I see allot of people everywhere post negative opinions on unity, and when you tell them game x is made with unity, they instantly have a lower opinion of x.
I wonder why is that. Why do some of you here especially dislike unity? There are allot of really long threads on several forums here of people complaining about unity / saying they will switch asap and few if any for.
The UE5 demos look good sure, but not significantly better than HDRP. Even if at all better.
There’s lumen, but why not just fully bake when you can.
I have a strong positive opinion of the engine. I find it surprising how at odds it is with people’s general impressions of unity and anything made in unity
The fact is (unless all the top search results are mistaken), Unity alone has about as much of the game engine market as every other game engine combined… including Unreal. By comparison, every other engine sort of looks like a niche market
I don’t have much to say about the developer-side of things, but for the player-side:
It usually seems to be misdirected frustration. There’s a ton of games made with Unity in general, and as such, there are also a ton of low-effort/asset-flip/cash-grab/etc. type of games published all the time. Because the “Made with Unity” splash screen is often present in those types of games, players associate Unity as just “the engine that pumps out trash games” or something.
That’s why they’re then surprised when told that something like Subnautica was made in Unity, for instance, because they assumed Unity didn’t have the capability of making an “actual game”.
This is why it’s misdirected frustration - they’re putting the blame on the engine, and not the developer.
The engine just provides the tools, but anyone can decide to just slap a Rigidbody on a cube and call it a “finished game”.
This is also why there’s still a debate about removing the “Made with Unity” splash screen, but that’s a whole other topic.
The reason why I think this situation exists is because of a misconception that Unity is meant to be a “beginner-friendly” engine that’s “simple” and “easy to use” and “requires no prior development experience”. Not really sure when/where this misconception came about.
I haven’t visited the Unreal Engine forums, but I do sometimes wonder if they get nearly as many threads asking how to solve a null-reference exception, because there’s tons of those here every day.
And I get it - we were all beginners once who had to cross this hurdle as well, but you have to learn to crawl before you can walk, as they say.
Learning a programming language like C# is an entire milestone in it of itself, and for someone who has no prior experience, that should really be the first step they take before jumping into game development, because Unity really doesn’t hold your hand here and instead assumes you already know the ins-and-outs of object-oriented programming.
These games are only known of in the first place because of youtubers and streamers who basically made a big part of their careers out of getting people to find these games for them so they could play them. If you want to point your eye anywhere, it’s not these games that maybe get 25 installs before these videos if they’re lucky, but people like Jim Sterling, who had loads of videos on their channel that amount to going "this bad game nobody has played is a Unity game because of course it is" almost verbatim.
Players don’t associate Unity with bad games because they got burned by shovelware, otherwise we’d have been having this same conversation about Criware’s middleware offerings because they preceded every shitty Wii game. They associate Unity with bad games because popular people online told them to.
The more you post this sort of thing, the more I want to put the Unity logo all over my next game to prove it’s not actually a problem.
Toxic minority online is very loud but ultimately it’s just immature people, who have no intelligence, and therefore I will not care about them.
That they’re even aware of what Unity is, speaks volumes about them being failed developers. They failed to achieve anything in Unity so Unity takes the blame.
It doesn’t help that streamers often mocked Unity for asset flip games, all the while ignoring the fact Blizzard’s done this since 2004. Each wow expansion contained hundreds of flipped assets and events re-used often with no texture changes. And yes you pay for that.
Just my two cents but the main reason I ever even thought about using Unity is because two of my favorite games ever were made with it and I only know that because they both had the Unity splash screen when I first played them. So from my perspective, Unity is a fantastic engine because it was capable of making some games I really enjoyed playing…
90% of those who complain are as hippocoder pointed out. I teach Unity 3D game development, and ive lost a few students due to they want everything done for them, (“isnt there a asset that will do that for me?”, or “doesnt Unity do that for me?”). They want an easy button, and they refuse to pay their dues,
The new generation of “want to be” devs just dont get it… so they blame Unity. They are to blame.
As a developer who works full time with both engines (among others), I could give you a laundry list of Unity’s shortcomings compared to Unreal, but it does have its place.
But from a gamer’s perspective Unity got a bad rap for three reasons:
The low barrier of entry combined with the forced logo on Unity personal means people will see that logo a lot on terrible and amateurish games as most of the great games made with Unity don’t have the Unity logo.
Before multithreaded rendering and job systems, Unity had terrible performance on PS4 and Xbox One. Many early console Unity games also used Mono, which didn’t help. To make matters worse, Unity games on PS4 are usually required to display the “made with Unity” splash even if they use plus/pro, so there were all these high profile indie games that ran like crap on consoles and all of them had “Unity” written front and center.
AAA/AA studios just don’t use Unity for their big non-mobile. Unity’s attempt to ensnare that segment failed again and again. So, there’s almost no Unity games out there matching the kinds of production values that are commonplace in games made with Unreal, or even matching the visuals seen in Unity’s cinematic demos. Gamers then associate Unity with simpler and stylized graphics.
We’re working on a high 7 figure title using Unity. Our team can get a lot out of the engine… but, our dreams keep wandering to UE5. And we even dabble with it… just in case.
Unity is a lost soul of an Engine. It doesn’t know what it wants to be. To expand its market, it had to go after non-game stuff like the auto industry and film. Both markets UE is much more prominent in than Unity even though they don’t push it much.
Look at the unity.com home page, and then look at the unrealengine.com web page. Really, go do it. Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about why Unity struggles to be taken seriously by gamers?
