
Sometimes the complexity of UE can be overwhelming. For example, if you're just trying to set up an AI-controlled actor to animate differently in some different states, you'll initially be frustrated by the gazillion bits of setup work you have to do. But in every case I've seen, that complexity exists to support the flexibility and richness needed by top of the line games.
Basically, for better and for worse, UE was written by and is used by people who have built, shipped, and supported AAA games.
Personally I think it is because it has terrible performance. Scenes that Unreal seems to be able to render at full frame rates run at a fraction of that in Unity. Even its vaunted 2D system is slow as balls... load times for Graveyard Keeper, as an example, are agonizingly long. And for what? A hundred megabytes at most of 2D pixel-art assets? What is the engine doing with all that time? Certainly not just loading and decompressing shit into RAM.
Reminds me of the unnecessarily long GTA Online loading times that were a result of parsing a giant JSON file. Is it really worth blaming the engine when maybe its the game doing something improper?
Epic has shipped first-party AAA games with Unreal. Unity has not done so. They had a planned release (of a high quality first party title) but have more recently cancelled it.
Unity also had a collaborative open source game project and canned that. And an example multiplayer FPS, but canned it because the UI, scene loading, and networking layers were all implemented using custom code and not the Unity built in equivalents. They had a 4 player multiplayer co-op game demo that they abandoned. Many of their demo projects where they promised to release source code, and they didn't deliver on that (a few of them they did deliver on but specifically under a license that allows no asset or code re-use).
Studios have made some great games with Unity. But the company Unity themselves have no idea how to finish a game, or even make one using stock unity. Even if they can't use current stock unity, they never bring their custom code into the mainline engine releases...
And I'm making these complaints as someone who exclusively uses Unity for their own hobby games. I really ought to give Godot a try, I just have so much personal experience using Unity (and working around their engine) that the idea of learning a new engine is daunting.
How long until every tech company pours massive and substantial investment into Godot to turn it into the Blender of AAA games and film? It's almost to the point now.
Amazon will ditch Lumberyard for Godot. They have deep interests in games as a part of their vision. Twitch, Luna, in house game studios, prime gaming, etc.
Apple will absolutely do it. They're building their own metaverse and VR. Although I'd also gamble on them acquiring Epic Games. Apple wants to own the future of content creation.
Google's significant investment in WebGPU is going to make Godot a more attractive platform. Google is indirectly contributing to this.
As Godot gains more and more mindshare and economic activity happening atop it, it will achieve the activation energy required to take on AAA rendering and workflows.
Companies will see Epic as a tax. And the entire world will be submitting patches to Godot. Godot is already spawning an ecosystem of support companies and console SDKs.
>Although I'd also gamble on them acquiring Epic Games. Apple wants to own the future of content creation.
This will never ever happen. Ever.
I think it equally unlikely that Apple would invest in/adopt something like Godot. Modern Apple has a serious case of Not Invented Here syndrome and despite Godot being permissive, I don't see them adopting that. Instead, I think we'll see more investment at ARKit and Metal, even though the only people that take Metal seriously are people who have a financial incentive to build iOS games (no one has a financial incentive to support Metal-based macOS games and there is arguably no financial incentive to make macOS games at all).
That's worryingly close to the same story high-end Unix providers told about Linux. If there is an open source engine that does 99% of what a proprietary engine does, then it's very likely we won't see that proprietary engine last for much longer.
Important to note: the contributions in question are a $250k megagrant. Throwaway money for Epic, but major for the small Godot team.
$250k for good PR and not being viewed as anti-competitive is an exceptional deal when you consider Google is doing the same to the tune of $400 million for Firefox.
Also in the short term Unreal's dominance matters, but in the long term it really doesn't. Epic has spent the absurd levels of Fortnite money trying to establish itself as additional integral layers for developers/creators so that even if Unreal stops generating any revenue it'll be fine.
I.e. people use Godot to get started and "learn" gamedev. Many will stop there and not progress beyond Godot, but some will want more/latest features or want to use a "proper" engine and so move onto Unreal.
The alternative starter-space is Unity, and that is more of a competitor for Unreal since there is a lot of starter materials and tutorials, and unity can make commercial quality stuff (three Unity games that come to mind are Two Point Hospital, the Outer Wilds, and Rust)
Also: Amplitude (the Endless Series, Humankind), mihoyou (Genshin Impact), Developer Digital (Fall Guys, ironically published by Epic Games), Paradox (Cities: Skyline), Kerbal Space Program.
