Greetings! In this post I would like to ask those users who joined and participated in this community from 2009 – 2011 to the present about what the Unity Answers and Unity Forums sites were like back then, with the honest purpose of collecting historical information about the Unity community.
If you are one of the users I described and have time I would really appreciate your response, but if you are not, it doesn’t matter, any information is welcome.
What were the sites and their community like?
How did the post system work?
Was it possible to delete or edit posts?
When I tried to ask on Unity Answers, there was no answer from users often.
The same situation was with many other questions. At least starting from the 2014–2015 years.
The forum was always active.
Finally, we have no division in the unified Discussions platform.
Well you can still read them! I’m kind of old school but hardly a veteran, signed up over 10 years ago.
The old forums are still here you just gotta poke around to see these old posts.
The first posts were from the small group of people who founded Unity and then it was pretty niche until it started exploding.
Then the forum and community evolved as Unity become mainstream and for years everyone was excited about this emerging engine and the notion that anyone could make a game that wasn’t just flash, and it was so cool to have a communal place for gamedevs to gather and share tips and workflows. Nothing like this had ever happened before we were still excited to just have internet, and things were a lot less jaded.
Back in the 2000’s the idea of a game engine was “We’re going to give John Carmack and John Romero a few million dollars to use the quake engine”. Hardly something novices could pursue. Unity Opened up this space to the masses, and the boards were where people came to figure out how to make games, it was a lot more engaging then. People were excited, new cool things were in every direction people were genuinely interested in looking into. There wasn’t this massive sea of unwanted asset store creations, well there kinda was, but people actually were excited about this stuff.
In a word they were exciting. New games, new genres, new platforms, new possibilities. We were excited for new render tech, new features, the nested prefabs.
Rather than the endless seas of technical talk there was a lot more general posts and people asking about broader concepts “how do i download Unity?”, “what does C# mean?”, and if you knew anything at all about gamedev you could come online and be a hero to the budding developers sharing your knowledge in a broad range of topics including art and design, not this stale, mechanized laundry list of technical issues for a few C# edge cases that fill the forums today. More novices and outsiders poking in to see what this was all about. There was also a lot less outside noise.
There was no minecraft back then, there was no Roblox. If you wanted to make games and unique digital experiences, you went to Unity, so the entire community was completely different. Some might be happier with having less novices poking around, but the forums feel a lot more lifeless without them now that they’ve found a home elsewhere.
Then you’ve got the Unity community on Discourse, you’ve got the reddit community for Unity, then you’ve got the people on X or Mastadon or wherever the heck else. We didn’t use to have all those options so everyone just came here and it was a nice melting pot. Now it can be a bit of a pick your poison, but that’s how things evolve overtime sometimes.
I’m hoping we can get back to more of that old school community. But Unity has to start putting out cool stuff worth talking about, and we as a community have to stop being such insufferable neckbeards if that’s ever going to happen
Snowballs chance in h@ll but you can dream!
Edit: Just saw Aras posting in there and he was one of many damned good devs that have left Unity over the years. And it kinda highlights something missing and that’s the personality. We also had Brackeys and we had Joachim Ante. While they weren’t on the board too much you still kinda miss the presence of visionaries and community leaders that made Unity feel human and that it’s going places.
Feel free to click on posters in these old threads and you can find offshoot posts using search tools and such. It’s intriguing but also sad to see how much gamedev has diminished in the past several years with all the chaos going on in this industry.
