They can buy an existing studio.
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Cough cough shadow gun cough cough
Back then, anything that got out of this association was ground breaking, technically ambitious rendering on low end machine, largely documented, and slotting nicely into workflow. That was the unity we loved. Punching way above itâs weight.
Still the best part of the manual.
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Or do a publishing deal.
Or do some more creative custom license agreements like epic does with ue5.
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Well my suggestions to Unity in the past, and including even as recent as a couple of months ago was⌠if youâre serious about game dev then buy a successful AAA studio. Meta, Sony and MS have been doing it on the regular. These studios go for as little as 250m so if they can afford to spend billions, they can afford (easily) to buy a small but successful AAA studio.
So your example is baseless. Nobodyâs been spooling up game AAA dev studios from scratch for at least a decade now, these things are bought and improved.
But they didnât. I donât see the excuse given the piss poor acquisitions in the past. It is 100% clear Unity have no interest in this and continue to believe Accelerate is good enough. If it was, I wouldnât be using Unreal for serious games.
Even Epic bought Fall Guys. Valve bought Campo Santo. Everyoneâs buying and improving game dev studios.
But here we are, Unity bought in with ironSource for some shovelware that will stop being monetised in a couple of years due to the quality bar being just too wide and the tools just too lacking.
Or maybe people are making this awful bet somewhere that mobile titles will remain small and and Unity will remain relevant.
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This is a tool they should have given away for free.
Honestly, at this point, this far down the abyss of sunk cost fallacy the best thing they can do is become a premier middleware company that supports other engines properly as well. It didnât hurt microsoft to realise that opening things up was better business. Unity as an engine doesnât have the capability* to fully utilise weta, ziva and the rest for years yet, so pimping it as a sub toward at Unityâs disillusioned creatives/indies is hilarious and will fail.
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Unity doesnât scale well. Only DOTS would be able to stream constant data like youâd get from Ziva/Weta/Large AAA assets and this lacks the tooling, testing, research, massaging that only an AAA studio would be able to even start using. Unity isnât going to effectively (meaning it makes business sense) scale without source for very many years yet. Thatâs just how it is. I donât even know if I will be in business by the time they do, so I wouldnât choose Unity to even use these tools with, so any subscription offering should be engine-neutral.
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And to build on what everyone said, if it was so easy, why is not everyone doing it? Why is Ubisoft and EA of this world not all jumping on this ship? Fortnite is like all AAA game studiosâ end goal, making billions from one game. And honestly, if we decide to make games, I would much prefer small and exciting games like Devolver do to an AAA game just for the money. Or even fun demos like Valve did for the Valve Index to showcase what you could do with it. But small game donât make billion. Also, if we make small and fun games, people will compare us to Unreal and say that we canât make big games because the engine suck or something. And if the game flop they will say the same things. Anyway, just my thought on the matter.
Yes, and for a while, you couldnât build on Mac and iOS because of this. There is a business risk for working with a company that is technically your competitor. And I know people say they didnât copy PUBG because it is an idea, but they had the code source, and they are both BR.
I mean, Unity bought Parsec which allows to collaborate remotely, Plastic a source control tool for big assets like in game, Speedtree for terrain, MLAPI for multiplayer, Finger Food Technology for AR/XR, and ironSource for monetization. These are all related to making game or monetize, but I understand your point. You donât need any of them or you mean game tools, not paid services. Unity bought tools like Bolt and TextMeshPro in the past. As @Andy-Touch said recently , the current Visual Scripting (Bolt) doesnât scale. So even if we bought the 20 most loved assets on the asset store, they will likely not be scalable solutions and would be another poorly integrated asset. I said in another post and I will repeat myself. In my opinion, Unityâs most considerable investment in the engine was hiring so much since their IPO. Which most people donât know because it is not as flashy as an acquisition. So I hope this will resolve most of the issues we see right now, at least the parity and delivering better quality tools. I think there are other issues with how we communicate, which I hope will be fixed too but this is for another time.
Would you all be happier if Unity bought game studios? I feel people would still be angry because we donât focus our money on the engine. Cynical people would even say that when John bought studios in the past, when he was the CEO at EA, they all failed, so by extension, every acquisition he does will fail. Yeah, I read maybe too many arguments on the internet, haha :p.
This is my personal, honest opinion which I may be wrong, but this is how I see things right now.
