Official: How Can We Serve You Better?

News & General Discussion
1

Hi all,

An exciting time to be making games these days, and we’re glad if we played a part in helping people get into game development and make a career out of it. But things change and even before the latest discussions surrounding game engines we have been wondering what we can do to move from “democratizing game development” to be more focused on “customer success”.

We have such a huge community, and active too: more than 1,000 new posts a month. We have been discussing this for many months, and we have done a lot of things internally that aren’t exactly visible from outside, but I would be very interested in an open discussion on how we can serve you better.

Now this is likely to spawn all kinds of responses, and I’ll likely put my foot in my mouth a dozen times, but hey, I’m a fallible human just like you :slight_smile:

Some fun-facts, observations and question to seed the discussion:

  • Unity has a crazy broad spectrum of users: from the largest studios down to a parent making a game on a weekend with their daughter and everything in between. And we have done a fair amount of talking to users and looking at analytics, and it’s clear we can’t make a simple divide between “Indies” and “AAA” audiences, it just doesn’t mean anything relevant in the same way that “web developer” doesn’t mean much anymore; it’s too general and doesn’t capture the challenges faced by our different types of users. Tell us who you are in this thread if you like; Freelance programmer? Student? Hobbyist? Artist? CTO of a big studio? It really helps us to know who we’re talking to in order to give comments relevant to you.

  • Nearly all people that have completed games are making money with Unity think it’s “really cheap” and we should charge more. Nearly all people who haven’t completed game think Unity’s the “most expensive thing on Earth”. That’s why we came out with a free version a long time ago to bridge that gap. There’s a subgroup of users that seems to be making 3D games for desktop (e.g. Steam or Kickstarters) that feel without the Pro features they can’t use Unity. How could we serve you better here and stay in business? Should Unity also offer a royalty scheme? Should we have extended Pro trial licenses? A Pro version with small watermark that you can use for development and then pay only on publishing? Ad-supported editor or something? Tell us what type of developer you are and what kinds of business model works best for you.

  • Many users wanted to make games for consoles but were blocked by numerous barriers to entry. Now, Unity Pro is essentially free or close to free on almost all platforms including consoles. Is this interesting to you?

  • Most games today are 2D games by a wide margin. Many more people making games in Asia than Europe. Many people in the forums seem to be making 3D games whereas most shipped games are 2D. Is it the case where it simply takes longer and is harder to make 3D games so you end up posting more here in the forums compared to the 2D game makers? What kind of games are you making? Where are you located?

  • We used to communicate a lot. Then we said some stuff, got busy with other stuff, and didn’t tell anybody. Unsurprisingly our users got angry with us and we perhaps stopped communicating as much as we should for fear of making more mistakes. We bad. Got it. Question is now what to do about it. Internally we got a lot of stuff; roadmaps, various testing groups, info on features, technical info that’s useful, etc. We’re already getting better at communication the past couple of months, and we have a ton of stuff in the pipeline, but what do you want to see? Are the technical blogs really helpful? Should devs reduce their workload and spend more time on these forums answering questions?

  • We used to sell software licenses only, now we also offer subscriptions. The pricing has been discussed at length in these forums and we’re up to date on the pros and cons of price, but what about preferences? Do you like subscriptions? How important is it for you to own software license?

  • Unity is currently closed source and we have talked about whether we should change that model for years. One of the issues with open source is that while a tool is small and focused it’s fairly easily to integrate community changes, but as it grows it becomes a tangled mess, bloated and difficult to fix. As a result most developers would stick with a certain build, use that, and only look at updating their source once their project is finished. With Unity, we have so much testing, integration and multi-platform experience we (usually) do a decent job of releasing builds that allow users to keep reasonably up to date all the time. How is your development structured? Do you like frequent updates with the knowledge your game will work on numerous platforms but no ability to tweak the source? Or you prefer to have source and manage it all yourself?

