Unreal is safe now, but there are no guarantees under capitalism. A FOSS license does guarantee that enshittification won’t be a factor because it literally can’t become the exclusive property of some company with a greedy executive board. Unreal doesn’t have that protection, Godot does.
Could Godot be compromised some how? Sure. Can it be enshittified? Not really.
The thing is, this could change at any time. The problem with enshittification is that it spreads. A company that’s doing great work today could be bought out by corporate profiteers and leeched of its actual value at any point in the future. We’ve had plenty of companies that started out with a vision and a set of strong principles who’ve been reduced to predatory business practices that are bad for everyone. You can’t assume that because a company seems to have integrity now, that integrity will remain.
Remember Elon Musk 15 years ago? Wasn’t quite the same, was it?
To me, sitting in a position of getting started in game development, that makes me want to sink my time and effort into an engine that I know can’t be enshittified because it can’t be bought out. I want to know that in a few years I’m not going to completely scrub every asset and mechanic that I make for the engine because somebody’s pulled some Darth Vader shit.
Bottom of the lake is pretty cheap iirc.
I don’t really even trust Unreal until Unity takes a legal hit for this. What’s to stop Epic doing the same thing?
Considering how locked into an engine a project can get, why risk a corporate engine unless you absolutely have to?
The bucket is also increasingly full of bots and astroturfers. I think they’re doing a half decent job of hiding the impact when it comes to numbers, but the drop in quality sheds a little more light.
The real question is whether or not people will continue to use Unity. Apologies mean less than nothing in a case like this regardless of whether or not they’re sincere. This is a company that’s shown their cards. Why give them business when you can go elsewhere?
Personally, this has made me start looking more into Godot. I’ve got a project I’m going to be working on that I was going to do in Unreal, but this Unity stuff has made me skeptical of tying my creative output to any one company that can’t be easily replaced. Getting that wrapped up with a proprietary platform that comes with licensing that might change just seems like a bad idea now. Maybe Unreal is okay today, but what about down the road? Why start building into a system that there’s no guarantee won’t enshittify a few years down the road?
I’d like to get my major mechanical stuff squared away and develop a visual style and then tell more stories without reinventing the wheel every time. Once I’ve got my assets built on top of an engine, I’d rather add to it over time than arbitrarily scrap it every few years. Updating and refactoring is all well and good, but I’m not in it to code the same system over and over.
That makes Godot look pretty appealing, and any closed source corporate offering look pretty shady.
Real world protest on a meaningful scale is extremely dependent on population density both of individual cities and of the country in general.
In the United States we’re extremely spread out, even if we have some urban areas with incredibly high population density. The result is a situation where wide-scale protest logistics really aren’t in our favor. Even if you mobilized all of New England’s protest-inclined leftists to organize around one city, it’s hardly the numbers needed to shut anything down. We can’t just all go outside and produce nation-wide mobs in our major cities.
Look at Occupy Wallstreet. They had pretty substantial support and there were busloads of people from all over the country going to New York. But in the end it wasn’t enough to create substantial change.
Strikes have been effective because they mobilize the actual workforce that’s looking for a result, and are inherently disruptive to the thing they’re trying to change. Their demands end up being addressed because they crank up the immediate urgency of addressing them.
We need that. Targeted action that is actually effective on a wide scale. I don’t really know precisely what that looks like, but I think a good first step is the kind of action we see around remote work. People literally will quit over it and go elsewhere. Companies have done so much to leech profits out of their employment models that they’ve reduced any incentive toward long term loyalty.
They really don’t have much bargaining power right now, so people can dictate the terms a bit more. Individual decisions regarding how and when companies get to buy your labor or your creative output, as well as which companies you support financially, may well be closer to an actual path through the muck.
Outside agitation can also be incredibly useful. An outside actor in contact with people inside a corporate entity have an opportunity to speak out without the chance, legal or otherwise, of employer retaliation. Again, targeted and largely individual action.
Whatever the solution is, I suspect it’ll look a lot more like that if it’s going to challenge the status quo in the United States.
Literally just button remapping support for my MX Ergo.
And for the fool who always comes into these threads to tell me again that I must not have tried in several years, I tried last month. Talked to the Solaar dev, tried to reach out to Logitech, literally nothing to be done.