Game Development

Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing

I get that, and it sucks. But too many offerings on the market are nowadays accepted as normal operating procedure, when they seem like such obvious traps to me. There is no financially-driven company out there that you can rely on with your project. Go with an open-source project or write what you need yourself. I fully understand the challenge of writing a product from scratch and bringing it to market. Your dependencies can break your neck one way or the other.

You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.

I know and feel that. I am no longer in entertainment, but I also see these exact same patterns in my current line of work (IT infrastructure). People use "free" tools that they take for granted, and then they're surprised by rug-pulls. This has been happening for so long in so many areas that it's almost tiring.

I think you're comparing apples to orchards here.

I'll grant you, Unity has been a commercial standard that many large and good games have been made in, Godot hasn't. Godot has been used largely by solo creators or small teams which has limited the scope and detail of the artwork in Godot games thus far.

This begs the question: What's the best looking solo-developed Unity game?

Does that game include a lot of purchased/sourced assets? Should that count as "solo" developed then? Given the contents of Steam's catalog, by sheer volume of titles it seems that Unity is THE engine for creating low effort shit-tier asset flip "games" that are little more than a tutorial project file with a retail price. "Games made in Unity" is a LOT of rough to look for diamonds in.

Once you've found the best looking solo-developed Unity game, ask yourself this: Could this game be remade in Godot? Is Godot technically capable of running a game like this?

I'm also unconvinced that Godot is inherently a poor choice for larger development teams. It has built-in support for versioning systems such as Git, and its modular node-in-scene system mean that different team members could work on different components independently, then bring their work together as a whole. There's also that whole aspect where the Godot editor is itself a Godot "game" that runs in the Godot engine, which means it's possible for developers to create their own extensions to the editor using the same skills needed to make games.

Beyond that, much of the work on graphics--3D art, level design, character/creature design, rigging, animation--a lot of that is going to be done in an art package like Blender rather than Godot. And yes I would suggest Blender for the same reason I'd suggest Godot, because Adobe and Autodesk are also pulling the same kinds of enshitification that Unity is.

The real reason that Unity is the industry standard? Because it's what they teach in school. "Learn Unity because that's what they use in the industry."

I said this in other comments earlier, you don't need to rewrite Unity to build your game. Build what you need, or pick up an open source product and add what you need. I don't understand why people bring up financial feasibility if you're being charged now for a wrong choice in the past. This was to be expected. It's always the same pattern. If you can't figure out how create your game without some false promise product, then don't build your game. It's really as easy as that.