Why You Should Not Use Godot: 5 Reasons

So a few months back we made a video about Godot’s strengths and why we would recommend it to game devs! This time, we want to talk about weaknesses of the engine and what might speak against using it for making your game.

~ Get Godot Assets ~

~ Publishers that offer Godot Console Ports ~

~ Realistic Graphics in Godot 3.4 demo by Cyberreality ~

~ Godot Channels we recommend ~

~ Other links ~
2021 April Fools article:
Juans statement about the logo:
Our Pixel tutorial post:
Godette images discussion thread:

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The Show Must Be Go by Kevin MacLeod
Inspired by Kevin MacLeod

[DankMemes-xqxm]

I think the simplicity and lack of certain technologies actually makes Godot better for new game developers. A lot of Unreal Engine and Unity tutorials are focused on teaching people how to do procedural animation, crazy particle effects, ray tracing, etc, but I think beginners should just focus on simple 2D game design and not worry about the features that make AAA games pop.

[sempersolus]

Reasons to use Godot:
- You have a small budget
- You're working primarily in 2D or stylized 3D
- You believe that, the larger its community becomes, the greater Godot will be
- In this increasingly capitalistic world, you'd like to ensure that the people behind your game engine are taking as little of your money as possible
- Your favorite movie was _The Iron Giant, _ but you wish he could have been... _bluer, _ somehow.

[devihen]

As an old-fashioned programmer, I'm finding Godot very easy to understand and very good to develop indie games even in solo.
Isn't the 3D performance top notch? I think that the style is king here and this kind of setback can force us to make more with less.
In my opinion, the feature to improve right now is the tileset editor, and I can't wait for Godot 4.

[Amipotsophspond]

I don't want Godot to get away from it's MIT License, no mater how features it would allow. interacting with the proprietary software world is a slippy slope, for any permissive license project.

[lg]

I love the logo 😱 it doesn’t have the conventional, soulless corporate style of most proprietary software. It just looks like passion to me.

[SirspenStudios]

Honestly for me the main reason I'm sticking with godot is GDScript. I'm not even a python guy but damn, GDScript is just so intuitive and well-integrated into the engine. It has its quirks for sure, but it just feels clean and straightforward.

[lorgarmor]

I will be honest: None of those points is a real "systematic" weakness of the engine. The first one is due to proprietary tech of the console companies (going against the Open-Source approach), visual quality is just a question of time (maybe slower, but it's not a billion dollar company after all) and the rest is community related. And only five bullet points is not a big figure to begin with :D

Just to come up with a definitive systematic weakness of e.g. the Unreal Engine: It's huge size, C++ is its only language, compilation times, ...

[SmeddyTooBestChannel]

Personal thoughts:
- The assets things is kind of not really a huge deal breaker IMO. I will loudly and proudly state I have an "asset hoarding" problem and I think you can get away with using stuff from itch and similar sites perfectly fine. I don't think there being a real team-endorsed asset store would be the best idea anyways if they want to keep their FOSS ideals intact. It would be nice if more asset devs optimized their files for Godot more often or if Godot made it easier to import stuff (which, from what I've been hearing, 4.0 is at least gonna alleviate at least some of those headaches), but it's not life threatening anyways.

- 3D stuff is mostly agreeable, but given the considerably younger age compared to Unreal and even Unity, combined with the fact it's a full game engine being made from scratch by hobbyists, it is a bit unfair to be expecting it to do have all of these super advanced technologies in it in the first place. Even then, very rarely I see indie developers trying to shoot for a game of that detail level anyways, no matter what engine, which I'd assume is the general demographic of users for the engine at the moment. I think the stuff that'll come along in Godot 4 will be great, and having performance upgrades is a HUGE deal because frankly, if something like *Cruelty Squad* runs like garbage on a modern but low-spec laptop, there's something very, very wrong, and I personally would prioritize performance over trying to get the engine to put out AAA graphics first and foremost.

- The branding stuff listed I think wouldn't be that big of a deal past initial impressions. I think if someone overhears that Godot can do all of the stuff that it does with a super permissive license, they should be on board (give or take any negative personal experience had with the engine). Also, I don't think NSFW develeopers are suddenly gonna get ousted by John Godot, CEO of Godot Engine and have their game be unable to be published on the internet just because they have a single female nipple in the corner of the screen for 5 seconds, just going by what the nature of the engine is. Random discourse on internet boards doesn't inherently dictate on how things are or work (which i think is a common misconception with people who are frequently on the internet in general but that's beside the point). You shouldn't be running stuff like Steam on GNU/Linux going by the philosophies of people like Richard Stallman (though that kind of implies anyone takes him seriously anymore anyways), but countless people do anyways and you can't really dictate that.


- My own personal gripe with the engine is that it's kind of a UX migrane, but the features currently available make it more than worth fighting through, and clearly there's a lot of work and attention being put into rectifying these issues in later updates. I'd be more upset with a lot of these things if they weren't just... growing pains. It's still relatively new, it's doing something hugely ambitious (I mean geez, I feel like we all kinda forget this is a GAME ENGINE, meant for **making interactive software that can and will be anything the game dev wants it to be**), and it's a passion project. Considering all of those things, the fact that it's even in the state it is now considering the first initial public release was only just over half a decade ago (as of the time of writing this), the fact it's as good as it is even right now and can totally be used to make games on a quality level people will willingly pay for, it's a miracle, frankly.

[maxismakingstuff]

Not having a centralized asset store may end up being a boon in the long run. There is a stigma over indie devs just throwing together free assets to push out a game after all. Though it might be a roadblock for some not to have it, it may encourage more unique visuals and mechanics.