  • The biggest problem game developers have is: they have nothing to sell (for those that want to make games commercially). A lot of people are stuck in “development” instead of “shipping”. People that ship games have all kinds of cool tools and workflows in Unity and they love Unity because it works the way they want it to, whereas we see a lot of other people struggling to get their games done. We’re trying to help with that and have a lot of things we’ll be doing in this regard that we’ll talk about in the coming months. Meanwhile, what’s your biggest problems getting your game done? Besides fixing bugs and getting better at communicating, what are the big issues you’re facing?

As people read the replies to the thread, please keep in mind that our vocal, active community all seem to be making similar kinds of games and so be careful that the info you see here doesn’t necessarily apply to the majority. This also means I encourage those silent lurkers to delurk and have a voice; Making non-game apps with Unity? Making 2D games? Don’t speak English well and are shy? Never plan to ship and think your opinion doesn’t count? A total noob? Still a kid? Doesn’t matter! We want to hear from everybody :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Brett

2

I am a full time game developer at a company in New Zealand, on the side I have my own games company making its own monster truck racing title. I have been programming for 20 years and specialise in C# and Unity :slight_smile:

My suggestions…

1.) I’d like to see more developer activity in the Unity forums. The Unreal Engine forums have developers in nearly every thread helping out and giving insights into undocumented parts of the engine and tips and tricks. It’s very rare to have a Unity developer chime in on an issue.

2.) I like the subscription model, I think it’s the way forward. I think to remain competitive, but to also remain financially stable, Unity needs to go to a pure subscription model like others such as Adobe etc have done with a great success. Have one editor, that offers all platforms, for a low cost subscription fee of around $29.95 per month. Do away with Unity free. You can only login and use the editor if you have an active subscription.

At this price point Unity will convert many free users to paying users at a low cost, while those who may have pirated Unity may feel the software is now affordable and do the right thing and get a subscription.

3.) Setup a roadmap with voting like Epic has done in Trello for Unreal Engine. Let your customers see what you’re working on and what has the most votes.

3

Epic is just getting started and has a tiny community, and like us in the early days, were able to have a lot of devs answering in the forums. We can do that too, but it comes at a price obviously: is it worth our devs spending time answering loads of questions instead of bug fixes and new features? It’s not all or nothing of course, but it’s easy to say we want more of everything for less cost, but something’s got to give.

For subscription: Do you want to cancel at any time? What happens if you cancel? Does it become the “free” version with limited features?

4

I edited my original post a few times :slight_smile:
Please re-read, thanks!

The problem with reverting to free is people will use Free then subscribe to Pro when releasing, then revert back to free, the model I suggest prevents this.

Regarding developers in the forums, I’m not asking for devs to spend an hour a day reading the forums, I’m just asking for a little more visibility and insight. At the moment it’s very rare. Just a touch more.

5

@Meltdown

Haha, okay. I’m too fast to reply :wink: Got to pick up my kids from school, so I’ll be away for an hour…

6

I’m a programmer who has just started out within the last half of a year. I plan to make a career out of game development, and spend almost all of my time programming.

I’m fine with the current model so far, but I’m only using Unity Pro without any add-ons at the moment (with subscription). The issue I’m going to face is when I need to buy add-ons for iOS, Android, Web GL, and who knows which others. Given that I’ve just started out and haven’t sold any games yet, I don’t have the funds to afford all this. Yet, I need pro versions to get my game out. So for me, some kind of payment method upon publishing would work better.

I’m making a 3D very unique twist on a voxel game (place and destroy blocks).

I love the blog posts, tutorials, and all the other content posted on the Unity website. I don’t think that developers should slow down their work to answer questions, though. Perhaps have people dedicated to these roles, so that there isn’t as large of a compromise being made (those dedicated people would have to have information from developers, but I would think it would be faster to get information from them and then take the time to write it out on the Unity website forums).

I love the subscription. I couldn’t afford the $1,500 payment upfront. As I said above, I’m just starting and don’t yet have funds. When subscription was introduced, I was able to get the pro version.

I have no desire for open source personally. I enjoy not having to worry about the source code - let other people handle that while I work on my own code. That’s less stress on my shoulders. Others have pointed out that having source code access could benefit all of us because the community can help fix issues. As you pointed out, though, that may not work so well. I don’t have experience in such an area, so I can’t speak about it. But I do appreciate not having to worry about Unity’s code.

