[doctorpangloss]

> Game libraries such as Monogame, Heaps, Raylib, Love2D, etc just wouldn't be that popular if Unity and Unreal are the be all and end all.

Just because it happens, doesn't mean it makes sense.

Anyway, people write their own game engines, and programming languages for game engines, because it is intellectually stimulating to do so, and something you spend 100h/wk to yield 1h of gameplay is still giving you more gameplay than something boring you spend 0h/wk on.

Then, the people who use those engines you are naming, they end up porting to Unity anyway. If you want to deploy on iOS and Switch with one codebase, it is the only game in town. And that's sometimes 60% of revenue.

> Don't underestimate what an individual or small teams can produce if they are operating on a solid platform that facilitates a rich ecosystem of tools.

Unity fits this bill exactly. I too want more competition. But in the real world I live in, if someone were to ask me, "what solid platform should I choose to make my multimedia application, as a small team, that also has a rich ecosystem of tools, and will enable me to make pretty much anything I can think of?" I would say, use Unity. Because I want them to succeed.

[JoeyJoJoJr]

Two high profile examples, Celeste and Deadcells use Monogame and Heaps (Haxe). They weren’t ported to Unity. Celeste and Towerfall Ascension are two examples of very high quality games that bucked the trend and just used a low level renderer (Monogame). IMO they are better because of that.

But besides that point, the very reason why many games are ported from their niche library to Unity or Unreal is mostly just for cross platform support. Not because the game creator has a preference for Unity or Unreal. They are forced into it through lack of choice if they want cross platform. If Love2D, Phaser, Flixel, and any other niche 2D game library had an easy way to target consoles they would get a whole lot more use, but they don’t because the lower levels are extremely complex and engine/framework/library developers can’t support it. WebGPU appears to offer a path forward in that regard.

[doctorpangloss]

> the very reason why many games are ported from their niche library to Unity or Unreal is mostly just for cross platform support.

Indeed.

> They are forced into it through lack of choice if they want cross platform... because the lower levels are extremely complex

That is what I am saying. There are countless indie game engines of great repute, but because they are "1 guy," they cannot reach feature parity with Unity. They never will.

The Blizzard that developed the Overwatch engine had immense experience and a notoriously frugal (in terms of employee pay) culture. It still cost them about $100m and many years to develop a great engine for 3 platforms (Windows/Xbox, Switch, PS5). What hope does Godot have with $8m, or MonoGame with kopeks?

Nobody can vibes their way past the math problem of multi-platform game engines.

This is only controversial because Unity received so much ill will; and, that the indie games business and social media are very sensitive to vibes.

> WebGPU appears to offer a path forward in that regard [like supporting the Nintendo Switch].

While I would love for this to be true, it is significantly more aspirational than saying that because of Game Porting Toolkit, DirectX offers "a path forward" on macOS.