It's great that Hollow Knight got made, in short enough order at the time (2017) and it's great for them that they were able to port it to so many platforms with relative ease.
But the entire development team probably got a few gray hairs from the stress of last year's Unity debacle.
It is now no longer 2016–17. We have now seen firsthand the quite possible perils of building your game on someone else's engine.
It's like how Twitter used to provide very open API access for people to use to build all sorts of third-party apps. Overnight there was a huge explosion of these apps, and it was great for Twitter because it meant more people had more ways to engage with the platform. But when, after Twitter bought all the third-party apps they cared about and kept increasingly clamping down on API access more and more before finally pulling the plug on third-party app support entirely, what did that mean for everyone who built their entire business around using someone else's platform? They got fucked, hard.
When you see this pattern recur time and time again, you start to think, maybe it's not such a great idea to build a business atop someone else's platform. Maybe you're better off in the long run if you have complete ownership over your code.
Imagine if Unity pulled the trigger on their bullshit last year and went through with it. What would the Hollow Knight developers have to do? Scramble to reimplement their game in a new, Unity-free codebase, on every platform it's been released on, just to prevent paying Unity more than they already do? It doesn't sound like an enviable position to be in.
You have to look at the bigger picture and consider nth-order effects if you're trying to make a business out of game development. If you're doing it as a hobby, then it's fine, who cares—if you wake up one day to find that the platform you've been using for your hobby projects now wants to charge you to use it or whatever, then it's a bummer, but not a big deal, because you haven't invested your business into the platform, you're just partaking in a hobby.
Out-of-hand accusations of “lacking empathy” and the like when it comes to subject matters like this are inane, vapid, and really quite untoward. We're talking about concrete things here like the technology used to make video games and its relation to treating game development as a business—not feelings, or inclusivity, or whatever it is you're responding to with this verbiage.
But the entire development team probably got a few gray hairs from the stress of last year's Unity debacle.
It is now no longer 2016–17. We have now seen firsthand the quite possible perils of building your game on someone else's engine.
It's like how Twitter used to provide very open API access for people to use to build all sorts of third-party apps. Overnight there was a huge explosion of these apps, and it was great for Twitter because it meant more people had more ways to engage with the platform. But when, after Twitter bought all the third-party apps they cared about and kept increasingly clamping down on API access more and more before finally pulling the plug on third-party app support entirely, what did that mean for everyone who built their entire business around using someone else's platform? They got fucked, hard.
When you see this pattern recur time and time again, you start to think, maybe it's not such a great idea to build a business atop someone else's platform. Maybe you're better off in the long run if you have complete ownership over your code.
Imagine if Unity pulled the trigger on their bullshit last year and went through with it. What would the Hollow Knight developers have to do? Scramble to reimplement their game in a new, Unity-free codebase, on every platform it's been released on, just to prevent paying Unity more than they already do? It doesn't sound like an enviable position to be in.
You have to look at the bigger picture and consider nth-order effects if you're trying to make a business out of game development. If you're doing it as a hobby, then it's fine, who cares—if you wake up one day to find that the platform you've been using for your hobby projects now wants to charge you to use it or whatever, then it's a bummer, but not a big deal, because you haven't invested your business into the platform, you're just partaking in a hobby.
Out-of-hand accusations of “lacking empathy” and the like when it comes to subject matters like this are inane, vapid, and really quite untoward. We're talking about concrete things here like the technology used to make video games and its relation to treating game development as a business—not feelings, or inclusivity, or whatever it is you're responding to with this verbiage.