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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

> To put this very directly, Godot is a meme in the commercial games industry. Most of companies with above AA cash would rather write their own engines than use Godot

I find this an odd statement because from my perspective there aren't any AAA titles written in Unity either. They are all proprietary engines or Unreal nowadays.

So the question isn't if Godot can take over the AA, AAA games, it's can it take over the market currently served by Unity.

It probably can't right now, but probably not as far off as it seems either

> There are a lot of forces working agains Godot: inertia, economics, instability, lack of talent, lack of appeal to talent.

Other than "instability" none of this is a criticism of the engine itself... so why is it a meme?

Edit: I'm actually really struggling to think of a game I would consider AAA that I know of made in Unity. Please help me out if you know of some I'm not aware of.

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> I find this an odd statement because from my perspective there aren't any AAA titles written in Unity either. They are all proprietary engines or Unreal nowadays.

I dunno what your definition of AAA is but Cities: Skyline, Hearthstone, Genshin Impact?

I’d say that AAA are the rough equivalent of major Hollywood productions. Looking at Wikipedia for budgets and box office for a few high profile films:

Everything Everywhere All At Once had a budget in the $14M to $25M range, for a $141M box office. The Batman made $771M from a $185M-$200M budget, and Multiverse of Madness made $959M off a $294M budget.

EEAAO is a AA, maybe an A film where Batman and MoM are AAA, you couldn’t even produce The Batman or MoM with all the revenue from EEAAO. Nonetheless, EEAAO was by far the most successful of the three, both in terms of critical acclaim and in terms of return on investment.

Likewise, Hearthstone is definitely not a AAA game. It’s deliberately a much smaller product than Blizzard’s other games. Cities Skyline is the product of a tiny 30ish person company, published by a publisher famous for lower profile, lower production value games.

Paradox as a publisher is about the same tier as A24: Very successful in their respective niches, but not their industries’ 800-pound gorillas.

Yeah those first two are AAA publishers rather than games.

Genshin impact though is definitely in the AAA category, it pulls in billions and had an initial budget (they put out constant updates) of $100M

Unity is used more widely than you might think, though maybe it's just your definition of AAA here.

Mihoyo's titles all use Unity AFAIK and have massive AAA-level budgets along with massive AAA-level revenues. Most of the big publishers have teams using Unity, you can kind of pick and choose whether those individual titles are "AAA" or not but like, Blizzard ships Unity games, etc. It's become a go-to choice for stuff that you want to cheaply ship across many platforms and have run on low spec devices.

Sort of telling then, that when they did their virtual actor software, they did it in unreal and not unity.

If a game is freemium it's definitely not a AAA title imo.

This take seems pretty wild to me, considering that freemium multi-player games have kinda dominated top-grossing for the last decade. Fortnite, League of Legends, Genshin, PUBG all follow this model.

Fortnite and Genshin are content mills

League of Legends is a massive success but AAA? Not really. It's basically a Warcraft 3 mod.

And Pubg actually was a mod wasn't it?

I'm not questioning the success.

AAA implies a certain type of quality to me, and being a freemium content mill online service game is absolutely not it.

Oh ok, then I guess we just have a different definitions. I would define AAA titles almost purely by budget/resources.

So for example, I would say that Fortnite and Genshin were AAA games from the start, and that LOL and Pubg became and have been AAA titles for years now.

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