Reflecting on Unity's Trustworthiness and Decision-Making in 2024

News & General Discussion
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Hello Unity Community,

I’ve been away from Unity for quite some time and I’m now looking to understand the current state of the platform, especially in light of the significant licensing changes attempted last year. I’m interested in gathering an unbiased view of how these developments have influenced Unity’s trustworthiness and its relationship with developers:

  • Trust Issues: After last year’s concerns with licensing changes, what is the general sentiment in the community towards Unity’s trustworthiness now? I appreciate insights from both those who have continued using Unity and those who have moved onto different engines.

  • Leadership and Decision-Making: Are the same leaders who were involved in the previous decision-making processes still in charge today? Or has there been a change in Unity’s leadership that could influence its future direction?

  • Potential for Future Changes: Does Unity still possess the power to make substantial licensing or policy changes out of no where like last year? How is this reflected in the current terms of service, and what measures have been implemented to ensure transparency and fairness?

I apologize if a similar thread has been posted recently—I couldn’t find one upon searching.

Thanks for your insights!

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We had tons of these discussions.
Most them been locked as was more rant than anything.

I plan to use Unity, as long it is feasible for me. In the end it is just a tool.
Not that other engines are automagically better.
Other has own issues, and a lot bad stories around them too. Just less prominent to the public.
Either way, I don’t care, as long it works for me.

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But how? If you ask Unity, everything is fine and dandy, they are the pinnacle of user-friendly corporations. If you ask us, we tell you that the company is rotten to the core and the decision making is deliberately harming users and usability and they don’t care about users anymore, the only aims are profit and stupid and misplaced marketing.

Yes, they can change price and license on a whim and they demonstrated that they are willing to do that. If you can’t weather off an engine change in mid-project in the lifetime of your next project, you shouldn’t start with Unity. If you think you can ride out, then you can, just know what you’re jumping into.

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Given how their last attempt of license tampering were received, I reckon they aren’t that interested in trying to pull the rug again any time soon. A large chunk of their users were already alienated by their recent behavior, no need to alienate even more.

At the end of the day, their value proposition has to be competitive. If it isn’t no one will use their product and services. And competition is great right now. Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot are all amazing tools. This will keep them in check, at least to an extent.

I’m sticking with Unity for now because I have ongoing projects in it. As for my next project, we’ll see.

Unity is still a great tool fitting a large variety of projects. Other engines may offer something it doesn’t (the same way Unity may offer something others don’t), but it usually comes at the cost of something else. When choosing your engine for your project, you will always have to weigh the pros and cons.

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Because Unity has been great at learning from their mistakes…

Did you know they are moving the forums to Lith- I mean Discussions in the near future?

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Thank god. Finally I will be free of this place and can fully focus on my project instead!

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Have you seen the transcript from the Q1 2024 earnings call? Unity’s management thinks that everything is fine as far as I can tell.

https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/05/09/unity-software-u-q1-2024-earnings-call-transcript/

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The preceding comment feels a lot like them dancing around how much of that is likely because of the migration from the now removed Plus to Pro though.

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They’re definitely dancing around but I wouldn’t be surprised if Unity’s management believed their own narrative.

Unity and Godot are not even remotely competitive with Unreal Engine.

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Unity management believing their own narrative has been the source of many problems.

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You deem this equivalent to pulling the rug?

I reckon the majority of earning calls will come across as cold-hearted and cynical to someone observing from the outside.

The value proposition in my book still works for me. If it doesn’t for you, that’s ok. There are alternatives.

If they weren’t, nobody would use them.

Unreal Engine is most definitely the only choice for certain titles. But, for other titles, it’s not a good fit.

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Your post was about the value of the engine. Unreal Engine’s value is so far beyond the other two that they’re simply not competing on that front. Godot is popular because it’s open source. Unity is popular because it’s established. Unreal Engine is getting better wildly fast. Godot is improving reasonably fast. Unity is stagnant.

There are engines out there that are so completely backwards and outdated that they make no sense and people still use them so that’s not a reasonable way to determine value.

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Game Engines are most definitely competing with each other, but not necessarily in the same areas.

Furthermore, what value does having meta human characters, world partitioning, nanite and lumen have, if you’re working on a mobile title making use of none of those things?