To be honest, the biggest issue I’m facing is performance. I’m not sure if this is the kind of thing you’re asking. But a complaint I have is Unity’s lack of support for multithreading. Making a voxel engine type game, there are many situations where multithreading would greatly improve performance. It seems as simple of things as testing for equality can’t be done on other threads (unless I’m making beginner mistakes), and that’s very much a hindrance.

I’m happy to know the physics system in Unity 5 will support multithreading. That’s a great start, as mesh collider building is having a huge hit on performance (I have my reasons for not making my own physics system…).

7

As a hobbyist and full-time C# developer, Unity has largely been great. I’d have to vote for keeping the free version though, as a continuous subscription for Unity would cause me to jump the fence completely ( the whole “cancel anytime and keep it” bit for UE4 is essentially free for hobbyists like myself).

The things that have had me looking elsewhere have largely been the included tools (well, that and RenderTextures, I switched to Unity after XNA was abandoned by MS). An included shader editor would be nice. Maybe a simple/extensible node editor framework for the editor gui? I know node editors aren’t that hard to write, but it’d be nice to have.

The biggie is that the UE4 deal, at least for me as a hobbyist, makes the feature set of Free seem more like a promotional product for Pro. And it’s really mostly due to the UE4 deal. It wouldn’t take much to make me happy cough RenderTextures/Oculus Support cough with Unity in light of it though.

Communication-wise, I think just passing more info, and more often to the community managers would go a long way.

Edit: I also broke my cardinal rule of no Internet postings after 11pm for this >.> we’ll see how that turns out tomorrow.

8

I’m on the “I don’t think it’s too expensive” side. For me at least, I do work on contract, so if the companies that hired me had to pay royalties on the things that I’ve built, I wouldn’t be able to use unity. It’s an interesting twist, but makes me happy I can do business with unity. I don’t mind the subscription model, but as mentioned it does seem to be disadvantaged in terms of pricing, especially if you plan to be a long term patron of unity. And I plan to be, because unity is great. :slight_smile:

One problem I’ve encountered, and I think is pretty common among unity users, is the farther away from the standard use case, how well features work gets a little shaky and ‘just works’ no longer applies. I’ve personally run into issues with trying to load/create audio clips at runtime, movie textures have huge issues (I’ve been reading some threads on the same issue reported back in 2009), and other things like lack of control over full screen and some default controls. Those are just issues I’ve had, but I’m sure everyone making a sizable game encounters many issues of their own with features that impact their ability to move forward on a project. I think open source, even if realistically isn’t useful for most users, does offer the promise that you could un-stuck yourself if you encounter a bug that may or may not be fixed in a reasonable time frame, or that perhaps the bugfixing process could be democratized more.

I do feel fairly comfortable upgrading to new releases even while working mid project, so I think that’s a rather strong point in unity’s favor. If there are issues in new versions, I don’t usually encounter issues with regressions. I do think sometimes really minor fixes take a long time comparatively long to get out. Stuff like the “rect[2] == rt->GetGLWidth() rect[3] == rt->GetGLHeight()” error spam when using image effects and re-sizing the viewport is an example of a bug that was fixed really quickly internally, but we won’t see it until… I don’t know, there’s no indication when we might get updates. I guess that’s part of it too, the inability to plan around unity patches and fixes.

9

@JasonBricco, Xgundam05, Doddler

Thanks for telling me about yourself and providing info, exactly what’s useful for us! Be great if everyone does the same!

10

Ok my name is Ben and I am a Unity3D User -

I am currently working with my Dad (A 10 yr.+ software engineer who programs in C#) we work out for our home. We are currently working on our first title. I am the artist he is the programmer.

Communication - Show us the road map for the next few months. I know that these are subject to change but Show us the road map for unity for the immediate future (Next few months). I am interested in the new shiney performance saving features. :smile:

Feature Suggestions - from an non programer point of view.

A Visual Shader tool solution similar to shader forge. We do not understand shaders at all… Tools like shader forge and UScript are awesome but expensive for people with a fixed income and need to run a family as well.

