So basically my name’s Tobias and im working on a Documentation + Presentation about Unity.
And i thought it would be interesting to hear as many thoughts as possible from ppl which are actually working with Unity etc. so here’s the Question! 
I’ll appriciate every answer, u can answer with anything like (Community, influence, International Impact etc.)
Thanks in advance everyone <3
Sadly, I believe it will likely not have progressed that much further than it already has. Unity has simply stagnated too much. Official documentation is very hit or miss and hasn’t had significant improvement for most of my time with it, and the official tutorials are almost always in a broken state outside of one specific release.
That said, I hope Unity spends this time stabilizing what they have, fixing bugs, and making things really solid. With all the new DOTS tech, there’s a large hill to climb for it to become adopted as a standard among Unity users. The networking/multiplayer solution is still floundering, even though there are okay third-party alternatives.
What I want is for Unity to have its technological identity established in 5-10 years. But what will probably happen is more technologies thrown in to “stay competitive” for their marketing folk, especially with shareholders and all.
I’m still giving it to Unity for their efforts in adapting. They really jumped onto competing with Unreal, and there are small details that I appreciate in the direction that they’re taking. For example, it used to be a pain to not have versioned Assets from the Asset store, and now the Package Manager helps alleviate this issue. Another example is AssetBundles. They’re a pain to deal with, but more in line with how professional practices handle the asset pipeline as far as large productions go. These are just small examples that I notice and I’m sure there are plenty more. Like, how have nested prefabs been handled? I mean, people have been bitching for years, and now it’s here. And same with dark mode. Also part of what I’m noticing is that JR was the CEO of EA when I was there, and he actually was pretty instrumental in adapting EA into the digital age. I’m seeing similar large sweeping motions to get Unity to adapt and stay competitive.
So far, I have no major complaints. I’m still waiting for those ridiculous shareholder decisions, but otherwise, if Unity “stays the same”, I’ll be happy.
Purely my own speculation…
Unity will continue to increase in modularity, with more and more core functionality moved to essentially plugins. Currently this is done via the Package Manager, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next decade the Package Manager system was itself replaced. I’m expecting Unity to end up largely as a framework which handles running through frames, calling the various special timing related methods, which other plugins hook into for whatever functionality you want.
Unity will focus more and more on multi-core efficiency, with functionality from Unity utilizing it better. The DOTS/ECS project will become mainstream and fully supported, with larger desktop/console projects utilizing it, but the main thread focused MonoBehaviour system will still dominate smaller projects and remain more popular on the whole.
I know you asked primarily about documentation, but the above is still very important on the topic. This is because documentation will continue to degrade and fragment, as the primary documentation repository gets less and less relevant as more functionality moves out of the core engine into plugins/packages - each with its own separately maintained documentation of varying quality. With two competing systems for writing your scripts (DOTS/ECS and MonoBehaviour), code samples and tutorials will also fragment along those lines.
We had a brief period in the 2017/2018 release years where virtually everyone was on C# using MonoBehaviours with the vast majority of documentation in one location. Basically the entire community was for a short time on the same page. That’s coming to an end.
Dont hold your breath on the multi core part, gfx jobs are still a broken mess and Vulkan support is also pretty much broken.
10 years from now it might be gone or lose relevance.
Does anyone remember Torque? Torque right now is what Unity might become in 10 years.
The question is about the state a decade from now. A $700 basic low end laptop will probably have 32+ cores, so all but simple games will have to adapt to that reality, and I’m sure Unity will as well.
Yeah, but unity is unity we have been rambling about this for years now. I have checked our steam hardware survey and its well over a year since 8 core surpassed 4 core so it’s time unity get on the train.
It really could go anywhere, they probably will continue to acquire and try to sell services as they try to work out how to turn a profit, and continue to tack on extra paid things that should have been core engine features and would be competition killers, such as unity MARS etc in a move to try and find some other form of profit that can prop up the engine. That might in the end prove successful, or it might end up being a bad move.
Thing is, until they work out how to make the usage of the core engine itself feel worth the money to users, whilst still competetive to competition, whilst still profitable for them in some way, its not an easy thing to speculate on as its hard to see what their actual final direction will be when this all gets worked out in the coming few years.
I just overall dont think the licensing structure for unity, works best for unity longterm vs the licensing structure for unreal when looking at profits for company vs value for users.
Bloating, abandoning core community, truing to sell engine to off-game usage(automotive, movies, ect), dying. Rising of a new, simple, friendly and easy to use engine(???godot???). It’s a standard lifepath of any software. Perfect example is jira vs trello.
Both Unity and Unreal are moving toward becoming general-use 3D tools. Unreal is dominating rendering and animation while Unity is dominating simulation and machine learning. Tbh I expect that in 10 years one of them will pull far ahead in terms of being the ‘go-to 3D tool’ and the other will either fizzle out or just go back to specializing in a small niche.
Who will win? I don’t know. Unity are starting from better roots, but are extremely slow to develop compared to Unreal. They are acting like a company in its twilight years when the game has only just begun. Meanwhile Unreal are cranking out features and breaking china everywhere trying to grow faster.
Proof?
I mean, there may be some proof of concept projects, but that doesn’t seem to be what the engine is being used in the real world right now.
No proof, just based on what I have observed:
I really can’t see this being aimed at just making better strategy games.
Trello is not a replacement of Jira. Jira is enterprise scale which Trello is not. Jira vs Azure devops is a better comparison
You can use machine learnign for a lot of stuff. For example in VR it can be use for pose prediction to substitute additional trackers.
Sure, it has a few very good uses for games, but not many. I don’t think that’s what Unity are aiming at. Same for ECS and DOTS. 99% of games don’t want/need it. But for engineering visualization/simulation it’s very useful.
I agree on the machine learning, but not on ECS/DOTS. ECS as a concept has been around for a while not just in unity but in the games industry, and there are not “types” of games that are better suited to it, just its a different way of thinking entirely. You can certainly make any game using DOTS and ECS.
For example overwatch uses ECS (non-unity, they have propietary engine).
For what exactly? 99% of games are bottlenecked by graphics, rendering, physics etc. ECS is cool and useful for some things but not very many, and it severely impacts workflow. I tend to agree with Tim Sweeney’s perspective:
“ECS is fast, but is primarily suited for particle-system-like constructs rather than ordinary gameplay code, in which updates an entity can freely read and write anything in the scene in an atomic, isolated, consistent, and durable way.”
Overwatch is the first I’ve ever heard of it being used in a game. And massive AAA games are being shipped in Unreal all the time without it, without performance issues. I don’t see how it makes up for its complexity.
ECS can be used for alot of complex systems when and if it becomes mature.
Edit: complex as in alot of data
I think you are confusing ECS and DOD in general with Unitys specific implementation. They are not one and the same. Just because unitys current WIP implementation is awfully complicated, does not mean the industry standard ones are. It also doesnt mean unitys will remain this way forever too!
ECS != complexity.
DOD != complexity.
The point is making the system usable, an AAA like overwatch will have done so and now reap the benefits when it comes to performance etc. It does not seem to have impacted their ability to operate as normal. Just as unity are doing, they build things into the engine to make the process of building games using ECS and DOD Practises faster (think visual tooling etc)
EDIT: including a link to one of the overwatch talks where they talk about architecture etc, at no point do they ever talk about “but we had to then balance the complexity it brought” or anything remotely in that vein: