Update about the future of the Unity Forums and Unity Discussions

Personally I hope Autodesk buys Unity.

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Are you sure you don’t just like them because they’re on a paginated forum? :stuck_out_tongue:

Joking aside they’re my ideal choice too. They’re much less likely to heavily disrupt things.

Any mac user would be worried if MS bought it.

Are there any statistics on how many users of Unity on Mac there are?
ChatGPT started telling me how to make such statistics myself xD

Why would you be worried? Microsoft has started to support Mac for all their products long ago. They are now more interested in people buying / subscribing to their products rather than using Windows itself.

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Microsoft is far more open than people realize these days. It’s thanks to them that community funded engines like Godot can even support .NET on every platform. If anything Apple is the company that would shutter support for everything else.

Like @RaventurnPatrick mentioned Microsoft doesn’t really make that much off of Windows. Microsoft is currently making about $62 billion USD but out of that Windows is only $5.26 (8.5%). Office and their cloud services are the big money makers, and Microsoft Office supports macOS and iOS.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/30/24055445/microsoft-q2-2024-earnings-revenue-profits-windows-xbox-gaming-surface

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Yeah Microsoft is super open now there even letting Playstation sell there exclusive titles.

If unity was sold Microsoft is probably who I’d want to take the wheel

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Former Unity employee here.

Unity tried a similar “migration” once already , when they tried to shutdown Unity Answers. Unity devs screamed, “NO. GOD. NO. PLEASE NO.” And that time, they halted things.

But 2 years later, with Unity stock at sub $16 and the Runtime Fee-asco in the rearview mirror, what’s the worst that could happen? (There’s still time. Don’t do this.)

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You’re forgetting the most important part of that: we had an actual reason beyond we didn’t like the decision. The screaming this time isn’t going to work because for the most part it’s just “can we haz traditional forums, plz?” If anything this is more like Lithium where it did in fact get released before it was rolled back within a few days.

There are real reasons to not like this decision. It may be hard to articulate, but let me try. We’re talking about removing a core feature of Unity (the Unity forums are a feature) and replacing with them with a New Thing.

  • Does the New Thing (Unity Discussions) have feature parity with the Old Thing? Who knows, but at first glance, it’s missing some core features.
  • Does the New Thing have as-good-or-better UX? Who knows, but at first glance, seemingly no.
  • Do people (or will they) generally want the New Thing over the Old Thing? As of now, no, not yet.

A proper deprecation is how you do something like this, and ONLY when you can answer a resounding YES to all 3 of the above should you disable the previous system.
What Unity is planning on doing is destroying what remains of the community, fragmenting their best documentation/help tool, and saying “ehh, rip the band-aid off, it’ll be fine, we’ll get there eventually.” This just may be the thing that kills off the remaining community.

[edit: by community, I refer to the people, not the product. The community is the most valuable thing Unity has had going for it- enthusiastic evangelists screaming from the rooftops about what/how you can do an exciting new thing with Unity. That wasn’t all happening on Unity Forums, but a lot of the “how do I do x thing?” happened here. I’m just not sure if Unity Discussions has the same je ne sais quoi, but I suspect it will bleed MAU to a halt. ]

But hey, I got this post in before it becomes read-only! Let’s check back in a year or two when it exists migrated onto Unity Discussions and find out if I foretold the future.

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(Nearly) all posts will be migrated, and all links will redirect. There will be effectively next to zero lost content. So they’re not destroying anything. All google search results that are currently there will still work after the migration.

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I understand that there are real reasons to not like this decision but most people aren’t presenting reasons beyond a dislike of the system. Unity Answers was different because that was legitimately going to be lost knowledge until enough people complained that they decided to properly migrate it.

Nonsense. If no one actually liked Discourse the platform would never gain any momentum and no one would be willing to use it but if you look at literally almost any other community you can see that’s not the case. If anything it’s the case that no one actually cares about the platform except a few of us old timers.

None of that matters though because it’s not the community being killed off that matters. It’s losing the people who are most helpful to the community. People who are regularly trying to assist with problems and not simply showing up to post on the latest complaint thread. Seriously some of the people in this thread don’t even post monthly.

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Dude, you aren’t exactly the youngest here, you DO know how it goes with Unity:

  • so we do this thing! (unity)
  • please don’t do that because of these reasons […] (community)
    […] unity silently or loudly kills the action […]
  • so we do this thing now, for sure! (unity)
  • please don’t do this because of more reasons […] (community)
    […] - unity silently retracts […]
  • okay, so tomorrow we’ll do this thing finally (unity)
  • fine, screw this… (community)
  • why don’t you give reasons why you don’t like this thing?!
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There is a good reason why the saying “Never change a running system” exists. You never know what exactly will happen. In the case of the forums I do believe it is a core feature of Unity that is better than other engines (thanks to the community).

Will it ever be as good as it was before the migration? I guess only time will tell.

But I would still fear that some of the more veteran members will dislike the change and thus many questions will be left unanswered

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Good bye old forum, you will be missed!

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I’m excited about this update, but I’m also worried.
I hope that the forum, which will change starting tomorrow, will be transferred without any problems.

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What I don’t yet understand about the migration:
Why does it take a whole week to migrate?
Couldn’t you perform the migration in 2 steps - i.e. migrate everything from forums + discussions while keeping them active and once that is done (1 week) only keep both read-only for 1 day to migrate the rest (1-week)?

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Since we don’t know when exactly they will switch the forum to readonly tomorrow and today I’ll have a life (have some beer with my friends), I would like to say good bye to the remaining members of this forum. Thanks for the last almost 10 years, it was educational for many reasons, gamedev, unity software and otherwise.
As I said, I won’t post here anymore and likely will ask for the closing of my account.

But I’ll remain on Twitter, GitHub and probably my domain will stay the same, if anyone really wants to reach out for some reason.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

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i just hope the “beta or transition” period is not +3 years of suffering… (if things are not getting fixed or complaints are ignored…) : /

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Enjoy your beers, and thanks for being such an active member of the community.
I’m sure you won’t be the only one that will be moving on to other endeavors! I myself will wait a little, but can already see going down a similar path if I dislike the new forum software.

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