Due to the CEO’s recent comments and the wealth of evidence by Unity’s actions, I feel I need to examine the strengths of the Unity product and how I best benefit:
Smaller mobile binaries
Better streaming of content
Using ironSource to publish and hopefully manage my titles for me
DOTS reworked into Tiny ASAP for mobile and web monetisation
Completely giving my title’s business strategy to ironSource to manage
To be clear, I am strongly considering this. If this is what Unity is strongest at and I want to make money, then could Unity staff get in touch? I would like to earn a lot of money.
To be clear, I do not feel I have misidentified Unity. It sounds like the problem was seeing Unity as a different product. It’s not really a shock to me but fighting this is dumb, if it is the exact design intent of Unity.
So if it boils down to this, we all really should be aggressively making money. I want to aggressively make money because only then can I sit back and have the luxury of picking any engine for what my passion products require.
"Unity Technologies unlike none of the other high-end engine manufacturers still use frequent domain reloads and antiquated proprietary C# runtimes, and appoint EA corporate kingpins as their CEOs…
It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with—they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots."
Hmm, it’s not really right to throw shade in that regard. It is only fairly recent that Microsoft finally opened up the Net world to allow for Unity to use it they way they need. Before that, a proprietarry system was the only way to serve all the various platforms they support (and that’s one of Unity’s strongsuits and something the few FOSS solutions do not support to this extent).
They are working on migrating, but you cannot do that so quickly with such a large codebase.
The problem with modern Unity is that it’s getting increasingly hard to use. The package compatibility issues, while better than a couple of years back, are still a pain to deal with. That’s on top of packages never reaching parity with whatever is built in, be it UGUI, Built-in renderer, Input, etc. The new tools are shiny, but somehow I still end up using most of the old systems, which are frozen in a time capsule from 2018.
Recent LTS releases are also somehow getting less stable, with major breaking changes that overstay their welcome for multiple minor releases. 2021.3.3 and 2021.3.4 were completely unusable due to a broken list inspector for custom types. And that bug got backported to 2020.3LTS as well. I now have to manually test basic engine features after each upgrade because Unity clearly are not up to the task.
And every time I hear new Unity news, they are expanding in new industries I don’t work in. Or they’re improving their advertising services which I don’t care about. GIGAYA news was the only real thing up my alley and they killed it. Unity are not solving my game developer problems anymore. They’re working towards increased profit for Johny boy and his merry band of shareholders. John is not making a game engine, he’s doing business where the most money is which is not in video games I make.
And while Unity the game engine is not going away anytime soon, I think the writing is on the wall and it’s time to consider other options - engines that solve real game developer problems.
.NET platform is considerably performant yet they insist on running with their old Mono/IL2CPP runtime (even worse, WASM/WebGL is built via a detour through IL2CPP… haha, can’t make that up, almost like “how can we use LLVM but make it as bad as ASM.js”).
GameObject still using magical implied reflection to bind Unity Event Methods?
camera, rigidbody and renderer identifiers being blocked by the old fake properties’ deprecation notice, even though they no longer work.
Can’t even instantiate/construct a MonoBehaviour?
The mess that is SendMessage, BroadcastMessage? And it’s not vestigial, PlayerInputManager uses this, it’s from Inputsystem. Which also generates a very weird class if you let it. And provides much better API that is as poorly documented as the SendMessage stuff.
Public is quietly implied serialized, but can’t show a [NonSerialized] in the inspector without writing an entire class to save my life?
The whole weirdness that are prefab stages. Ok it’s not C# specific. But wow.
== operator still overloaded for that weird Unity Null Check?
RuntimeInitializeOnLoadMethodAttribute with a handful of wonky LoadOptions instead of some clear entry symbols and expecting every program to implement them.
Using Bursted C# for DOTS code (shoehorning, more like - a DSL would have been the way to go)
Anything with Burst, really. I love the performance. But wow have they massacred the C# Language to get it. Should have just allowed inline C or, you know, a DSL that doesn’t need all the boilerplate.
No way to get Transform Children as an Array? (A proxy for the many oversights and inconsistencies in the API)
No way to provide Spans to methods like Handles.DrawLines? Unity really must like garbage.
Speaking of, a garbage Collector from, what, 20 years ago? At least it’s “incremental” now. Phew. Crisis averted.
No reasonable default Synchronization Context for System.Threading.Task? Come on. Can’t make your engine so pervasively single threaded and allows async, that’s intentionally MAKING people shoot themselves in the foot. Thank the Lord for UniTask.
2022.2 - No Cancellation Token Source for OnDisable, but one for OnDestroy, so as to add maximum insult to injury because of garbage collection?
Why the hell are Unity Event functions not multi threaded / parallel execution yet. All of DOTS builds on the premise they aren’t, and won’t be. (but they can sure be async though… Watch out for that synchronization context, kids!)
URP: Can’t write a pass like RenderObjects because RenderObjects uses internal API of com.unity.rendering.Universal
I’m scared of the new Roslyn stuff. Not sure if I should be, but I have my Compiler lock up at least once since Rosyln was brought in, it just sits there with a compile “Error” in the console that is actually just the version string of the MSVC compiler.
Scriptable Build Pipeline, just a sad LOL to close this list here. A hacky, proprietary mess on top of a lobotomized Gradle (it seems), why not use MSBuild or something that at least plays well with CI pipelines. Speaking of, we pay for unity cloud build but it’s several versions behind tech stream. And doesn’t even support the dedicated server built target yet which has existed for almost a year now.
