Poll: Should Unity invest in making a full game?

News & General Discussion
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I’m curious about what the community thinks of this. I feel like of all the things Unity could work on right now, making a high-quality online game would be the absolute most important. Open-source would be a bonus. And needless to say… it would have to be made using only publicly-available Unity releases

I say this because some parts of the engine seem to require a lot of work, and the best way to understand how to fix them would be to make an actual game. For example…

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that it would necessarily take time and resources off of direct engine development. I still think it would be well worth it, though.

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We already sort of discussed this here: It would be cool if UT make "games"! - Industries - News & General Discussion - Unity Discussions

But having recently re-evaluted (due to various testing) Xenko, Unity, Lumberyard, CryEngine and after spending a lot of time with UE… All I’ll say is they really, REALLY should.!

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I think there are many smaller things which don’t get enough attention. If UT went through the effort of dogfooding their systems and really producing a high polish title, I think there would be improvements across the board.

It’s one thing to read a bug report, it’s another thing to deal first hand with the problem.

I do think that Unity could use a bit more ‘skin in the game’, and that it’d produce good results for everyone.

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My answer was no, but it’s much more of a tentative no. I don’t care what they do as long as the new Input API is released in a timely manner. Ideally before the current project I am working on reaches the feature freeze point.

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Speaking of the new Input System… its release is imminent, I think: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/welcome-new-input-system-resources-and-info-please-read.397153/page-3

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If they made a game they would see what things need improvement. There is merit to that.

However, I prefer how we the users are basically already that feedback system. If they used resources to do that, would it clog the pipe and result in our feedback being less recognized? Would it affect their involvement in the community?

I think it would, and prefer for them to not commit lots of resources to a large, polished and publishable game.

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What if they invested that $400 million they recently received into forming an in house team and making a fairly large game so that it didn’t impact current engine developers at all? Well other than refocusing a bit to nail the low hanging fruit issues the game dev team run into.

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That would certainly be a different scenario. Personally I still don’t endorse the idea, there’s really no guarantee that it will actually improve any issues and as far as I know most of the low hanging fruit and hot issues are well know, so it really just boils down to how they prioritize features and bugfixes.

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There are a few ways to look at the issue:

I don’t mean to compare Unity and Unreal again, but Unreal looking for 5% gross sales means that their business is going to be more focused on providing tools that result in successful game sales.

Unity’s business model is more divorced from customer results. They make money from more people using the software without any direct compensation from sales/income.

Personally, I’d like to see Unity’s interests move a bit more in line with seeing their customers be successful rather than expanding the customer base as widely as possible.

I’m not saying “Unity doesn’t care if their customers are successful”, they certainly do, but the incentives and business models are different.

Any time I’ve ever seen a development effort dogfood (use their own tools to build a product) the results have always been better:

  • bugs tend to be nailed faster
  • problems addressed more completely
  • apis produced that reflect usage and are smoother to work with.

From a business perspective, obviously Unity’s plan is kicking ass, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it. After all, I’m not a shareholder, all I care about is the engine and toolset.

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This has been discussed before, the answer (my answer) is still “no”.

Making unity develop games does not guarntee improvement of the engine, and can result in half-hearted overly specific solutions and workarounds that would not be useful for every engine user.

Now, @frosted has a good point about business model, because unity pricing scheme does not really encourage them to be interested in customers being successful.

Some changes in gathering feedback, dealing with bugs, etc - those could be helpful. But unity suddenly deciding to start making games? I think this will provide no improvement for the engine.

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I voted yes, not for features and all, but to understand what a scalable workflow looks like. Making mini games for tut has limits that don’t reflect what UI, workflow and pipeline is needed to make great big games with a team. They have the mini game market completely secure now.

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Do you really want Unity to start pumping out games to compete with the ones that we make?

Competing with your customers is always a bad business plan.

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I think Unity provides a great system for prototyping and simple games but once the level of complexity exceeds Unity’s thresholds it makes making games more complex and harder/slower.

Aspects like interactions e.g. object A interacts with object B is an inherent part of game development, be it collisions, spells, dialogue or any other type of in game interaction.

Are simple to start with but as the number of elements increase the amount of work compounds.

The other aspect of this is the fake it to make it side of game development, be it a dynamic weather system via skybox or the harnessing of the GPU to show more complex scenes or particle FX.

Then there is the garbage collection system in Unity which can cause major performance spikes in a system that does not provide a bespoke memory management system.

The disparate and broken nature of Unity’s technical developments, Input, Terrain, Prefab, Scripting and Experimental features. Have all spent way too long outside of the Unity main branch.

Or the inability of Unity to provide access to the full power of our CPU’s or GPU’s from it’s programming language.

It’s use of separate PBR textures when real world games use texture channels to save on bandwidth and memory.

Do you know that the Unity navmesh system cannot handle moving platforms, something I found out by trying to recreate the first level of DOOM which has an elevator.

Or should I mention the fact that the Unity PhysX system has a way to do large world with origin shifting but that Unity does not support or show this aspect of the PhysX api within it’s own API commands (to my knowledge).

My point is that only by making a high end game that shows of Unity and highlights it’s weaknesses will Unity improve.

IMHO Unity should make a A, AA or AAA standard game with a very large world to push the engine forward.

However I suspect sadly this will not happen, just my gut feel for what Unity is doing or not doing and the direction it is heading.

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You mean like:

  • source engine
  • cryengine
  • unreal engine
    ?:stuck_out_tongue:

Joke aside, they don’t have to make a good game™, they only have to make an exhaustive tech demo with functional gameplay used to demonstrate the implementation of key features working well and have deep insight about workflow and pipeline necessary to make project at that scale… you can breath now :sunglasses:

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Duplicate topic. There are many existing discussions on this topic. Closed.

If you want continue the discussion, please do so in this existing thread:

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