[Portponky]

people getting shot in the face = fine
clothing = controversy
why is the world this way :|

[karagaya]

The Godot at the end killed me 😂

Im using Godot science almost 3 years now, but just for 2D games or a discord Bot. I really like the engine and i learned programming with it. But i can see how the Godot community grows from day to day.

Maybe 3D is not as great, but for 2D is Godot one of the best engines in my opinion. Im sure 3D will get better after time.

Imagine Godot in something like 2 years, i think it will be an REALY powerfully Engine and the Community would be big as unity or unreal.

Yeah, the logo is special, but i think even if you don’t like it, you can use Godot because the user can see the logo for like 2 or 3 seconds when launching the Game.

[devon]

#5 has improved a lot in the year since this video came out. cheers! thanks for being a part of that!

[claireodendron]

The logo looks fine the way it is, although, if there's restrictions on its use due to being copyrighted by someone and that person having prudish requirements, then maybe Godot should provide some additional default picture/icon for people to use in their games, and which is ok to place on things such as the pixelated bikini parts. They could still use the original logo for the engine itself, just provide a different to include in new projects.

[AdimasDuvitra]

Love you two guys for being honest. And I love Godot too. Next content idea: what would YOU guys like to see to change in Godot if you were the maker of the game engine to cover/fix those weakness previously mentioned? Again, another subjective content :D

[ThomasHempel]

I chose Godot over Unity BECAUSE it is small, FOSS and has personality by doing things differently here and there. Of course it's not perfect. Nothing is.

The only "personality" that Unity has, is its tendency to bloat, recompile and crash every few minutes just to get in your way. Seriously, the latest Unity LTS is less stable the Godot 4 alpha. :-D

Besides that, we should not forget, that Unity and Unreal have multimillion $credit companies behind it! I don't expect it to keep up with those and have any kind of feature parity or do stuff at the same speed. Godot is built by literally a hand full of people.

So is it bad? No! It's absolutely awesome for what it is. Take a look at Blender. When they started their OS journey, they where at the same place. The entire industry laughed at them. And now? Give it time, spread the word and use it! Funding and features will come!

[NekotoArts]

I'm not even gonna lie, that Godette bikini fanart was *one* of the reasons I clicked on the pixelation video. (The other being that I like shaders)

I'm a little sad to see that they are very rigid with the logo design right now, but at least we can use our own logos freely I guess. You also made a good point about the Godot subreddit; is it even a work related space?

Finally, I'm surprised you didn't talk about the 3D feature shortage in Godot 3. Some people say its 3D features are sufficient, I don't agree personally (despite being primarily 3D dev) but whatever. Maybe I can use that as a future video idea hehe.

Loved to see a different video! I think it's important to talk about the things godot devs don't like about the engine too!

[rafaelbordoni]

As a student of the dark arts of shaders, here's what I don't like about Godot:

- SCREEN_TEXTURE is only generated once, right before the transparent queue so we can't have refraction effects in front of transparent geometry, refracting geometry or even geometry that uses the depth buffer;
- We can't rewrite the part of the shader that deals with ambient light, reflections, emission, etc. We're stuck with writing to roughness, metallic, emission and ambient occlusion, we can't even sample the ambient and reflection cubemaps;
- No "official" way to write post-processing effects, we're stuck with using geometry in front of the camera which runs into the first problem, and on top of that, we can't access a normals buffer;
- We can't mess with the camera's projection matrix;

I think these are huge, I understand they want to simplify the shading language and allow us to write stuff faster, but it prevents us from having basic stuff all 3D games have, like, we can't have a fire with refraction or any refracting VFX in front of water or transparent stuff, this is just basic. The second one also severely stops us from being creative with the rendering pipeline, it's like they're assuming we're using the metallic workflow and won't even let us do anything different. The last one is a bit of a pet peeve, we can't have proper planar reflections in Godot because of it. Some more bonus pet peeves now:

- No multi-compilers, no ways to include files on your shader codes and no global variables;
- No ways to change the shader materials UI on the inspector;

These are minor, they don't affect the end product that you're making but they affect the process of making it. The lack of multi-compiling means maintaining any complex shader code can be a nightmare, and creating or editing materials can also be a nightmare when we can't organize the way uniforms show up on the inspector. I remember they only recently gave us an update with occlusion culling and another one with varyings that go from fragment to light, which goes to show how far behind Unity and UE4 we are. Haven't tried Godot 4 alpha yet, I hope most of these are addressed.

[snaker]

I spent several months completing all the official Unity courses. However, after trying Godot for just a few days, I fell in love with Godot.😘 When making important decisions, I don't recommend that you rely entirely on others' advice to save time.🙁 Because without practical experience, you can't discern that some advice is actually very one-sided.🤔 That might make you miss out on something great.😓 It's worth spending some time to do your own research.😁

[mcqueen]

For me a good engine must:
- Export to mobile and PC (I don't care about consoles)
- Have a decent amount of tutorials
- Run smoothly and have a built in editor (instead of tons of Gb to install and the heaviest text editor on the planet)
- Have a blue friendly face as the logo

[Goldenfightinglink]

I learned "programming" through Godot, the documentation (which is partly community ran) is super simple and provides everything you need to actually make something.

I started on 3d stuff recently and had to learn blender. It was an absolute nightmare. It's extremely unintuitive, every other setting gets changed by a click or shift click or Ctrl click. Saving grace is a yt series that goes quickly into depth of certain actions, made within the last year or so. I would've dropped it if I didn't have that.

Godot is also the youngest of all those game engines. So maybe it has merit if that's it's 'peers' and it's already getting praise for being intuitive.

Them being prudes is pretty weird and I hope they don't turn out to be incels