In the news another massive prize fund ($500,000) has been announced for games made in a non Unity game engine.
Is that because that engine needs the publicity and to lure people to their technology, or does it make good business sense to use prizes to help drive the quality and development of games with your technology?
Would a prize fund actually drive sales on the assets store, in essence funding the prize and reducing the actual expenditure?
Is it good business/free advertising or a waste of money?
Do you know why the competition is continuing to run these? Because Unity is still more popular than them. Unity doesn’t seem to need any more advertising than they already have as they continue to bring in new developers without problems.
Advertising is all about perception, not reality, if another game engine is perceived to be better/more lucrative, then the market will move in it’s favour.
And game engines once adopted and ‘mastered’ are easier to stay with than change.
Except other engines are better and more lucrative for certain situations yet we don’t see the entire market moving to them and the reason is simply that Unity solves the majority of the problems for the people who are developing for it.
CryEngine may have superior graphics and it may have zero cost at this point in time but it’s harder to use and has a far less helpful community (assuming they haven’t changed from past experiences).
Unreal 4 may have superior graphics and it may not be that much more difficult to use but it introduces royalties and the necessary overhead to deal with Epic Games when they come to collect that royalty every interval.
Then you have the factor you mentioned where people aren’t changing because the need to change has not been overshadowed by the difficult of migrating their operations to that new engine.
Once again until Unity is not in a dominant position it’s wasteful of them to pursue advertising with gimmicks.
Minor point maybe, but Unity has a much lower technical requirements. My computer won’t even run either of those engines. And the community here has been absolutely great in the two months I’ve been here.
I mean this could also be done in the forum. But what about competitions to promote new features? Best little example project that uses new feature gets a nice recognition. … And the rest must fight to the death! jk!!
would have to be a massive carrot since most studios using such engines are using them because there publisher has pushed them to do so. The publisher has many reason for doing so as well, since it provides them complete control, with no fear of depreciation as well as internal sales.
Are you asking me what would be the advantage of winning? Same as many Ludum dares I guess. Maybe there can be other sort of prices, some could donate an Asset Store asset, as a way to promote their product.
I would like to see competitions within the forums, I imagine this would only be encouraged by unity. If there were frequent community challenges, I’m sure the site would adapt to meet the demand.
no im asking what advantage to having a unity only unity run one would be, just seems like unnecessary and artificial limitations. We have Ludum Dare and GGJ already where you can participate no matter what tech you use. Like why would unity just not sponsor GGJ or Lunum Dare, or as a game jamer would would i choose to participate in one that limits what tools i can use unless there is a prize.
