Slay the Spire 2 is one of the year’s biggest hits, which is a good time to remember it abandoned Unity because of the dev fee debacle: ‘That is how badly you f****d up’
I’ve been enjoying Slay the Spire 2, even if I agree with PCG’s Robin Valentine that it sometimes feels like more of a remake than a sequel. But there’s plenty of time for that to change: the game has only just launched in early access, and developer Mega Crit says it expects to spend one to two years building it out before a full release. Nevertheless it’s already a huge hit, selling over three million copies in the first week.
I had this little itch in my brain when I was looking through the game’s credits and saw the Godot logo, and then the reason why hit me: the Unity debacle of 2023, which saw Mega Crit switch engines to Godot after two years of development. I don’t even think I’d heard of Godot until this.
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Even though Unity would end up reversing the changes, it did so in a piecemeal fashion that was never going to satisfy developers, and many ended up leaving the engine behind permanently. In Mega Crit’s case that was in favour of Godot, which is offered under the MIT license, and is free to use “for any purpose.”
Mega Crit chose Godot after an internal three week game jam that ended up producing a fun little deck-battler called Dancing Duellists, which is a nice palate-cleanser if you’re all Slayed out: it’s available for free on Windows, Mac and Linux. Mega Crit says anyone who wants to make a donation should direct it towards the Godot engine’s development fund: Mega Crit is one of its major sponsors, as is Terraria developer Re-Logic.
It’s a small but telling piece of recent industry history: the entire thing took maybe a month to play out in the Autumn of 2023, but by the end of it Unity’s CEO was gone, the company was backtracking as fast as it possibly could, and all the goodwill it had built up among indie developers over many years was gone. Many of the developers were soon gone too.
Almost three years later, we’re seeing Mega Crit prove you can build one of the year’s breakout hits with Godot: and you don’t imagine they’ll be looking back at Unity anytime soon. Among the many criticisms of Unity’s attempted changes were that they simply represented a “cash grab” on what it thought was a captive audience. As Slay the Spire 2 shows, in the long run such things can cost you.
Oh and one other thing I noticed in the credits. The lead engineer on Slay the Spire 2 is called Jake Card. Nominative determinism in action or what?
