At my last startup, our product required information that didn't exist in the digital world - the table of contents of hundreds of medical books. So I used to spend nights and weekends visiting local Barnes & Nobles and university bookstores pulling down books and manually typing out the table of contents with chapter titles, pages numbers, etc. Quite possibly the most boring job ever! Most bookstores didn't mind my presence, but I did get kicked out of one (thanks Harvard Medical School!). I tried to use OCR and other techniques and it just wasn't accurate enough (this was a decade ago so the tech wasn't quite as advanced as it is now). Eventually the company got big enough where I could have dedicated staff to handle the process, but for a long time it was how I spent my free time.
Wow...I wrote up a whimsical account of what could happen after the price increases. I got the timing wrong (I thought it would take several months for the CEO to step down), but some of it is starting to come true: https://quiver.dev/blog/stepping-into-the-unity-ceos-calfski....
At Quiver, we’re building comprehensive, polished courses for Godot. We aim to take you from the basics to more advanced concepts. Our content isn’t free though, but we’re doing our best to make it worth the cost. You can check it out here: https://quiver.dev. (Disclosure: I’m the founder).
At https://quiver.dev/upgrade/ the section "Why should I purchase a Quiver+ subscription?" the following text needs copy editing:
You shouldn't -- well not right away at least. Start by trying out our free tutorials and game templates to see what game development with Godot is like. If you want to hacking a small project for a few weeks is enough for you, our free offering might be all that you need.
As this is likely a critical path for many conversions to paying customers having language that can be parsed easily is probably critical.
I actually did find you guys last week. I didn’t buy anything because I’m waiting for the Godot 4 3D shooter game, since that’s exactly what I want to make. Having focus on code organization + best practices would also be awesome.
Awesome! The 3D shooter course is in production now, and is looking great so far. We try to inject best practices in all of our courses as well as weighing tradeoffs when discussing different approaches to a problem.
Totally agree, that's why I submitted this article. I'm personally invested in seeing Godot become successful, but this type of constructive criticism is great for the ecosystem (even though some people get very defensive). I think it's exciting that there's so much room for improvement and shining light into Godot internals is a great way to expose what needs to be done.
I'm less concerned about Unreal pulling a Unity. The bigger issue is just a lack of attention. The last numbers I saw was that Unreal was pulling in $100m a year for Epic. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what Epic makes off of Fortnite. In my experience, products that matter a lot to the consumer but not the company tend to stagnate. Just look at Google outside of search.
If anyone's looking for a quick intro to Godot 4, you can take a look at our video series: https://quiver.dev/tutorials/create-your-first-godot-4-game/. Disclaimer: this is offered by my company, but the tutorial is free and the code and assets are liberally licensed.
This move by Unity isn't completely unexpected if you've studied their financials. Smaller devs are basically dead weight for Unity, so it seemed like them putting the squeeze on them was just a matter of time. Bottom line: don't count on a public company to do the right thing if you're not helping their bottom line.