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Unity should have done what photoshop didâŚ
integrate AI into the engine to smooth out the daily workflow
you donât need to compete with fancy graphics if the process of creating games is simplified
ArtEngine would be perfect candidate to make part of the engine (integrated - not separated sub based)
also all the sunken money on their AI division would not be for nothing
Youâre a smart guy. You know full well that focusing money on game studios is focusing money on the engine. Or is game dev so far removed from your area of expertise?
I get it, you do enterprise and video stuff. Also maybe you forgot that EA is still buying AAA game developers practically every 2 years on average. Next time you enjoy codemasters or racing games youâll also enjoy an EA acquisition.
Anyway, zero people will be angry since theyâll be using Unreal Engine 5 like I am. Iâm using that engine for high end 3D content because it seems no-one at Unity gets the memo⌠you arenât going in the right direction.
Unity today, really, really sucks at making ambitious games, and it will be the core reason most people trying ambitious games are still working on them years too long later. You want to talk about customer anger?
Talk about why so many notable studios are cancelling their Unity projects and moving to Unreal, year on year on year. Happy to list 'em. Happens often, after all.
After 12 years of steadfastedly helping Unity, you name one thing Unity ever did for me or for anyone really developing a bigger project? Apart from give the runaround, delays, walls of silence âŚempty promises⌠bla bla bla bla⌠nah.
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Thatâs the thing though, Bolt couldâve scaled if they didnât discontinue Bolt 2 and integrate and the out-of-date Bolt 1, which stopped development back in 2018. More than two years have gone by and UVS lacks even the most basic features Bolt 2 had.
Anyone who knew Bolt 1, and its state at the time, didnât think itâs a good idea. There was a lot of community backlash to the point the UVS product manager at the time bailed out altogether, and we donât even know who manages it now.
We can only guess why they decided to go for Bolt 1 but from what Iâve gather higher-ups requested Visual Scripting to be engine integrated for Unity 2021.1 and they couldnât do that in time with Bolt 2 because it wasnât finished yet, but they could do that with Bolt 1. So we got a non-scalable solution for a marketing check mark and two years later itâs received 0 improvement and doesnât even integrate properly with other Unity tools like TextMeshPro because theyâre basically rewriting the tool from the ground up. Years wasted because management donât know what the fuck theyâre doing.
Not to mention historical visual scripting development in Unity. They had their own GO visual scripting solution in development before DOTS hype started in 2018, then they cancelled that because DOTS was the future of Unity and they started on DOTS VS which didnât go anywhere because DOTS itself wasnât anywhere near design complete so they cancelled that too. Then they asked the lead DOTS VS dev to integrate Bolt 1 as a native engine package and write new runtime for it, which he did and then left for another internal Unity team. The new runtime, however, is still nowhere to be seen.
The problem here is not that Bolt 1 doesnât scale, itâs that Unityâs management canât make a single correct decision when it comes to visual scripting in Unity. In fact, theyâve consistently made the worst possible choices for the past 4+ years.
I do hope the new hires are actual engine developers and not marketing, sales, etc people because all the main systems in Unity I care about have been developed by skeleton crews consisting of a few engineers at the best of times. At one point URP 2D renderer had only one graphics engineer working on it which is why we canât get basic features like shadow falloff distance to this day.
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Can you guys please stop putting words in my mouth? If you want to know what I think Unity should do, just read the rest of my post! Seriously, itâs not a long post, and I wrote the answer to my question in the next sentence . . .
Where did I say that Unity should make their own games?
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I agree, and this anger comes from real issues. But I feel we are far past the point of buying a game studio and expect in 3-5 years to get some improvements. We need to work on these issues NOW and better communicate what we are doing to solve them.
And they are not the only ones that got screwed. I love DOTS; they did deliver cool things like the Job System, Burst and Native Collections. But they tried to make everyone switch to ECS before it was ready, which caused a lot of internal and external frustrations. I still believe ECS is an important puzzle piece for the long term, but it is sad how it was handled 
Yeah, the Video team was just one person for a while too. I am confident it gave everyone more room to breathe, and like you, I hope it will be enough to deliver what we need.
Funny you said that, apex is doing very well, and had the amazing feat of being a cult fps in Japan, a market notoriously allergic to that genre, and is the only reason the game is on switch.
Ubisoft tried with hyperdscape and failed hard by messing with the structure of the genre too hard. But itâs not like they are running out of live service fps or shooter, they cornered the market with Tom Clancyâs licenses games.
