The acquisition or merging or whatever that happened with IronSource is a terrible deal, especially on the side of data privacy and breaches thereof. Then the new board is nothing to be trusted. They have not forgotten their plan, they will merely go at them through another path. I cannot even trust their business lingo until they properly and clearly define the meaning of each key word they use in their TOS and related pricing documents. And they're not really willing to do this but instead running on what appears to be assumptions.
Their entire strategy is to build a platform-blind ad delivering dominant force and we know that they will once again change their fees pricing tiers when they have enough leverage to do so.
When users were getting worrying messages from the Unity software relevant to user data privacy, the team was very evasive. This kind of mentality of course would have no reason to be limited in scope to a deep desire to squeeze data out of the developers only. There is much to dislike about them.
I looked at this entire catastrophe from a distance but now I'm seriously considering moving to another engine and may even, GASP, think about coding.
There are lots of talks about Godot, an engine that wasn't without issues during its 3.x phase, but most of the engine has been rewritten for version 4 and while it's still weak on the 3D side of things and tough to scale up, for 2D games it's really solid. There is no doubt that continuing on this trend version 5 will be one serious contender.
The less alluring part about it is how they plan to start an Asset Store, which just sucks. It will become another Unity, but open source and possibly with better management in terms of scope and new functions. Asset stores mean any project integrating third party tools becomes dependent on the well being of their respective publishers. Once a tool is not maintained anymore, you better be able to understand the logic and do the code yourself.
As a Playmaker user, that proved to be very stressful, annoying, complicated and added tons and tons of work weeks just to migrate between tools. I have only managed to reduce the anxiety induced by such changes by becoming relatively capable of creating my own functions from the API I used, but vanilla Playmaker users would absolutely blow their brains off because of such tragedies in their development strategies.
Most importantly, it is unlikely that in the near future the Godot board would be composed of absolute hacks who get paid between 12 and 18 millions in salaries and bonuses for just catering to shareholders while shitting demented pricing plans that are as stupidly convoluted as a Bond villain's plan, when a fraction of that money put on a few solid engineers could be used to solve many lingering issues and deliver core features always put on the backburner.
Unity's entire business model is even a mess to explain to newcomers. Sharing fees either based on total gross or number of copies sold for premium applications, obligations to move to a superior version when reaching a threshold, license fees (seats) and install fees. This is so retarded, there are no words for it. And they plan on updating it and will try their best to ruin Unity again.
So moving to either Unreal, Defold, Godot, Flax, etc. seems OK IF you can do the line writing. Godot has the dynamic GD script which is very helpful, but it also relies on C++ and C# which is just brillant. I have seen scripts copied from Unity to Godot with minimal changes, which means that yes, Playmaker could and really should be ported to Godot too.
