Unity Plus costs $35/mo for 50 concurrent users, and UNET was a fumble. Grid (https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/) is free, and was built multiplayer-first.
The last time I checked, I couldn't build a project OOTB and in 5 minutes have a multiplayer game to mod and hack on. That's been a feature I've provided for years.
I think the appeal of PBR workflows for 3D games is what Unity and Unreal capitalize on, but for 2D hobbyists, there are much better solutions with far less overhead, and fewer expenses.
I'm working on Grid engine 9, which should release some big improvements to out-of-the-box multiplayer support. It's the only source code-based Lua game engine that I know of with first-class multiplayer support that has a dogfood project. Everything else out there is roll-your-own w/ LuaSockets. I've been writing it for the last few years due to not being able to find a solution that fit my needs.
I used to use Lua all the time. It's the language I learned after QBASIC and what I spent most of my teenage years writing. I'm definitely going to stay up to date on Grid. This looks neat!
The last time I checked, I couldn't build a project OOTB and in 5 minutes have a multiplayer game to mod and hack on. That's been a feature I've provided for years.
I think the appeal of PBR workflows for 3D games is what Unity and Unreal capitalize on, but for 2D hobbyists, there are much better solutions with far less overhead, and fewer expenses.