Realm 2025 - The State of Play?

[peachypixels]

Hey Everyone!

It’s been over a year since the deprecation of Atlas & the SDK’s and I’m wondering what the current state of play is?

From my perspective, I’m a solo game dev who switched from an in-house storage solution to Realm… and it was a transformative decision (in the positive sense)

In the two years of development & beta since switching, Realm has been easy to implement\maintain and flawless in execution. I couldn’t imagine my (data heavy) game without it.

But on the cusp of finally publishing after three years development, I’m questioning whether my decision to stick with Realm (to see how the open sourcing would go) was a wise one.

Judging by repo commits over the last year, it’s hard to argue that forward momentum has almost come to a stop.

As an indie who has to undertake everything from concept & design to publishing & marketing (and everything in-between) I wish there was time to sit down and learn about the inner workings of Realm DotNet and contribute in some meaningful way (beyond analysing & reporting bugs) but there are just not enough hours in the day\week beyond what I’m currently doing.

Of course there might be discussions\deals going on behind the scenes. Or devoted & skilled open source contributors that I’m not aware of yet. I'm just saying what I see based on activity around the repo.

As we all know, the forward momentum of tech stacks is relentless… and sooner or later I fear Realm and\or Realm DotNet will hit a brick wall and nobody will be able to address it as it currently stands.

I guess what I’m trying to find out (for everybody’s sake) is...

1. Are there any real drives to try and (at the very least) actively maintain it?
2. Are there any plans to work with larger entities (with some form of vested interest) who might be able to spare resources to contribute?
3. Have MongoDB considered some form of paid subscription tiers for on-going maintenance?

Appreciate (3) might be unpopular, but from my perspective Realm allowed me to greatly enhance my game and I would like to keep it that way. If that means a little cost overhead for some security, I would take it.

It’s too late to switch databases for me now and once the game is published, switching to another solution (on N real world devices) makes me shudder at the scale of the migration that would be needed.

Realm is (imho) a fantastic product and a credit to those who built it. It would be a real travesty to see it slowly fade away.

I hope this comes across as constructive, as that was always the intention.

Interested to hear the thoughts\concerns of others…