The Godot developers created a new business entity that will facilitate porting games to closed platforms.

They support dual licensing for this very reason.

I think epic made their engine more appealing by waiving some Epic Games Store charges for Unreal games. And had a no fee until 1m earnings thing. Not this kind of shit.

Let’s not forget that Unity recently merged with a malware company, so borderline-illegal predation is their entire business strategy.

No, they merged with an advertising company - you know, the same companies with which they're close enough to have plugins for. It's about business; who you talk to, who you have deals with.

I would never call such horrifically predatory tactics “good business sense.” It’s abuse of market position and should draw the ire of antitrust regulators, as well as make their product a major business risk for any new projects.

It is good business sense. The engine has relatively little value, it's about what software stacks it integrates with, plus the ease of use for making exports to the two platforms that matter (Android and iOS). There's a reason Unreal doesn't even exist in this space, even though it's technically capable of running on these devices.

Again, this is not the industry you're thinking of - it's the mobile industry, which is less about game development and more about having millions in your war-chest (usually from a few VCs) that you can spend on your marketing budget. If you can't market, you're dead in the water.

The entire industry is built around ads in games and traditional social media.

Things like this will stop happening if:

A) People become less susceptible to predatory marketing.

B) Another game engine developer decides to undercut Unity while at the same time offering similar platform targets and SDK integrations.

(There's also a thing to be said about hiring, where all new mobile-game devs learn Unity - as it's become the de-facto standard for getting a job in this industry. Any new player would need some big names to adopt them first to make a push for people to learn the tools, not hobbyists.)

Barring that nothing will change.

Also, there really aren't "new" projects in this field - you rarely see scrappy upstarts succeeding in the mobile space, just jaded veterans undercutting their old studios by offering their VCs (or new, hungrier VCs) a bigger cut of the pie. Also, studios with private chefs, massive salaries, and cult-y work spaces that look like adult playgrounds.

Yeah, but when they reach that limit, it says it's gonna cost $0.20 per install. So can I reinstal the game 1 000 000 times to accumulate $200 000 of costs?

Even so, after they hit the limit, if the game costs $20 I can reinstall the game just 100 times so the developer doesn't get any profit from that sale.

I guess that when they hit it. Reinstalling the game will generate costs so the revenue is now lower than $200 000, so it doesn't work. But that just means that we can effectively limit the developer to $200 000 revenue.

Godot's 3D is perfectly usable in my experience, it's been a while since I've used Unity though so I can't tell you how they compare.

That was correct about maybe 5 + years ago. However, particularly the latest 4.x builds, the 3d is top shelf. It won't beat unreal, but it's 3d capabilities are better than most people's ability to use them.

It has 3d

Have you seen Godot's releases after 4.0? Particularly the SDFGI feature?

Unless there's a coordinated effort by a fanbase to install the game over and over again because the game asked you for your preferred pronouns or some nonsense. Or maybe a pirated copy of the game still phones home to Unity and charges the developer. There are a lot of ways this could be problematic.

I guess good luck to the mid-size developers who take service deals, then.