Concerns Regarding Stability and Quality of Unity 6

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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ouch then… thats pretty bad :frowning:

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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?

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

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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

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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.

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I can confirm that depending on the nature of the bug they do get fixed eventually.
I guess the main problem for now is that unity is so segmented into multiple features such as multiple render pipelines etc, that whatever combination of features you choose is most likely not “battle tested” and thus not production ready.

Just a few examples of the top of my head just regarding URP:
When activating MSAA and having a cutout shader+e.g grass) the objects are not rendered in URP on certain mobile devices (fixed since it has been reported)

Lens flare is rendered upside down (fixed and regressed multiple times, still exists on certain devices)
We reimplemented lens flares after looking at the original implementation and got it to work everywhere by writing readable code and quickly identifying multiple logic bugs

Certain combinations of URP settings lead to black screen on mobile (particular native render pass)

Default terrain grass is pink on certain devices

Terrain grass billboarding code was changed in URP so it only rotates on the xz plane now (without explanation)

MSAA still does not work with URP when using renderscale (blurry image)

Texture Sampling and mip-mapping are implemented in the wrong way leading to blurry and or very flickery results compared to built-in. Those can be resolved by using custom mip-bias sometimes but not fully.

Those are just a few of the problems we discovered (probably more I can’t remember now)

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My opinion is that Unity forgot what was their main strength. I think it is the best platform giving the highest possible performance with relatively easy to use IDE and C# that is kinda C++ with lots of friendliness. It even has something akin to Blueprint in UE 5 for example . So main strength should be reliability and ease of use. Then other things like lifelike graphics and AI for example. Versetality is a good way to go as well as Unity had quite a wide range of use targets both as platforms and as application types. Now it is very easy to force people to stay with older versions and eventually migrate to different engines. I have one foot in UE so it is an option. Still if it is possible I would prefer to stay within Unity as the Editor is really easy and cosy to use. So, focus on reliability please. No crushes and as few bugs as possible, not more and more features that for now I am not sure if even for one year new development had been stopped but first versions of Unity 6 got to high reliability level would be an equivalent to stabilizing a fast moving boat close capsizing. It can reach the target first but may crush, drown and so on.

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I like Unity, technically. Stability and quality, I think it is great, and most complaints are focusing on minutia, aka “narcissism of small differences”, when comparing engines.

I wanted to make it a point to say it. Because my upgrade from 2022 to 6000 went so smoothly. It s a scary prospect, and in the end I only had to correct I think it was three lines of code.

Yes, it crashes periodically. So what. Show me a program that doesn’t.

I yell “G-D A-HOLES, CAN’T THEY DO ANYTHING RIGHT!?” and “F-ING UNITY!” more often then I should, as I should have learned by now, I am the one doing it wrong, not Unity.

Except their old UI, which is diarrhea, and so bad I don’t trust they fixed anything or made it more pliable in UIElements, and am really not prepared to switch over just to find the same old problems repackaged.

But everything else I have worked with, has been golden, as in 99.9% pure, once I figured it out, quite performant and stable.

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I agree that Unity has become more complex and harder to work with compared to older versions.
But in your case, I feel the issues may not be caused solely by Unity 6 itself, but rather by the large version gap between Unity 2018 and Unity 6.0.

I remember when my team migrated a fairly large project from Unity 2018 LTS to Unity 2019 LTS, we ran into a number of issues too—many of which were due to changes like differences in serialization, not necessarily bugs. They were more like “breaks” caused by the transition.

And honestly, I think this kind of thing is common across most engines or frameworks when there’s a big version jump.

So going straight from 2018 LTS to 2022 LTS and then to Unity 6.0—I’m not surprised you’ve run into a lot of breaks.

But yes, it’s definitely frustrating when some critical bugs can’t be fixed on our end and require Unity to modify the engine itself. That’s something we often see with new Unity versions, and it can really slow down development.

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I tried 6.1. Then I tried an update of it. Still having a LOT of instability. The editor crashes almost every time I stop my game, when opening the project, the windows often don’t reposition themselves where they were before (across two monitors), sometimes after launching unity, clicking an asset will show nothing on the inspector window. I have to quit and relaunch it until it works again. On top of that, I’m getting random mesh glitches at runtime.

I’ve decided to downgrade back to 6.0 (which also isn’t perfect, but at least it doesn’t have all the issues above).

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this and other issues you have mentioned sounds like some sort of incompatibility with your hardware/software setup. think about it, if it happens frequently this would had been noticed by unity devs. I’m sure they can’t work on something so unstable.

So this leaves you to a couple of options, try to check what drivers you have, maybe you need to update them or downgrade them. it happens a lot with nvidia for example where a driver version can be awesome then the next version can destroy your GPU literally, then the next one will be awesome again. google your precise driver number + issues as terms and see how many other people reporting various issues you get. (also don’t rely on driver provided by third parties, like dell or assus, use the nvidia drivers)

one option you should check is if unity is using the heavy duty GPU like nvidia or the intel integrated on CPU graphic card. if you have a setup that has this combo.

if you still can’t make it work then both try to see if games work in general, get a high GPU demand game and play it for some time see if it behaves as it should. then also just open a bug report with unity with all the system data, maybe they can look into this issue.

it can be any number of reasons, disk storage with issues, GPU, normal RAM or GPU RAM problems. assume nothing test everything.

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No, I think it’s the fact that I work on a Mac, which eliminates a lot of variables when it comes to hardware, but I have a feeling that they don’t test their changes on Mac as much as they do on Windows.

I’m running a stock MacbookPro, in which previous versions of Unity run fine on. The bugs are in the version of Unity.

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last time I’ve heard about Apple, unity had a preferred relation with them as apple promoted them to be the game engine for their VR systems. Which I’ve not heard about it lately so probably is a complete failure. too bad, I was expecting apple to buy unity directly to have an inhouse app dedicated to graphical applications that is not unreal. But if the VR thing metaverse is a bust they don’t need unity anymore.

So theoretically unity devs should pay particular attention to the mac ecosystem.

Maybe they just updated stuff for newer apple hardware and that broke compatibility. How old is your macbook?

Did you checked the unity logs files? they add there a lot information about hardware access and files access and stuff like that, info that doesn’t appear in the console

the logs are here