I was looking around the Collaboration section of the Unity forums and I had this idea:
What if Unity made a website where everyone could easily collaborate on games together? Instead of everyone’s little projects being scattered all through the forums, it sure would be great if there was one place with about ten active games, and you could join any one you liked, and when it was done Unity Games (previously Union) could publish it and they would take thirty percent of the profit, and the remaining 70% would be split up between the people who made that game, according to the amount of work they did. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Also there could be built in instant messaging for the members of the team, and project management, like Trello, but all built in. Also I think an important thing would be having your real name on the site, because that’s how it would be in a physical game studio. Well if any of the Unity Tech guys are reading this, I’m telling you, you guys should do this! It would be such a great thing for the whole Unity community.
Here’s a thought: make one yourself and leave Unity to do what it does best: improve their game engine.
Well, I would if I could, but I don’t know anything about web development…
To Create3dgames;
Knowledge is power. Good idea.
I get your line of thinking but it won’t work the way you are suggesting. It sounds cool in practice, in theory these collaborations fall apart without strong dedicated leadership(and normally money).
You could use confluence or jira to manage a project like this.
Not something Unity would need to be worried about. Although it would be a great community project (if it got popular).
From what I’ve seen any who try to start their own Unity site from these forum’s doesn’t get much reception.
But if a site like your idea is done really well, and done professionally it may just work.
@TheRaider Well, with my idea there would be leadership and definately lots of money.
@Meltdown The best people who can do this really well, and professionally is Unity themselves! And it is something they need to be “worried” about because it would benefit them the most.
What makes you think they need to be worried about it? Because im pretty sure they don’t care about managing collaboration projects.
90% of Collaboration projects are a joke that will make zero dollars. I couldnt think of anything worse than trying to manage a collab project.
@JamesLeeNZ Exactly! 90% of collaboration projects fail. More than that probably. Which is exactly why there needs to be an official place where we can collaborate successfully and make money. Its like how Unity asset sharing and selling was before the Asset Store. Imagine if Unity had said “Oh, asset selling? No, we cant worry about that. We need to work on the game engine.” There would be no Asset Store. Likewise, I think Unity needs to make a solution for collaborative successful games.
Yea… not really. If people can’t figure how to collaborate, or work with others using existing chat/email/vc tools and get some sort of organization, they aren’t going to be able to finish a game in the first place. Organizing and communicating is critical in working with a team. A babysitter site won’t solve that. All would do is cause more headaches for UT. They make the tools, you make the game.
If you really think it will work, just build a forum site yourself and set it up.
No they are not. They are not website/collaboration system developers. They are game engine developers. Their business is not seeing pipe-dream (in most cases) collaborations between indie developers succeed. This has nothing to do with their business model.
Here’s a thought - how about collaboration on dev kits instead? I see so many people planning to create a MMORPG for example, if these people worked together to build a base engine for their game then they might get half-way there.
So…Unity would take 30% of the profits for setting up a site that showcases 10 or so game projects initiated by some user/group. All that Unity would be providing would be…a website, with “built-in” project management/trello and instant messaging…
I think TheRaider was referring to money during development for the developers. Making a game takes a lot of work. For a developer to go no-pay till after release takes a lot of motivation and trust. There is still no guarantee or higher chance that the project will succeed compared to doing it the typical way, at least from the way you’ve described it.
In my opinion, most collaborated no-pay-during-development projects only work with close-knit teams with good leadership.
How would you go about tracking and peacefully splitting up the profits to these developers based on “the amount of work”? Especially if you’re thinking many developers will pop in and start helping out. There is coding, graphics, sound, animation, modelling, etc. I’m not saying it’s impossible to come up with a scheme, but it’d be rather hard I’d imagine.
The rest of the features of whatever tools being built-in for one site can be done with other services/applications. It may not be super duper easy like logging in and boom you’re setup. But once a member of the team is set up which is pretty much the hard part of joining a collab project, and if that member won’t put out the effort to do that then…I can’t see those developers being very helpful.
Under the assumption that this ‘leadership’ is still the typical user, and Unity has no control over the project. I still don’t see much benefit from having Unity involved. But if Unity did have control over the project in some way. Where they can replace project leaders if they fail or disappear. Then it makes a little bit more sense.
The most/only beneficial thing about your idea in my opinion is that if Unity does it, it would provide nice advertisement/showcasing to whatever ~10 Collab projects that were chosen. Most of the time those scattered collab projects fail because of poor leadership/no experience/no skill. So I don’t think this would help clear up the scatter collab projects.
There wouldn’t be just ten games in total. There would be ten games actively in development at a time. When one gets finished, another can be started.
Where are the successful collaboration projects? People don’t like the OP’s idea 'cause ‘Collaboration’ projects are mostly people with no skills, hoping to work 1 hour/week, and magically end up on some top-10 list.
My advice: Before trying to collaborate, build something solo! Prove you can actually complete a real project. Once you’ve proven that to yourself, you may just find that collaboration wasn’t necessary after all.
Gigi.
I know. Doesn’t really change what i was saying.
@Gigiwoo2 Well I have built games solo before. And I’d like to build games with other people in the future.