Would it work, are there Unity games that would be great as ESports games?
Would it promote Unity?
Could Unity set up challenges to make ESports games for the Tournament?
Or would a game development Tournament be better or complement a player’s tournament?
No it would not. They already do game development related contests and there is no point trying to jump in to eSports scene which has nothing to do with development.
Unity should sponsor like a indie dev hunger games…
“20 devs enter… only one may leave!”
What a game jam with paintballing or nerfing and pizza/coffee/coke only if your backers/faction can raise enough kickstarter cash?
Would you have time to make a game?
What if the Hunger Games arena was in VR and it was also where the developers compete for resources, e.g. power, bandwidth, cloud space, food, water.
I think maybe esports are a wee bit overrated at the moment.
I mean, I’m glad to see it flourish, but not at the cost of other good games.
Actually what will happen to ESports in the VR age, will there be a Rift (Seated) branch and a Vive (Boxed in 15fy sq.) branch?
An ESports-focused game design/jam, perhaps. Unity is an engine developer, not a game publisher. It wouldn’t really make sense for them to sponsor an E-Sport, especially if the game in question isn’t built using Unity.
Hosting or sponsoring some manner of design event for exploring the use of Unity for making E-Sports titles, that is a bit more plausible.
With what game? it would not benefit Unity to support esports with games made in unreal engine 4.
There is a long gap between sponsoring an E-Sport and convincing devs to work in the engine. It might work, but I’m not sure its the biggest bang for buck in terms of marketing and sponsorship funds.
Would rather see Unity invest in hiring the best talent in the world to indirectly make my game better. Then the games we all make promote Unity.
Hearthstone has a pretty healthy “esports” scene (if you consider card tournaments esports), but that is supported by Blizzard.
Unity hosting Hearthstone wouldn’t get more people interested in Unity and making games, it’d make them more interested in playing Hearthstone.
It is in the best interest for the game devs to fund their own esports, and for engines to work on making their engine attractive to those game devs.
RIGS might be the start of VR Esports
esports?
valve had source and a bunch of mods that turned into really popular games, those games then became valve’s own published titles to push steam platform onto everyone, hammer was a great leveleditor (actually still is all the current engines are joke for actual quick level design tools) and engine for its time, they still have huge amount of players for both tf2 and cs/go even l4d2… they still get a ton of custom maps built.
moba scene riot made its own engine, dota2 is again based on valve engine…
I think unity is still too much of a mobile game dev platform, its only now in last 3years that it has been starting to get pc titles made on it that have gained popularity, though frankly they are all suffer from problems (rust battle royal respawn lagfest imma right, yes i am) poor performance and bugs, and total crap mod support (unless you’re talking about the guys at oxidemod who have made it easier to extend mainly multiplayer server functionality in unity made games) But it doesn’t really cover fully supporting a community in the same way full modding does, and without that you can kiss goodbye to growing any sort of large community, because dlc’ the hell out of your community doesn’t lead to esports it just split community up if not done carefully, I mean unless you’re blizzard they always seem to find lots of fools their poorly developed titles, i stopped being one after diabolic 3) but after that I mean what you gonna do if you make a popular game on unity, tell your players to get unity and go buy a bunch of assets and tools that should be built in already to the engine in order to make maps etc for the game. unity themselves still see shoving ads at players and data analytics as more profitable from the mobile scrapform platforms than anything else imo and shoving cloud crap networking services at developers to buy.
To epic’s credit they gained 2 pretty popular titles in the last year with ark survival and rocket league, both could be esports titles… though i don’t see it, but they do have an engine and editor that provides the right kind of tools to support a big community and they jumped on supporting ark survival with ok-ish modding support (no c++ only yack blueprints) pretty quickly so they know they got work to do on that front. (fyi ark got modding support with epic’s help before the ‘esports’ tournament idea came along) To me any game dev that offers its community servers to host with, offering full mod support is really like the next step to cater towards growing a big community. While having a game where developer managers the server hosting and is gatekeeper on new content can also grow hugely popular they are often very different sort of games titles. esport titles have mainly come from a background of fast lan play where players can run host their own servers and dowatever fkk they want at least pre M$ console degeneration age, while the other type tend to be less twitch fps gaming and more strategy related where network ping between competitors has not factored in as heavily.
I don’t think unity will get esports anytime soon because the kind of developers and studio’s capable of really doing those types of games and growing them fast usually already have the skilled employees to just use a better engine for the job or bleh ‘roll there own’ …what unity does have though is ease of use for indie’s and not overly large studio’s but I’m starting to see that more of as an advantage for prototyping more quickly while actually building the final game is better done on ooh i dunno unreal or cryengine with a team to fill various roles.
I think it will be interesting coming years… unreal and cryengine come from making pc titles, i think they’ve both been kinda surprised by unity in the last few years completely wrecking there business models because of them just relying on big studio’s/publishers licensing their engine, who have made largely failed titles, and on there own games not doing hugely well. They’ve been pretty anti-indie for a while and they are paying the price of that, but shouldn’t take longer than another 1-2year to even things out if they do the right things to catch up on unity success. While tons of indies and smaller studio’s have made successful games on unity for various platforms… in numbers that is something, I’m sure a big esports title could come from it eventually but i say the feeling of unity have to many developers using there platform don’t really give a crap about making the tools that are needed they still think everyone should go buy an asset for what they can’t be bothered to provide for developers by default. And a lack of building there own games in house probably doesn’t help on that front either. And asset bundles… pff the whole thing sucks inc lack of tools for managing it and is pretty anti modding imo… a relic from catering for the mobile platforms and is more for pushing dlc than anything else.
Could it be changed and improved sure, anytime soon doesn’t seem so.
oh and then you have the whole anti cheat thing… building multiplayer isn’t easy, unity failed to get phase2 support out for unet when i thought it would be ready by now… authoritive servers are a must, I think the current years for unity is really a big rush for developers to get into game development like myself it is by sure the easiest engine for it and many are still learning, it will be a few years before some awsome title(s) come out that really start off any esport game on unity, or could be a title that is out now that over the years finally polishes up to be a big thing. but I don’t see that happening either given the kind of developers behind most the current top selling pc made unity engine games 