It’s sad because there are a lot of great people working at Engine. Great engineers. I don’t know why they can’t focus, as I have no insight into their internal issues, but a lack of focus is clearly what they represent. And Unreal Engine 5 just shines a huge bright light on that.
Kind of like how people love to bash programming languages for no reason other than it’s mainstream. See how many “java/javascript SUCKS why not use Rust or Go!” discussions there are. In a professional environment, those are usually the new guys with no experience in building real things.
Usually comes from people have produced nothing of value and never delivered any games end-to-end.
Most of our new hires where I work come only with Unity experience, but we do projects on different engines.
The ones that take part in Unreal projects for a while often comment they have a hard time when moving back to work on Unity projects.
Don’t get me wrong, there are many pain points in Unreal, and there are things Unity does better, but in terms of pipeline, QoL features, the large number of wheels you don’t need to reinvent, and source code acess, the number of projects where I would recommend Unity over Unreal are diminishing.
I see this a lot as well.
I primarily develop web applications and have many finished projects, although I’m actually not a fan of JavaScript either, but not for the usual reasons you see, and TypeScript fixes most of the issues I have with JavaScript anyway.
People often complain that “JavaScript bad” because "1" + 1 = "11", or {} + [ ] = 0 and such.
But then I ask, when/why would you even do something like perform arithmetic operations with strings, or add an array to an object?
Like sure, JavaScript says you can do that, but you don’t have to. I’ve literally never run into these sort of “problems” on any web project I’ve worked on, because I just don’t do these things.
Just wanted to pop in and say that Unity was essentially marketed this way in the very early days (perhaps back when it was competing with Torque and 3D Game Studio). Those who had worked in game dev previously could see past it of course, but it was very easy for beginners to fall into that trap simply because of how much Unity stressed how “easy” it was to make a full game with their software. They pushed that narrative for years, and I certainly didn’t hurt them to do that.
I personally don’t see as much hate now. There are enough high profile games made with Unity to dispel the stereotype. To build of what Murgilod said, that’s likely because YTbers got bored and moved onto the next thing to bash / hype up.
Contrary to what you’re trying to say with your post those of us who dislike Unity do have legitimate grievances but you’ve mistakenly made the assumption we’re aiming them at the engine. We’re aiming them at the developer but it just so happens to be that the company has the same name as the engine.
I don’t know what to say other than you’ve either never worked on a large project or you’re willfully ignorant. Lumen and Nanite exist for the purpose of shifting developer time to more productive tasks.
Lumen’s biggest advantage isn’t being able to skip the final bake. It’s biggest advantage is being able to skip every single bake you would make over the life of the project. If an artist suddenly decides a light isn’t positioned quite right the change can take seconds instead of a preview bake that could take days on a large project.
Nanite’s biggest advantage isn’t maintaining high quality the further you zoom into a mesh. It’s biggest advantage is allowing artists to skip the retopology stage. According to the following thread the retopology stage can take anywhere from an hour to a week depending on the model and that’s just ONE model.
Extending upon what @Ryiah said. What about games that don’t bake? Such as survival games where there’s a consistent day/night cycle, various weather systems, etc. Baking doesn’t help with this at all. Lumen definitely can, and Nanite helps not having to retop every single item there ever will be. It’s annoying to have to do the two things above, while I get why we’ve had to do it, tech is finally strong enough where such things should be gone forever.
I absolutely HATE baking, it’s one of the most unforgiving things to ever exist. Spend hours or days baking lights only to find out something just doesn’t look right and have to re-do it all again.
Yeah, if you want to light a scene dynamically Unity’s offerings honestly fall apart pretty fast and give some pretty lackluster results unless you’re willing to put in a lot of work learning the ins and outs of a lighting system that has only managed to stick around because their own lighting system is too busted to use in production.
Guess the irony is that these days, UE is probably the easiest engine to pump out asset flips and trash titles. The marketplace has become quite sizeable as well.
Its insanely easy to make good looking environments using the Quixel assets, drop in some enemies - follow a few YT tutorials and glue it all together with Blueprints. Wham, bam, thank you maam.
This is the main reason I make a point to share what I’ve learned after working more with UE4. The reason I came to unity first when I wanted to start making games was because it was “the easy engine for beginners.” I mean just search anywhere and you see it repeated over and over.
But that just isn’t the case. Maybe it was before, but not anymore. Using blueprints I can actually make games almost entirely on my own. I tried similar in Unity but it was enough of a struggle I just thought I wasn’t smart enough to do the technical side of things.
Also, as mentioned, Unreal has a lot of built in tools that solve many of the bigger problems the type of games I want to make face. In unity I always had to build my own tools, which meant hiring help.
And, as I’ve mentioned several times already, the superior UI in unreal also helps ease the learning process by guiding me through common workflows, whereas in unity even when I followed tutorials it was still hard to put the pieces together just because things weren’t as logically placed.
As for what gamers say, who cares? Let them march, so long as they pay their taxes.
Unity is just a tool, it has a purpose and niche where it will be best. I think it works well for people who know enough to bbe able to write their own tools. Like people who have been coding games for 5+ years, and thus can get benefit from a lightweight, modular engine. For noobs, I think unity makes life harder compared to the competition.
My only complaint that is personal is the predatory nature of asset store marketing. Shouldn’t be taking advantage of peoples ignorance. That’s actual bad juju.
Unity is still marketed this way. Look at how much press there was even just a year ago around The First Tree, and how much of it was about being a “game made without any code” …
