i have seen a lot of folks talk about switching to godot due to unity “selling out”. but if godot gets popular enough, money will be waved in the maintainers’ faces, and it will follow the same trajectory.
meanwhile, there are alternatives like love2d, which is a more straightforward game engine written in c++ built on popular open source libs like sdl2 with a extended with lua(jit). it’s lightweight enough that you could probably maintain it yourself.
There are four differences between Godot today and Unity circa 2007 that make this unlikely:
1. The Godot trademark is owned by the Software Freedom Conservancy, and not the original authors or their company.
2. The founders do have a consulting/support company, W4Games, but it is not Godot Inc, and because of point 1, can never be. Secondly, it is not afforded any special place in the project leadership structure. W4Games employees account for 2 of 9 leadership positions in the Godot project leadership. This is overseen by the SFC who would not permit a company to have too many seats.
3. The founder's company also does not have overwhelming control of contributors. Of the top 10 contributors, numbers 1, 2, and 7 are part of W4 Games inc, but all of the top ten have significant contributions.
4. It's open source. This is less of a deterrent than the above, since it's MIT licensed so someone could make a closed source fork, but they would have to compete with the community in that case.
Actually the reason that most people don't like Unity is because the goal of the company seems to be to create a million half-baked, fancy-looking ideas rather than creating a solid experience with the core engine. Even today there are still very weird and difficult to circumvent bugs that come up in almost every project, even in trivial ones. Also, the last time I used it all of the old forum threads had been partially corrupted.
with regards to love2d, they are no on the same "market" (I have made hobbyist game in both)
love2d is really the most minimalist things you can call a game engine, i.e quickly you have to resort to 3rd party library , even for something as simple as 2d collision or the ECS system. If you know perfectly what you are doing it's probably better.
Godot is much more battery include so for an experienced programmer it may feel too opinionated.
my own experience was that, while I'm a web developer for 10+ years, I'm really new at game development, and love2d was easy at first but soon a pain because I hit a ceiling glass of "my game has become too complex and I don't know the design pattern of game developement". At the opposite Godot was a pain at first, especially as a Vim user, i.e why do I have to use this GUI, but once I got used with the tool by following some step by step tutorial, I felt like sky was the limit.
meanwhile, there are alternatives like love2d, which is a more straightforward game engine written in c++ built on popular open source libs like sdl2 with a extended with lua(jit). it’s lightweight enough that you could probably maintain it yourself.