Domain reloads shouldn’t be gone because of .NET 6, they should be gone because they are slow and interrupt development flow.
They could be mitigated at least by providing a configurable grace period before recompiles and also asset imports.
Also, there is no reason the interface should lock up like it does. I initially thought that the “Hold on…” Timer in Preferences was the grace period, but actually it just doesn’t show the progress indicator box - the UI is as unresponsive as with it. You can literally configure a lie.
Also cute - while unity is processing, try to drag a file or other objects from any window to another. If it comes over the Unity window, even if you did not release it, Unity swallows the HWND drag and drop messages EVEN THOUGH IT IS BUSY AND DOESNT LET YOU INTERACT WITH IT, essentially trapping your mouse cursor like the metaphorical Tar Pit Unity and its Domain reloads are.
I would also like to make alot of money. I am going to start creating an online game as well, as a solo developer. I will update the content regularly.
Now before I get into any gameplay systems or creating any design, I have mapped out all the monetization. I hope to make alot more money putting that first and foremost. I now see that finding the fun is more of an optional at this point with Unity and I will now try to find more money.
“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour.”
If your compulsion loop isn’t correct your end user eyeball container won’t be able to consume enough ads about ad related content and you won’t be able to turbocharge your earning bucks!
@hippocoder i totally agree, use Unitys best features and strengths and run with it. The only thing we can do. Would love to see you do just that.
@PanthenEye I agree that most of us still use the older (2017-2018) “tried and true” tools, and they have never failed me. I use 2019 LTS, and wont use newer version for awhile yet, as i dont want to waste time dealing with engine probs and less stability, i want to work on my projects.
'We have assessed the new data and come to a new era of online gaming. We have identified a core component of our new online ad-based game that keeps user’s eyes from blinking for an extended amount of time. Based on a cross-cost examination being completed with Amazon’s new cloud based AI MakeMyMoney, which uses machine learning to leverage next-gen cloud based computing with our ad-based user experience we can now safely say we highly expect user retention to blow up by at least 7%. Being that this is a solo developed online platform, we can expect revenue to rise by at least 13 dollars.
We are going to change the world. Don’t pursue gamers as a market. Pursue humans. The ones with eyelids that we can effectively keep open for longer."
If we’re talking money making strategies with Unity. Nutaku had a talk a couple of years back at Gamescom or Devcom, don’t remember which one. They make shitloads of money and they have a 10’000’000 fund for predatory free to play adult video games.
So make one in Unity, get published on their platform and make fuck you money, then retire and forget about Unity or make games in an engine that still cares about non-exploitive video games.
Man, if the only way to reasonably make money from Unity is to make ad filled mobile games, I think I’d rather go back to making content for Second Life.
well i can always go back to selling crack. honest work, ya know? Is it awful? yes. but people know it’s awful. It’s an honest transaction. I can look my customers in the eye and feel good aout what im doing. not like these gambling apps mocked up to be harmless phone games. Just good, wholesome, honest crack cocaine.
In they end they still lose money, so why bother, they haev diversify so much and haven’t proven to have a strong product for any market. Whenever I check film, only unreal name comes, and they have both proven high profile track records and plenty of grassroots pushing around very impressive visual. Unity had some stuff, then it kind of fell off. Same for cad and whatever, lumen looks like a one click solution vs shadergraph insanity.
Can we stop with the entirely counterproductive Unity bashing on irrelevant issues for no good reason?
Seriously, in recent years what‘s really started to become ugly and unmanageable about Unity is the anti-Unity flaming behaviour. No engine is perfect, specially not a complex one. Unity isn’t our engine and I do not share commonly held views expressed here. I see Unity working on many fronts and making good progress in areas that matter to me (DOTS) and also doing things I couldn‘t care less about and I‘ll just skip over these.
Maybe this is the ugly side of a tool that is extremely popular these days, so much so that competitors popped up everywhere (Unrealistic, Godotcom, …) forming their own communities and before we know it, the communities fight each other and then the Unity community sees the newcomers shine (mainly their marketing) and sure they make constant and well-marketed progress, on the surface way more than Unity but they do so only to be in a place where they support a FRACTION of what Unity can do (ie playing the catch up and USP game) while the Unity community sees this as a threat and starts to blame Unity itself for all kinds of things that probably don‘t even matter that much TO THEM at the end of the day.
Like instantiating MonoBehaviours, like, seriously, WHEN??? It would be a GAME CHANGER, right??
This is how one talks bad things into existence. Nitpicking.
And no matter how little I like it too: mobile is where the money is these days. People playing increasingly dumb and aggressively marketed pennyfishing games on ubiquitous mobile devices hanging on straps around their shoulders or squeezed into their trouser’s backpocket while cycling (and many are $1,000 devices!!). We cannot blame a company following where the money is, after all, we live in neoliberal capitalistic societies.
Fortunately, we also have room for well-made indie games not following trends. For that, Unity is one of the best tools to use and I don‘t see that changing anytime soon! Let‘s not care about an acquisition whose intentions and future outcome we cannot even begin to comprehend.
The positive thing about discussions like these: I think it shows that a lot of us REALLY CARE about Unity.
But maybe we should express that, from time to time where applicable, in compliments towards the Unity team doing all the hard work. For them, it certainly isn‘t easy either to read threads like this one, discuss it internally with their inside knowledge and then go about their job, fully motivated. Worst case scenario is when the community carries such negative resentments into the company and its culture, damaging it from inside.
All of DOTS builds on the premise they aren’t, and won’t be. (but they can sure be async though… Watch out for that synchronization context, kids!)