Concerns Regarding Stability and Quality of Unity 6

Hello everyone,

First, I want to start by saying how much I genuinely love Unity. I’ve been developing with it since Unity version 3, working on a variety of projects ranging from game development to industrial applications.

That being said, I wanted to voice some concerns about the stability and quality of Unity 6 and its various subsystems. We’ve heard from the scene in Barcelona (and I was there, in person) “Unity 6 is our most stable release to date,” but my personal experience tells a different story. Since Unity 2018, I’ve noticed a steady decline in quality and an increase in the number of issues.

To give some context, my team recently migrated a project from Unity 2018 LTS, skipping ahead to 2022 LTS, and then to Unity 6. Unfortunately, the transition has been far from smooth. In just the past four days, I’ve already reported three bugs and identified two others that were previously reported on the forums—a total of five bugs, one of which was particularly critical (player/editor freeze under specific conditions).

Since moving to Unity 6, I’ve reported 11 bugs in total (all confirmed), and many of them remain unresolved. Several of these are critical issues that significantly impact our workflow.

I fully understand that Unity has grown immensely over the years, and maintaining such a vast and complex platform is no small task. However, it has become increasingly challenging to work effectively when it’s unclear whether an issue stems from our own code or a bug within Unity. The lack of reliability in even basic features—such as USS transitions failing after restarting the editor—has resulted in countless hours of debugging and frustration.

At this point, I can’t help but feel like I’m doing QA work for Unity Technologies, given the amount of time spent tracking down issues.

I wanted to raise this concern here to see if others in the community are experiencing similar challenges. I’d also love to hear from anyone at Unity who might be able to provide insight or updates regarding these issues.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope we can work together to improve the platform we all care about.

2 Likes

Not wishing to give unity an out on this, but stability isnt the same as less bugs, it just means it doesnt crash much…

But onto bugs

I dont mind doing a level of QA to help the tool i want to be better, because like many of us, we can test our stuff, give it to others and they find stuff we never found… so, I dont mind, too much…

What I mind is you spend ages shrinking a problem down to a smaller bite sized lump, you write specific and precise instructions and the first thing that seemingly happens is… they open it, change a bunch of stuff and then claim “cant repo” if I said to you to drive to my house go down this road 300 yds, turn left… and you go 2 miles, and turn right… well of course you’re not arriving at my house. Dont be surprised then when the bug doesnt happen if you didnt do what it said.

what you are observing is the result of unity management/people that control the board making some business mistakes.

is actually quite simple why those old versions are more stable than the recent one.

so what happened? a couple of years ago unity merged with an advertising company with the idea of diversifying the goal of the company less on game engines and more on advertising. this shift in focus meant less care was put in the editor so for that it lost its competitive edge. Unfortunately for unity as a company this management/ownership decision backfired big time when the giants of web advertising, alphabet, meta and apple, did everything they could do to cut any advertising competition out of their platforms.

now unity is forced to shift focus back to the engine and because of various business accounting reasons, that are too boring to write about, they had to release unity 6 when it was not really ready to be released.

Did they will manage to fix and improve the editor at a fast pace and grow back? We will see.

Incidentally the business shenanigans that google did may cost them a lot as there are talks of breaking google into pieces. But that remains to be seen, because with the new US administration and their clear goal to protect the US economy, I don’t see how they will go ahead shooting down google. It doesn’t align with this new protectionist perspective.

3 Likes

I guess and fear the main issue right now is lack of resources, as many former core devs have left the company for various reasons.

Our company has submitted several bugs / regressions for Unity 6 (around 10). You can be lucky if they stay unresolved, some of ours were being first accepted by QA, and then closed as “won’t fix” with strange justifications from product / dev team. They seem to try to narrow down on only the biggest use cases for now, probably due to the mentioned lack of resources.
This also leads to less QA work by us, as we don’t see a point in putting in work with bug reports, including repro projects, and then no effort on Unity side to fix those bugs.

2 Likes

The biggest issue I’ve had, and it’s quite a substantial one, is that sometimes Unity will just completely lock up my entire computer during script compilation and get stuck like that. Scripts start compiling, any audio or video I have playing at the time starts stuttering with pauses sometimes as long as 30 seconds, and then everything completely freezes. My system specs are well beyond what projects I’m working on should require, yet sometimes I have to reset my PC entirely to get back to work.

Cant say ive had unity lockup the pc, ive had it do its thing for 5 live times when compiling to web for the first time, but never actually lock the pc - normally id say thats more hardware like… Problem with freezes is theres no messages

It’s not hardware. The issue occurs across multiple devices with multiple configurations, often with nearly blank projects.

ouch then… thats pretty bad :frowning:

Don’t you think that would be a quite known/widespread issue if you as one person have managed to encounter it on multiple devices and different projects?
Do you happen to have some basic 3rd party toolset you are adding early on into all your projects?

1 Like

99% of the time, this happens on stock projects. There’s about a 1 in 100 chance that this happens, loosely estimated.

Over the years I helped debug many issues. And so far unity 6000 34 works almost* perfectly. it’s a tool. large one. The only solution to make the tool better - is too collectivly find and solve all the issues. That’s just the part of being a developer, I guess

is an old issue that I’ve had to deal for ages. I see it is still not fixed

it was at the time when I’ve still had some love for unity but I had no idea how I will slowly drown into madness.