[georgeecollins]

Now that Godot seems to be getting much hotter, I feel like I am having to update my game engine more and more frequently. It's great to see then update the navigation system, but will it break my game? I worry it could be heading to the same problem I see with Unity where things are constantly getting updated and re engineered. I have seen professional teams working in Unity be many version behind because they dread the work of updating.

Plus, I don't know how many more integrations I want to do on 3.x before 4.0. I am hoping that the move to Vulkan will give me better 3d performance on mobile

[wongarsu]

With Unity the general wisdom seems to be to lock in one version for each project, and only update when you start a new project.

Which I guess isn't the worst? Sure, better forwards and backwards compatibility would be better, but this way you get more features quicker and more coherently, at the downside of not getting any improvements during development

[dleslie]

Unless Godot has solved the problem of forward compatibility of binary asset bundles with compiled assets, then what's true of Unity is true of Godot: the cost of your engine upgrade is proportional to your reliance on existing assets.

It may just be a recompile. It's may be that the upgrade requires more, a whole art pass before recompile. Maybe there's mods you don't have the source for, that you can't upgrade at all.

[Uehreka]

Hopefully the incentive schemes help with this: part of the reason for Unity’s feature churn is that they’re more incentivized to create new features (to acquire new customers) than maintain old ones. You’d think this approach would backfire, but with the amount of lock-in engines have they can afford to piss off current customers at least up to a point.

Godot, not being beholden to shareholders and quarterly growth targets, can hopefully make more clear-headed decisions around product roadmap.

[dleslie]

Unity needs existing customers to continue their pro subscriptions; and game developers are notorious for throwing everything out and staying afresh on every project. The new features are as much for existing customers as they are for attracting new ones.

That said, Unity ads is where the real money is at.