A Visual logic tool similar to that of Playmaker or UScript. Something that allows us to iterate on simple things as well as ship in a final game. - Doors opening, Triggering alarms, etc. I really do not want to bother my dad when he is working on core gameplay scripts to work on a door opening script.

The editor has always felt bare to me as an artist - the lack of a easy way to block out something quickly and easily has always left something to be desired with Unity compared to other editors. (See Radiant or Source engine BSP/CSG tools) give me a tools similar to hammer or Radiant and but build from the ground up for unity3D.

Terrain - I know I am not the only one on this however - The current terrain system is old and (might?) need replacing with something more efficient. Just saying…

Accessibility -

Unity Pro has always been a pie in the sky thing for us… Mainly due to its performance saving features we need pro for our game if we are to make the game world bigger… We are currently working on a small top down GTA clone. Things like level streaming, and Occlusion culling, etc. we are not going after making the next rembrandt of games. We will leave that to the AAA Studios. But we do need performance saving features - As well as the ability to drill down to find performance problems in our game.

Graphics for us are secondary - However awesome lighting is always welcome :slight_smile:

EDIT 1 -

Suggestion about Unity3D what would it take to open source it similar to what epic did? I would like see Unity go sub based - I made a post about this a while back… let me see if I can dig it up

EDIT 2:

Maybe it could do with some tweaking but overall… Unity makes money back on the sub license and people who have bought the pro license up front get to publish royalty free. Once again just a thought.

11

I think these two points really hit the mark. The Pro product is expensive if you’re working on your first game and you don’t have any guarantees of success. That said, there are NEVER any guarantees of success, so you either have to be confident in your ability to make your money back, or you need to be willing to gamble. That’s assuming you need Pro features, otherwise it’s a no-brainer to grab the free product.

Having shipped a few games and made quite a bit of money, I definitely don’t think Unity is too expensive. I’m certainly not saying you “should charge more” though :slight_smile:

I do think the add-on platform prices could do with some revision. Paying the same amount for a single add-on platform as you pay for the “base product” (which builds to multiple platforms) has never seemed fair to me.

Overall, I’m very happy with everything in the Unity world. I agree with the other guys that it’s nice to see the developers in the forums answering questions here and there, but it doesn’t break my heart when it isn’t happening.

12

I’d like a IAP software built into Unity that could work on any platform, it would be awesome. I realise that IOS probably would hate it and not allow it but on Android, Web and PC it would be awesome. especially if developers could link their games so that say someone is playing on a tablet and they move to a PC they still have their IAP, because they would log in with their Unity Account and then add stuff like badges and whatnot also their Unity buddies that also have accounts and can see the games their friends like and play them.

So it slowly eats up the world, than the evil that is Google removes plugins and everyone is like “Awww shit, my web player games don’t work now” and Unity is like “Yo, ain’t no problem, just install the Unity Arcade and play your game in peace(Almost wrote Penis there but saved it just in time)” so the word gets out about this program people can install and play the old Unity Webplayer games(Because, lets be honest WebGL will come too late and will be to slow) and secretly this was Unity’s plan because now they can act all nice and be like “Oh, on the Unity arcade we will only take 20% of IAP sales if you upload your game to our servers”, as instead of a simple browser alternative to play web players it is now a digital store. then the obvious move by devs is to start doing builds directly for the Unity Arcade of any size(Because games would be saved) and then Unity needs to change the name of the build option and have it that it automatically uploads to the Unity Arcade and bazzar! Unity now has a full on steam competitor and seeing that Unity engine sales will be tiny to the amount that the Unity Arcade is making they just give the engine away.

13

Thanks for joining this thread and I’ll be trolling it as it evolves. I’m heading out tomorrow to speak at the DevGAMM developer conference in Moscow, so may not be super responsive for the next few days.

14

@ bibbinator @ David Helgason

Do you remember ( if you were around then ) when Unity was Mac Only? Do you remember the plan, the strategy for improving Unity and increasing sales? Well, that was the Plan/Strategy that got Unity here where it is today.

Just go back in time, take that Blueprint and pretend Unity is still Mac only and implement that strategy/plan again. Why? Well, that particular Blueprint turned out to be very effective and very powerful.