Add Activision on top, last time I checked cod warzone was doing well.
I mean like, you would think they needed the code source of their own engine, that was already able to make open world and multiplayer before pubg, which is why pubg was built on it in the first place because of those properties.
And since we are bringing apple in the discussion, the audience reveal that epic doing Fortnite and epic doing the game engine were separated entities, which is why the judge cancelled apple abusive conflation between the two.
And there is this misconceptions that cultural product are competitor, like if I like marvel, I wonât consume DC, in practice you are more likely to consume both, which is why new game advertise themselves as like X but with Y, to entice player, itâs synergistic, the hats in time works because mario established the formula, people who plays mario are likely to play hats in time, and vice versa, and even make cross over fan art or mod, I play Fortnite but I also occasionally play apex.
Quality and fitness to market are more indicative of success. Fortnite and pubg have very very different experience, only the premise of the genre are the same. Traversal, shooting, items, graphics and targeted demographic have zero or little overlap.
It was a well-known fact that the tool scales terribly, even before unity bought it. Companies werenât using it, they are using things like behavior designer, playmaker, and amplify shaders editor.
Why Unity bought Bolt? Management issue.
While itâs true that plugins typically are made for specific problems, there are more general ones. Things like Odin inspector, bakery, mesh baker, amplify shader editor, shapes, rewired. I would honestly prefer getting better solutions from unity, but I know it wonât happen. After all, there is a reason why we have 2 input systems, 3 render pipelines, 2 VFX systems, and 3 UI systems, and people still need to buy assets to replace basics or write in-house solutions.
Honestly, I have noticed that. But I havenât seen any significant progress from teams that got new people.
Also, the company likes to claim there are thousands of people working at unity, but most of these are non-developers and companies unity bought. I would be surprised If more than a few hundred people are working on crucial, currently needed tools.
Itâs already known (between developers) that unity tools scale poorly. The default way of thinking is to buy an asset or make an in-house solution. Tools like Zenject have become standard because you have to glue dozens of assets together.
Thatâs why I think publishing would be a better solution than buying game developers. There is a lot of know-how behind making a game, which the company doesnât have. Itâs not only about knowing what is currently selling but also things like what your engine can do, and how to create a realistic, competitive deal.
The best publishers in the market do more than just give money to the studio and sign greedy agreements with short deadlines. They often can provide a dedicated QA studio, a studio to help with making trailers, help create a marketing division just so both companies work together, and even bring experienced developers whenever there is a serious problem with the project.
Some publishers go much further and are looking for teams to do specific projects they have researched and know will sell.
My point is that unity can manage and squeeze some easy money through this.
People tend to say that simply because pubg is in a poorly designed game. They are known for making the worst decisions that primarily hurt the game, then spending at least months fixing them. Also, epic published most improvements they have made for Fortnite. I believe most of the new features and QoLs they made, were playtested with Fortnite at first. I mean, I wouldnât be surprised If the epic was actively looking into the pubg code at some point, but I donât think theyâve copied anything.
I just checked the revenue Warzone and Apex made. It still is not on par with the 5.4 billion gross revenue but, to be honest, I didnât expect them doing that well. I found ~600 million for Apex in 2021 and ~2 billion for Warzone. It happens during COVID so donât know if it is sustainable but at the very least, it is healthy for now.
Well, I see it that way. If you play 200hrs in Fortnite and 200hrs Apex, both companies make less than if a user would have played 400hrs in one. I would be happy to be proven wrong on this. Do you know any study or have any source on this matter? 
Indeed, itâs a management issue. Bolt outsold anything else in the asset store by a mile. It perfected the marketing for Unity/coding newbies, who are the main Asset Store audience, and it had the most streamlined UI/UX experience for that purpose. But actual game development is a whole another beast, an entirely different use case the tool was not designed for. Management only cared about the sales numbers.
Bolt 2 was to address nearly all major problems of Bolt 1, though. It was scalable, performant, had all the missing usability and debug features Bolt 1 lacked. It had two years of progress packed into it from 2018 until Unity acquired it in 2020. But Unity threw all of that out the window in favor of integrating a toy for Unity newbies. Now two years later, itâs still the same toy it was in 2018, just under a different paint of skin and name.
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Perhaps this was hyperbole, but these numbers are way out. iOS wasnât âhalfâ, it wasnât even one of the top grossing platforms, which are PlayStation and Xbox by a large margin. It was the 5th largest, at around ~7% (source).
