I'd argue that 2022.3 is still the best option if you don't want any drama from your tools. Using "old" versions of game engines is generally much safer than the latest. Let someone else figure out if the new model of parachute is any good before you try it.

If the tools are dominating your thinking during development, you've perhaps chosen the wrong ones for the job. There is no shame in using older tools to build games. This isn't like a banking web app. No AAA studio is going to give you extra consideration because you have unity 6 experience vs something slightly older. Valve certainly doesn't seem to give a shit. There's not much reason to chase a higher game engine version number.

If you are a solo/indie studio and you are using a newer version of a tool because it appears to enable something in your game, you are probably not going to do well. The engine does not make the game. It supports the game. Concerns like the "Unity look" are a consequence of the developers and artists doing a poor job, not old or subpar tooling. Environment lighting settings have their own hot key. Breaking out of the aesthetic mold is trivial if you make any attempt to do so.

I was in the audience when DOTS was announced, and a decade later Cities Skylines II showed how ill equipped for prime time it remains (not that the developers were blameless).

Superhot (2016), outer wilds (2020), and limbo (2011) received patches last year. How do the developers of these successful games manage that?

- do you really need a game engine for making a 3D counter strike game?

- arent there libraries in c++ like raylib, jolt for physics etc?

- if you had to make a CS type game, what libraries do you think would be needed to get it done without touching unity, unreal, godot etc?

The author is a friend of mine. A few weeks ago he mentioned this small game he made years ago was more successful than his ambitious projects. After that conversation he decided to update it and produced this wonderful blog post.

If you haven’t checked out the game yet it’s a lot of fun for the modest price.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/391420/Gun_Rocket/

Light theme might have a readability edge in daytime / well lit offices. But I'd bet most people using Unity are hobbyists doing it at home in their evening hours, when you want to dial down your blue light for the sake of sleep.

The more recent frequent breaking changes around URP custom renderer features and render textures haven’t been much fun either, but nothing as bad as losing a working lightmapper and light probes support (the replacement really want ready for actual use) while working on a project highly dependent on baked lighting…

Not saying I agree with everything in that article or Unity doesn't provide hundreds of useful features.

> I tried to boot up Gun Rocket to play it. But it refused. No matter how hard I clicked the game would not open.

> After trying a few times I realize if the ship isn't moving for about 0.5 seconds it explodes. Has that bug existed all this time? Oh bother. I hope not!

Grinds my gears that the game has continued to be listed for sale on Steam with years-old negative reviews pointing out exactly these issues, but the developer still has the gall to act surprised about them.

But Godot has an issue here, "naked" godot games are fine, but the second they use "addons" as shared libs instead of being statically linked into the main exe, it is a disaster as most of them are built for massive mainstream elf(glibc)/linux distros. It seem also godot games tend to use much more nasty third party shared libs. addons/third party shared lib devs are mostly forgetting '-static-libgcc -static-libstdc++' compiling/linking options while generating their shared libs. For addons, they should provide static libs for game devs to link in their main exe.