Whether or not something is valuable to someone depends on the project parameters.

There is value in open source. In fact, some value it a lot more than shiny, proprietary features.

That’s true. But I don’t see how that’s contradictory to Unity still providing value for current and future projects.

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If you look solely at the desktop features you’re going to miss all of the features that it has for mobile and the fact that it has been getting faster and easier to use on those platforms with every major release.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/unreal-engine-5.4-release-notes

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How are the build sizes? Last time I investigated this, they were atrocious in comparison to Unity. Furthermore, Unreal Engine left a lot to be desired in terms of soft integration.

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I don’t know. I’ve seen projects to minimize it for Windows (example linked below), but I haven’t looked into it myself as I’m not typically the one that has to deal with that thing.

https://github.com/pfist/Nano

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I’ve been working with Unity for 16 years, been active on these forum for most of that time. I have zero trust left in Unity after the cascade of horrible decisions they have made in technical and management over the last 6 years. I’m exploring another engine, and I only come to these forums to feed my salt addiction.

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this is very true, for those of us making web based games, from the bigger 3 we cant pick unreal, they dropped web support, now this helps them 2 fold, 1, they dont have to put up with all the whining of needing to support as many levels of capabilities that unity is trying to do, but also meaning their code is naturally then more focused and can be defaultly more focused.

godot is also working on c# scripting, not just gd scripting, but also while currently c# doesnt do web, it seems to be planned, so at some point people like me can look and decide on a much more like for like basis… Im not overly interested in learning yet another langauge, ive already got fading memories of so many in there, (yeah as400s rpg or multi user forth was just gonna go so far right) but, having had a short play today with godot i have most of a mini platformer, with zero coding, because they provide a basic “move” script, (yes Im following brackeys as well why not), but the ide is lighting fast, why? well cos it doesnt have 60 modules they built as addons they have to allow for, so code again is more focused, and so, the download was tiny, the speed is good and other than needing cors to run on my website, and actually to move the default unity stupid hey we want to call our file something.wasm and you now have to force encoding to tell people we compressed it, rather than just calling it something.wasm.br or whatever, so i moved that to the unity folders and tada, all is good, and it loads fast too.

Im not exactly planning on leaving to godot, dont get me wrong, but, id be stupid to not keep an eye on the competition and stick with unity if it isnt my better choice. if say in 6 months godot is all c# happy and webified, maybe id revisit the question and find actually unity are going to be left behind, godot is more viable for an idea I have…

going to the food store in a lambo is a nice ride, but the stupid short journey isnt good for it, some idiot will ding it, and frankly that few hundred 16 coloured, barely legal car which costs 10th or less to insure etc, is the right tool for the job.

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Thanks everyone for the responses I barely expected any, years back when I was much more active I would barely get any replies to anything posted in the general thread/section.

I guess this still a sensitive subject but I can see why.

I’ve been looking at other engines around the time this first started but since it has been a while I was curious to see what has changed.

Appears to be a real shame as the onyl programming language I know (to some extent I’m not a pro) is C# which I was starting to enjoy, I was also enjoying the engine itself with a fair few assets purchased.

Since I’m not actively working on any projects in unity due to potential future risks of them pulling something like this again I’m personally thinking of sticking with another engine, although my focus is on mobile games and I really like what unity has to offer…

Thanks for your input I always greatly value people with such experience commenting in these types of discussions, if you don’t mind me asking what’s the other engine you’re exploring and why that engine?

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I’ve been moving my main project to Unigine. The main reasons are the rendering quality and terrain system, both of which are far beyond where Unity will ever be. It is not too hard to get up and running in it coming from Unity, as the interface and workflow is very similar, and you can use C# for nearly everything. It is under active development but it still has a few big holes and quirks which make me miss Unity every so often (like UI and Animation systems). Engine API is well documented, and the devs are generally quick to answer questions, however there is not much of a community to speak of… which is a real negative. No Asset Store either so you’re forced to code your own custom solutions. It is a PC-targeted engine, I would not choose it if I were focused on mobile platforms.

It’s really sad to see what has become of Unity. I could deal with all the mismanagement, BS marketing, IP chasing, etc. IF they were making competent improvements to the engine and rendering. Delivering things that actually work. But they aren’t. And they won’t. Time has long passed. Fuck hope.

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