That is,
if their homemade ECS variant (like C# Unity was their variant of C#) proves to be that much of a gain, but it really looks like a paradigm breaker.
Although the change will be gradual and progressive, obviously the people remaining on the "old" tools will dwindle in numbers, but the real question is if this will only be a reduction towards a more focused niche or a pure and simple extinction.
I'm not sure if I will want to bother learning a new set of tools in 15 years from now. A super solid and matured Playmaker (or else, like Bolt) will be equally nice.
Third party VS tools might as well try to furnish their own sets of ECS-compliant nodes/actions and a lot of the support will come from their respective users. But I suspect many coders will flock to Mother Unity and pamper her with new scripts to enhance her own VS tool.
Now Unity has something that plays against itself; its business model. They largely provide a core system but you need to buy tons of options to make it palatable for proper devlopment. Which means a tool acting as a superior layer and providing more functions than the vanilla system will certainly have an edge, especially if done early, that little extra something to sell.
This is where tools like Playmaker, Bolt, FlowCanvas, etc., can find a solution to their survival, but they really need to provide that extra thing that Unity will likely not provide, and think of it now and quickly.
Like, for example, providing greater cross compability with more external tools/libs, but that's a hard thing to do and requires money. Usually it's the devs of these assets who chose to build those bridges back towards VS tools. Or perhaps an easier output of WYSIWYG semi-interactive videos for test and other statistic-related outputs. Just throwing ideas here, but I think it's fair to say that the threat is pretty real.
If the VS tools we have now get closer to perfection and find something to leverage right now, they can become
essentials and maybe secure themselves alongside Unity. That's all the best we can wish them, right?
Playmaker was built as a FSM system, but creating new actions requires coding.
What if they actually provided a node-based Action Creator?
Bolt is moving in a way as to allow the creation of metanodes that literally act as states. In other words, soon enough Bolt will have a large catalogue of metanodes (implied states) to download from. Playmaker already has this catalogue but no way to create actions in Visual Scripting.
Then, only robust parallelal "co-engines" (sort of) such as Playmaker, uNode, FlowCanvas or Bolt will survive if they have a massive community, are powerful and up to the task, with also a massive selling point that Unity could not hope to obtain. Bolt (Ludiq's) are
very organized and aggressive in their business plan and communication. You just need to take a look at their website or their tool's interface, it smells dedication, money and modernity. Yet not even that guarantees that they'll survive in 10 years from now.