I disagree. A game thatâs technically impressive is nice, but itâs not enough on its own, and thatâs one of the things that making a bad game teaches you. 
I need my tools to support my capability to make a game that is successful on multiple fronts. Not just technically, but also in whatever other ways engage with my players. And, frankly, unless weâre a big AAA studio the chances of engaging an audience on primarily technical grounds are slim. Those audiences are already well tied up with Call of Duty and Horizon and Battlefield and Assassinâs Creed and so on and so forth.
The ways that we need our tools to support us is in enabling high-end creativity. Unity used to be awesome at that compared to the competition. As an example, the ability to make an edit in an off-the-shelf Editor, then press play, and be running the newly edited thing in seconds⌠that was fantastic. To be fair, it still is fantastic, but everyoneâs doing it, so it no longer sets Unity apart from competitors*. Back in the 2000âs iteration time was a huge issue for many developers, and Unity solved it. Where Unity is falling behind, in my eyes, is identifying the challenges that small- and mid-scale game developers face today and addressing those.
Iâm always one for making custom tools and systems for my game, but I really ought not to be doing it for stuff thatâs genuinely common. Epic are doing a great job of identifying stuff thatâs common and just dealing with it. Itâs worth pointing out that they have an advantage here in that their focus is narrower than Unityâs. Where Unity is trying to help everyone do everything (and, Iâll be honest, doing a decent enough job in that context) Epic are specifically helping people to make AAA-looking 3D action games. That gives them a very clear context in which to solve problems.
Hence the contemporary acquisitions of MetaHuman by Epic, and Ziva + Weta by Unity. From the press release alone I knew exactly what problem Epic had just solved, for who, and had a fair idea about how it would impact a game developerâs day-to-day work and a small- to mid-sized studioâs capabilities. Itâs taken months to get a video of a couple of lions from Unity and, while itâs really cool from a technical perspective and Iâd love to play with those tools, Iâm still not entirely clear on what problem itâs solving for me in the broader context of wanting to create and successfully commercialise products in a dynamic and competitive market.
- There were competitors back in the mid 2000âs who also did this, but they either had significant shortcomings elsewhere or price tags which were inaccessibly high to many small studios.
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Iâll be glad seeing yours too. But you made a reasoning mistake, revenue from the games isnât tied to number of time played:
- If the player paid 50ÂŁ upfront, 2000h or 30mn of play donât change your bottom line
- if the game is a free to play, probably 80% of the install base isnât paying and is the content for the remainder, and still they pay when they need the benefit, be it skins or booster. Hence the reliance on fomo for timed cosmetic and loot box for everything. Heck they even have a âstop playingâ mechanics with energy type of resources that only fills up back when you are away. It encourages consistency, IE coming back checking the game, over pure hours. See genshin impact or any mobile game, or the battle pass system with a free track and a premium track, that unlocked week by week to throttle player progression, like Fortnite.
And on top of that, number of hour doesnât translate necessarily into enjoyment. You gotta play the game your friend play, when they are available, which is more about consistency than hours. That put the burden on dev to have the dreaded content threadmills, hence the themed seasons structure to encourage checking back. You donât want your player to burn through the content too rapidly or burn out the game. Thatâs also why they tend to have story that never resolve, but build up to have big epic events per seasons, like honkai impact.
Also player putting big hours tend to be a threat when there is competitive design, it create unbalanced in the game, so they have mechanics to subtly push player. When I pull long hours in Fortnite, I notice the bot are more agressive, they put me with higher tier player, the loot are less good.
But if Iâm away for a long time they definitely hand me over a victory, and after near win Iâm definitely getting good loot with rare version of weapon I tend to favour. After 1895h of game time, from season 3 of the first chapiter, and roughly 60ÂŁ spend on the game, you start noticing the pattern.
Source, any good talk about game design monetization from the casual, then Facebook, mobile and finally current free to play games.
It was an honest question and I donât have a source either :). And I understand your point and I donât disagree. It just seems weird because player time and money are finite. So they probably, as you say, switch between COD, Apex and Fortnite but they still canât afford or play all the other games on market. So if a new awesome BR comes out would it affect the revenue on the other games? Or letâs 10 new BR come out, would it affect the revenue on the other games? At one point, players canât play all of them, so the best ones either win all or the player base split. So while I understand there is not just one winner, they are still competing for the revenue. Anyway, I know we are maybe off topic.
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