Why waste it?

15

@HeadClot88

Perfect, really helpful with the additional info. You’d be surprised at how many people fit your description and family-related team of people :slight_smile:

Terrain system is old. It’s on the roadmap and progress has been made, but nothing that will help you in the next few months. We’re working with Autodesk on FBX export related things, and we’re looking to integrate our new PBR shaders into their tools to make it easier for artists to see their work in their tools and go straight into Unity. It’s true that when there’s an Asset Store solution we generally will try to solve other problems not already solved in order to provide the most robust set of tools we can as quickly as we can. That said, it’s reasonable that we would work on some sort of visual shader editor and make that available to everybody.

Noted on rest of your comments.

Whether you have Unity pro or not, for a top-down GTA clone I wouldn’t use streaming or occlusion culling. I would create pieces/blocks (not city blocks), props, scenery, etc. and assemble them into levels. Then I would write a simple C# tool that figures out how many of each type of block, prop, scenery, etc. could be on screen at once and create a pool-based system. This would be what a large studio would likely do, and this is why people love Unity because they can write such tools really easily that essentially allow each game to feel like a custom written engine tailored to their needs. I’ll see about getting a blogpost with an example of this done.

Good luck!
Brett

16

I’m a programmer for a small UK based Indie. We’ve shipped several mobile games (3d 2d) using Unity.

One thing I’d like to see:

Give feedback on Feedback! Let us know that you’re actively monitoring the Feedback section by commenting on the suggestions and stating the progress of implementation (if any) or state that they are not likely to be implemented, etc. If a suggestion is implemented then give details of when it is available.

17

Are you saying you couldn’t get multi-threading working using the .NET libraries?

18

I strongly dislike subscription model for one simple reason, you never own the software.

Now for many young users they wont care about that, they seem the cheapness, the ease of paying small chunks and jump in with both feet, but its a lack of foresight. I know personally when I get around to retiring I want to be able to continue to use the software I’ve developed expertise at, but its quite likely going to be hard to justify an on-going subscription when you no longer have income and have to survive off your pension (assuming you have one). I mean looking to the future everything is going to be subscription and unlike some its not going to be a case of a single subscription to one product but multiple, which means well you might be well off enough to afford some you may have to make choices between them.

Often people say well you wouldn’t keep using old software, which is simply not true. I still use PS CS2, have never had a need to update, heck I still have PS 5 (not CS5 just 5) on my old xp machine as it was so damn fast to use. With Unity although I own Unity Pro for 2.6, 3.0 and 4.0 I still used 3.5.7 for 90% of my projects due to legacy requirements and have only recently began to move new projects over to 4.3.4.

Indeed one of the main reasons Adobe moved to a subscription model was that people and companies would often skip a generation or two in terms of releases, particularity for mature products like Photoshop where there are few innovative features left. Doing so enabled them to lock users in as well as encourage those users who used to pirate or who would choose a cheap/free alternative. However as I’ve explained above it is a short-sighted business model and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it change eventually.

Of course the solution is simple, just offer a method that means you get to keep the last version of a product once you hit a certain amount of paid months/years. This can easily be balanced against ensuring that a subscriber pays the cost of what it would have been to own the software under the previous model as well as ensuring that subscribers couldn’t abuse the system. For example if I subscribe to Photoshop for more than 5 years, then when I stop I get to use the version up until I stopped paying for ever afterwards, but if I resubscribe then the ‘buyout’ option gets reset so I have to subscribe for another 5 years. Such a scheme provides the piece of mind to know that regardless of circumstance should you pay enough to cover the cost of the software that you will get to keep it eventually. Especially on Windows where software will tend to continue to work for far longer and many more versions than say on a Mac.

19

This is something we’re experimenting on new ways to deal with this, and Graham’s team is now making dot dot releases for enterprise customers and it might be something that if successful we can use to be much more rapid on our simple fix response. No promises, but wanted to let you know it’s something we’ve already found a solution for possibly.

20

@SteveJ

Yeah, we have a bunch of stuff to help developers be more successful in the pipeline. I know that may not help today, but helping developers from idea to app store is what we see as the next step.