I heard of two Nintendo published games for their Nintendo Switch platform that utilize the Unity Engine (not marketed well, but can be found in the 'Intellectual Property Notices' section for each game):
* Jump Rope Challenge (summer 2020, released as a digital only game on the Nintendo eShop originally planned to be limited release, but staying up indefinitely for now)
* Fire Emblem Engage (January 2023, developed by Intelligent Systems, so considered more of a 2nd party game)
One more example that is 3rd party published but Nintendo owns copyright on:
* Cruis'n Blast (September 2021, a port of an arcade game developed by Raw Thrills, who both developed and published this port)
One more example but using the Unreal Engine:
* Yoshi's Crafted World (March 2019, developed by Good Feel)
Despite the examples I listed, almost none of these games are ones developed by one of Nintendo's internal studios (Jump Rope Challenge being the exception, but it was never intended to be one of their big games), but instead are developed by another studio not fully controlled by Nintendo.
For their big games developed by them, they still use their own bespoke, proprietary engines, which is likely a sign that Nintendo doesn't trust outside engines like Godot, Unity, and Unreal well enough to commit to using them for such games. Outside developers making games to be published by Nintendo apparently have more freedom to use their preferred engines, including the mentioned outside ones.
But that's not what they are doing. Godot/Unity are not complements to Unreal. Epic are, in fact, commoditizing their competition, which is low-end, indie-friendly games development platforms.
Yeah, I had looked up the term to double-check before posting, but I felt that it didn’t quite fit as a developer picking Unreal was unlikely to also use Unity for a game.
Godot is (becoming) a very good competitor to Unity. Godot pre-4 was not ready for prime time, but Godot 4 is almost there. I'm pleasantly surprised by the leaps-and-bounds they've made over Godot 3/3.5, and Godot 4 has surpassed Unity in a number of areas (though in some cases, they've been assisted by Unity shooting itself in the foot, such as with Unity's non-existent networking functionality and chaotic approach to render pipeline development).
However, Godot 4 still has a ways to go before it's competitive with Unity in the AA space (meaning, for example, games by studios like Paradox, Amplitude, or miHoYo). Mostly, the asset pipeline still needs a great deal of work. Hopefully the Epic investment will let them reach parity (or exceed) Unity on that front.
I haven't tried it in four, but trying to get an animated model in blender into godot in 3 was a total mess. You needed to configure the animations in a very specific non-obvious way and there were a ton of gotchas.
Tim Sweeney has been a big proponent of open platforms for over a decade. See also: the whole Apple vs Epic thing which was definitely not a good business decision at all. I think it’s possible this isn’t really about “incentives” and is just about sticking to certain principles.
I don't think that's him sticking to a "certain principles", he's just doing whatever it takes to make people think Epic is the "good guy", as long as he's doing the opposite of the competitors.
For example, take a look into his take about blockchain games. At first he was against NFT games [1], then after Valve banned NFT games, Gabe Newell talked about it [2], Tim suddenly was OK with it [3]?
He fought with Apple because he thought he could win it, so his Fortnite could avoid 30% transaction fee. They clearly had a lot of discussion, strategies before suing Apple and thought it was a good idea, they could have won big. It's not a bad business decision if he can win, but they didn't so it looked bad.
I could be wrong but it seems likely his first tweet was about Epic integrating NFTs into their own games, and the second was about allowing them on the EGS?
I don’t really see the NFT stuff as relating to open platforms anyway. Certain kinds of software (the most obvious being viruses and scams) need to be banned from platforms anyway.
Please do realize that according to your own web site (https://www.brandons.me/) you're a javascript developer having opinions on why Godot is supposedly catching up with Unreal Engine to the point that it's becoming a threat.
Hey, more people installing the Epic Games Launcher is probably the win. Platform neutrality, or its specter, probably wins for us.
It’d be much more offensive to our sensibilities if it were like the situation on iOS where Amazon is available, but “no way will we let you buy a Kindle book unless you reopen the store in a web browser.”
(Because yeah… apple sells all the books I want to read, in their very cool bookstore that I haven’t seen in more than half a decade.)
At any rate. Anyone serious about godot is probably compiling it or getting the official release artifacts. This seems like something Epic probably couldn’t justify turning down as window dressing for the unreal store. I’m for it anyway.
Edit: more optimistically, if the GUI framework were slightly easier to use, Godot is a very attractive tools development platform. Maybe that factors in.
Perhaps for end-user tooling, like map editors. Obviously Epic is motivated to keep devs inside Unreal for as many internal dev tasks as are feasible.
This is about them distributing the engine itself on the store (and apparently even contributing to it), not just allowing games made with the engine on the store. Presumably you could already do that
Every time I open Unity these days it I hate it a little bit more. Everytimy I open Godot I love it a little bit more. The bloat vs the transparency. The frustration vs speed of development. Godots catch phrase should be: Godot gets out of your way! Unity may have democratised game dev but Godot made it fun again.
Godot and Blender share the same space I feel in regards to getting a tremendous amount done within such a contested space, all without falling prey to the usual open source traps. Exceptional projects
I feel the same way. I haven't actually completed a full game with Godot but it was a joy to use when playing around with it and making some simple proof of concepts.
