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Unity is eliminating 265 jobs and terminating Weta FX partnership
(www.gamedeveloper.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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…which is why Godot now is quickly slipping into the niche that Unity largely used to be for.
And since Godot is FOSS, there is no going back for Unity once Indie game devs have shifted, since - like with Blender being free to use - it destroys the competition by becoming the defacto king when it comes to things like video tutorials on places like YouTube.
Popular tutorial channels on YouTube know their viewer audience is less likely to be large enough to be profitable via ad revenue, premium subscriptions, etc. if they are limited niche of people only willing to pay thousands for a license to an application they don’t yet have any professional reason to pay for.
Being open source in any way also usually then leads to a snowball effect of an application gaining popularity and then people extending its functionality.
This is also what I think will soon happen to Plex with Jellyfin since the Plex bigwigs have decided they want to be Netflix more than people’s personal media server frontend.
All it will take is one big mistake and the ground will fall beneath their feet just like with Unity.
All fascinating and frustrating to watch as I used to work with Unity a ton since its early days.
Never really thought about the popularity of FOSS starting with youtube-tutorials. But completely reasonable that when everybody starts with Godot (or other FOSS like Blender), even bigger Studios might just use that one since there are just more guys already proficient with it.
Again, it's a snowball effect.
Students and amateurs want to learn how to do something. Their choices are either - (sometimes) get an EDU address, fill out a form, apply for a discount or free version, see the watermark or lose a ton of functionality, and only see tutorials via classes or other a-la-carte method (how many folks are doing Houdini lessons online out there - probably not many if I had to guess considering Houdini's price), or start paying $20/month for a program that they someday hope will allow them to earn money - knowing that if they stop paying, they lose access to files... OR...
They can download a program for free, that anyone can add stuff to, with thousands of really well done tutorials online on free places like YouTube, that studios will love because there's no licensing fee or if there is - it's only when they are really profitable or whatever.
The more that people use it, the more there are people doing tutorials, expanding functionality, etc.
Blender used to be garbage in like 2010, but now - you'd be an idiot not to grab a copy and teach yourself if you used to regular in apps like 3DS Max, Maya, or other premium closed application now requiring a bunch of DRM installers, license tiers, and subscriptions...
Same goes for Adobe's stuff. I imagine there are more and more people sick of Creative Cloud's garbage and are ready to find and learn and contribute to FOSS services... All that needs to happen is critical stupid event by bigwig, and suddenly a mass exodus begins.
This is also why languages like R and Python are supplanting SPSS and Matlab. Open source is just better in some ways, particularly once it gets over the initial usability barrier, which Jellyfin seems to now be achieving.