In theory, Godot founders and Godot Foundation Board members Rémi Verschelde and Juan Linietsky were in a prime position to benefit when developers erupted in outrage after engine maker Unity unveiled its planned Runtime Fee.
As furious developers turned to look for new engines, many turned to the open-source engine named after Samuel Beckett's stage play. Wouldn't such a surge of interest be a boon for the two developers?
No. At least, not for the bulk of Godot's development. Verschelde and Linietsky (who also co-founded W4 Games, a separate corporation developing licensable porting and multiplayer tools for Godot users) had been leading community-driven development on the engine since 2014, and all the while they said they saw a backlash to Unity coming from a mile away. "Even before this happened, there'd been multiple warning shots from Unity," Verschelde recalled in a conversation at Gamescom 2024. And despite the boon that could come from an influx of users, the Godot team prayed Unity wouldn't make that explosion happen.
As the two tell it, Godot wasn't ready for primetime until just months before the Runtime Fee debacle—and as it exploded, they faced their first test on what would happen when a userbase used to Unity's tech and values would react in the face of Godot's open-source style. It's a case study in how any team can rapidly scale in the face of surprise growth—and how teams who espouse open-source values can incorporate input from new members.
Read the full interview at Game Developer.
It's wild how Unity's bad decisions and growing problems have been obvious to everyone except Unity