Ever noticed that Epic does a ``good deed'' right about when they get a bad PR hit?
Call me cynical, but I'm sure that Epic would really like for everybody to talk about something else than the quarter of a billion dollar penalty they just got from the FTC for exploiting children etc.
The very same Epic that would really, really like to be able to bypass any kind of app store safeguards and review processes, no matter how flawed and self-serving those processes might be.
Yep, it does seem like it's time for a few warm fuzzy PR events to get people's attention diverted.
It's a little hilarious you consider Godot launching on the Epic store getting anywhere close to enough press that the FTC fines get. The fines have hit every news org, including airtime on CNN and MSNBC. I don't see them covering this bit of news about Godot launching on EGS.
Actually now that we mention it, they got huge bad press regarding the FTC situation twice. They got a lot of bad press in December too for the first FTC fine.
So I'm not entirely sure your cynicism is logical here, Epic isn't doing anything ATM to counter bad press, certainly not to the point an effective PR team would.
When we're talking about big companies, never turn your cynic mode off. They shouldn't be judged on human terms, but rather on psychopath/sociopath terms.
Every action they take is based purely on utility and they would never add a competitor, no matter how insignificant, to their store unless they judge it to be good for PR.
> Starting today, you can choose to use EGS to download the engine and keep it up to date with every release
Curious the level at which they auto-patch and update the engine. Most games that I'm aware of are very sensitive to their engine version, and don't update major or minor versions completely freely.
I wonder if they patch a base installation of some kind (think: a core project selector / launcher) and then individual projects contain a copy of the engine at time of creation?
While it will inevitable be larger in the future, Godot's current executable size is so small something like this could actually work.
At the very least I would want something like Unity Hub which can manage both projects and engine/editor version installations. Being locked into whatever version of Godot Epic Store considers to be "current" sounds like a nightmare.
yea a big selling point to me using godot is downloading the binary of the exact version im building with and stashing it away. i dont want even minor vers to be automatically applied and dont really see the gain here other than exposure
Is this just Epic Games looking at Godot like "hmmm yeah, definitely not even close to being a threat to UE" hah. I suppose they're right, with how buggy 4.0 still is.
No this is Godot publishing on the store because they recently released self publishing tools on the store. EGS already has non-game apps like Spotify and Opera available so they're really open to whatever that isn't adult rated or abusive.
Oh how I wish “Godot as a Library” was a thing in the same way that Unity may be embedded into another project. Dealing with Unity as our AR runtime has not been great.
I truly cannot describe the amount of confusion that courses through me each time I open the Epic Launcher. I know that Epic decided to create it using the Unreal Engine UMG technology, but it truly shines as one of the most sluggish applications on my entire PC.
At this point, I would _gladly_ accept an Electron application in it's place. Just wild to me that UX teams at Epic seem happy to deliver this to users.
Also an excellent alternative (also for Linux initially, but now on Windows and MacOS too) is Heroic Games Launcher: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
I started using it instead of Lutris for most of my non-Steam installs and it just works for the most part, which is fantastic. Even auto-updates my GOG and EGS games.
Guess what? During the last few years, more and more parts of Steam's UI got rewritten to work in a very similar way to how Electron does (using CEF). Back when these views were still in the minority it was easy to identify them by how sluggish they felt compared to the rest :)
Not OP but on Mac at least I find it wayyy faster to browse the steam marketplace and community sites in Safari or Chrome than in-app. Everything about it is slow from loading pages to scrolling to clicking buttons.
Not OP, personally the Steam UI seems to freeze in the following cases for me:
- when opening or scrolling my library, as the icons load in (~400 games)
- when trying to install a game (delay until the install dialog pops up)
The other slowness feels inconsequential, like when opening a store page or launching a game - on par with what you'd get when an average web app is loading or an Electron app is being launched.
Pretty much every other store out there has been worse in comparison, GOG Galaxy seems to be reasonably close to me though, Origin and Epic are both slower in my experience.
OS? I don't have freezes, with more games (though most are in closed categories). Galaxy is second best for me as well, but it's also the only other app trying.
I don't remember any install freezes, but I wouldn't bet on that one.
It depends on the game, but if they require the Epic launcher it will automatically open the Epic launcher and run the game for you. No need to keep it always running or search multiple store launchers to find which store you purchased X game with. They're all in one place.
It's the pop up ads that irk me the most. Pop-up ads on a Windows PC what in the actual fuck? Great way to make someone truly and deeply hate you brand.
Edit: Here's a weird theory, maybe Epic doesn't see Godot as a competitor to Unreal, but does see it as a competitor to Unity, and hopes it'll spell doom for Unity (which is Unreal's only real competitor)