> Even a bit of support for Godot's C#( help them get it working on web), would be great.

They did that. https://godotengine.org/article/introducing-csharp-godot/

At least some initial grant to get it started.

Getting C# working on web would be an amazing. It is already on the roadmap but some sponsorship would help tremendously for sure.

Ok. Credit where credit is due, but considering the sheer value of having the next general of programmers comfortable with .net, Microsoft *should* chip in more.

Hasn't Microsoft largely hitched their horse to Go these days, though (not just this project)? They even maintain their own Go compiler: https://github.com/microsoft/go

It is a huge company. They can do more than one thing. C#/.NET certainly isn't dead, but I'm not sure they really care if you do use it like they once did. It's there if you find it useful. If not, that's cool too.

We're talking about a nominal amount of funding to effectively train 10s of thousands of developers.

I think Microsoft can find the money if they wanted to.

I'm sure Microsoft could find the money to do a lot of different things. But why that instead of the infinite alternatives that the money could be spent on instead?

It seems Microsoft is not betting on C# and I think the main reason for this is that C# isn't futureproof because of it's ugliness.

It is a powerful and robust language with great standard library, but you just cant be comfortable with it. All those boilerplate, all those sealed override virtual public protected or whatnot before each statement, those curly braces everywhere. You are always inside classes that are inside namespace, and even then you need to go deeper and have curly braces with properties and arrows in random places. Delegates and Events are ugly and unintuitive, two set of syntax for linq (and honestly for almost any somewhat new feature of the language), ref in out, you name it. It is hard to push something so inelegant.

A lot of the last few C# compiler versions have been about "boiler-plate" reduction. Namespaces don't need curly braces any more and are just a single line at the top. You can write some top-level code inside a namespace without it needing to be in a class. More of the properties and method bodies that are simple can also be written entirely with arrows without curly braces.

Delegates and Events were a mistake, but that's a low-level .NET mistake that a lot of modern code can easily ignore, with Action<> and Func<> now reliably almost everywhere and WinForms easy to write off as "dead". (You can especially eliminate the need for the ugliness of Delegates and Events with System.Reactive.Linq.)

Records and Primary Constructors remove a ton of the boiler-plate of writing basic "DTOs" and/or dependency injection.

C# is pretty elegant, and a nicely evolving language. Microsoft isn't any longer trying to bet on C# as a "systems programming language" because too many people see JIT support and VMs as "not low level enough" (including apparently also Anders Hejlsberg), but that doesn't mean C# isn't "future proof".

History has shown Microsoft abandoning any gamedev toolkit or sdk they “support”. Managed DirectX, XNA, etc.

Personally, I would like them to never touch the game dev side of the market.

> Getting C# working on web would be an amazing.

People have been using Blazor WASM in Production for more than a year now. It's been stable since .NET 8.

"any reason Microsoft isn't sponsoring a solid open source game engine"

I can see they do this in the future tbh, given how large their xbox gaming ecosystem, this path is very make sense since they can cut cost while giving option to their studios or indie developers

While I'm dreaming of things that will never ever happen, I would absolutely love for them to buy the game engine side of Unity and open source it.

Unless I missed Unity sorting a ton of stuff out, I assume they're going to have to sell themselves off for parts at some point after the runtime fee fiasco that was supposed to make them profitable lead to developers being angry or outright leaving the ecosystem. My assumption if that happens unless the DOJ gets involved for some reason is MS buys it for this reason.

Unity isn't really worth 9 billion imo.

I would like MS to buy them out and FOSS the engine. Maybe if they split the ad business off into its own thing.

Unity feels like a bizarre almost abusing business relationship. They can change the terms of service at will.

The licensing is confusing. Billy is a freelancer. He makes a small game for his friend company. His friends company raises a funding round.

Depending on how much money is raised, Unity is going to call Billy up and extort him to upgrade to a higher license tier.

I don't particularly like Godot, but every few months I try and learn it again.

The game engine landscape is like picking the least worst option.

All that to be fair, Unity provided a high quality game engine for effectively nothing for over a decade to the vast majority of its users. It's time to pay the piper.

They do, Unreal and Unity tooling for Visual Studio, it is even part of the installer.

Also some of the low level improvements on C# have been done with collaboration with Unity team's requirements, regarding their Burst use cases.