Recently, Unity announced a new “runtime fee,” which has drawn significant criticism from developers globally. In essence, the game engine plans to impose an install-based fee on developers and publishers who utilize Unity for their games. Following the announcement, we had a brief conversation with Brian Bucklew, one of the minds behind Caves of Qud. Like many Unity developers, Bucklew considers the runtime fees unreasonable and is exploring alternatives unless Unity retracts this new policy. Regardless of Unity’s decision, however, numerous developers believe that the trust between them and the platform has been compromised.
Over the past weekend, Bucklew decided to see just how much work would be involved to port Caves of Qud from Unity to Godot. Now, without getting too technical, the architecture of Caves of Qud makes it an almost ideal candidate for transitioning from Unity to Godot. We don’t want to mislead anyone in believing that every developer using Unity is capable of porting their game to another engine in under 24 hours. But that is exactly what Bucklew did, live tweeting his entire progress through the weekend.
He said he logged about 16 hours total to get Caves of Qud booting under Godot, and that Freehold Games likely won’t fully port the game until its 1.0 release that is due sometime in 2024. The point of this proof of concept, however, is to determine if it’s plausible to move Caves of Qud from Unity to Godot.
“Unity’s pricing scheme spits in the face of a community that has invested a truly unfathomable amount of time and energy creating value for them, because Unity used to be a trusted partner,” Bucklew told FullCleared. “They’re acting like a monopoly, leveraging monopoly pricing power, and I wanted to show as clearly as I personally could that they aren’t one.”
You can follow the entire thread here.
