@LeonhardP This was more than I was expecting and I really do appreciate you taking the time on this response. Some follow-ups:
How will it continue to provide feedback if no one is working on it?
Getting to the last 10% is the toughest part of any production. However, it’s often the most valuable for finding where your weak points and edge cases are, providing critical information as to how to build your next project and what tools you’ll need to get there. Taking a project across the finish line allows for honest, thorough retrospectives which are so, so, so vital. Not to paint a target on @Andy-Touch and team (who have been nothing but professional throughout), but everything that was communicated at GDC and since the layoffs has indicated that the project was within scope and on schedule.
I’m totally sympathetic to the fact that economic realities happen, but what this communicates to me is that Unity doesn’t consider the final phase important in this regard, which is a perspective I can only understand coming from those completely disconnected from the realities of game development.
I understand the desire for cleanup when opening up a project to the public (or even internal teams). But many of us that were looking forward to this, it ain’t our first rodeo. We weren’t expecting perfection and are capable of taking a nuanced look.
There were also many solutions here that didn’t include shutting things down completely - beta gating it, opening it up in stages / modules, or even simply releasing ‘as-is’. Unity waxes about ‘synergy’ in the abstract but here you had a concrete instance that people were actually excited about. It’s extremely concerning how little consideration seems to have been put into alternatives to canning the entire thing.
Then why not just pause the project and spin up a new one? Support the team in evolving in scope? A simple example: one of the first things the team talked about in the GDC presentation is the pain of locking yourself into a render pipeline at the start of production.
There is sooooo much richness contained in just that ONE insight. It touches on feature sets, platforms, performance, and building shaders, materials, and tooling that can be shared across projects, all of which seriously impact the bottom line of teams that choose to build with your engine. How does Unity plan to get any level of holistic feedback going forward without an internal productions team that’s worked on a scale larger than a one-off demo and under pressure of meeting tight deadlines and ambitious goals? Because years after SRPs were lifted out of preview, in addition to ‘which render pipeline should I use?’, we’re still asking questions like:
There are some very talented people working on the SRPs, and some really amazing projects have been done in them. I’ve worked on some. And in the end, these are just a few micro examples from one aspect of the development process. But dogfooding, integrating your bottom line into the equation, it’s a forcing function to creatively solve for all the things. They reveal your blindspots in an immediate and powerful way, whether it’s animation, audio, story telling, AI, UI, even monetization!
So again, in these and other areas, how does Unity plan to gather feedback and improve how they holistically look at these tools going forward?