User Research: We're looking to understand how you build communities surrounding your games!

[zjebali]

Hello!

We are looking better understand how you build communities around your games. This information will help us understand where the gaps in the process lie so that we help fill them and empower you to build the community you want.

The survey is about ~8 minutes long.

Thank you ahead of time!

Survey Link

[Antypodish]

Sorry, but another terrible Unity survey.
Other did suffer from various issues.
This one can not go back to previous question.
Seriously, are we talking to professionals here … ?

I suggest to make survey how Unity should make surveys.
Unity first need to learn how to build communities around the Unity engine.

But I do understand, why we get flooded with such crappy surveys, if someone is just an internship.
No offence. It is just Unity guiding interns badly.

[zjebali]

@Antypodish

Sorry, but another terrible Unity survey.
Other did suffer from various issues.
This one can not go back to previous question.
Seriously, are we talking to professionals here … ?

I suggest to make survey how Unity should make surveys.
Unity first need to learn how to build communities around the Unity engine.

But I do understand, why we get flooded with such crappy surveys, if someone is just an internship.
No offence. It is just Unity guiding interns badly.

Hello,

I’ve added a back button as per your suggestion.

Thank you for the feedback

[ExtraCat]

Amazingly, I don’t see a back button even now, many hours later. Is it in a preview package?

[angrypenguin]

No back button for me, either.

[koirat]

It is in different survey. Probably.

Is unity selling this survey data ?

[hippocoder]

Community is a little tired of polls now, I think. Just my 2p as a moderator who is here many times a day.

@zjebali

This information will help us understand where the gaps in the process lie so that we help fill them and empower you to build the community you want.

Why? Why is Unity focusing on our customers and not on us - basically we came here for a game engine, not a social media platform.

[angrypenguin]

@hippocoder

Community is a little tired of polls now, I think. Just my 2p as a moderator who is here many times a day.

Polls and surveys are fine, personally. If I don’t care I don’t have to click.

The bigger thing to me is that I want better support for the stuff that’s already being done, rather than things being stretched thin to cover even more stuff. If I need help building community then there are specialists I can approach for that. I don’t need my engine vendor to help me do it. I do need them focusing 100% on making me the best tools possible so that I can make the best game for that community.

[koirat]

Somebody should already tell Unity management to stop hiring this non tech people.
It’s just sink for money that could be spent in a constructive way by hiring more programmers.

[MadeFromPolygons1]

We really dont want yet another additional service that nobody asked for.

Even less interested in more surveys and polls. This is not the type of communication anyone means when they ask for better communication from unity.

[hippocoder]

I have cleaned up some posts, don’t forget to have professional conduct. We can make our points without veering toward the personal.

[xjjon]

The surveys seem pretty relevant if your target is developing games - especially mainstream mobile games. Social and community targeting is an important part of business these days…

Google Play, Apple Arcade, and even AWS regularly do surveys and run programs to help build community/social/marketing knowledge for smaller developers, so if Unity can provide helpful tools or resources then why not?

[system]

@xjjon

why not?

You don’t understand. Unity is only allowed to work on things what rando’ users on the forum say so.

[koirat]

@hippocoder

I have cleaned up some posts, don’t forget to have professional conduct. We can make our points without veering toward the personal.

Hey now, you just destroyed my “likes mine”.

[Ryiah]

@xjjon

Google Play, Apple Arcade, and even AWS regularly do surveys and run programs to help build community/social/marketing knowledge for smaller developers, so if Unity can provide helpful tools or resources then why not?

Because Unity has yet to finish (ie reach a stable and feature complete state) most of the projects it has started over the years. By the way I love that you’ve chosen Google because they’re an excellent example of a company that starts projects only to quickly abandon them even when people love them to the point there’s a meme now.

[N1warhead_1]

There’s only one question that needs to be on that survey - “Do you want us to finish the stuff we start?”.

[hippocoder]

Yeah I mean perpetual communities and patreon are fine if you’re never going to finish, and this adds more people organically using Unity. So basically if we can string along all these indies, and convert their followers into Unity customers, that would be fantastic business.

…in the short term.

In the long term, customers will attack the parts of the company that aren’t benefiting what they signed up for if it’s done badly.

So community is a great business move from Unity. If they listen. They sure didn’t listen to a single forum mod regarding Unity Connect, but got a bunch of other people from random places to cock it up.

So honestly it’s up to how much money Unity wants to keep flicking at a fireplace really but if they want to make money from community and customer acquisition the first thing to do is not Unity Connect 2.0.

The fact is Unity doesn’t have a clue how to market games since the only game it’s done is Gooball, and most of the Unity tech demos (the closest equivalent to a game) no longer work, so that should tell everyone what they need to know, and what they should be asking for.

[Murgilod]

@hippocoder

Yeah I mean perpetual communities and patreon are fine if you’re never going to finish, and this adds more people organically using Unity. So basically if we can string along all these indies, and convert their followers into Unity customers, that would be fantastic business.

…in the short term.

In the long term, customers will attack the parts of the company that aren’t benefiting what they signed up for if it’s done badly.

So community is a great business move from Unity. If they listen. They sure didn’t listen to a single forum mod regarding Unity Connect, but got a bunch of other people from random places to cock it up.

So honestly it’s up to how much money Unity wants to keep flicking at a fireplace really but if they want to make money from community and customer acquisition the first thing to do is not Unity Connect 2.0.

The fact is Unity doesn’t have a clue how to market games since the only game it’s done is Gooball, and most of the tech demos no longer work, so that should tell everyone what they need to know, and what they should be asking for.

You know what’s worse?

We already had basically the same thread in February. I even left some replies about the dramatically poor community building efforts here.

@Murgilod

Frankly, I don’t want a Unity developed community building platform because if there’s one thing Unity does not seem to understand at a corporate level, it’s community building. I wouldn’t trust a company that has left its user base with things such as:

• completely replacing the forum software in such a way that made them useless as both archival resources and communication tools
• leaving community hubs like Unity Answers to totally languish
• deleting the Feedback section entirely without any sort of archive
• just completely awful communication historically
• replacing the job forums with Unity Connect, a service so awful to use that this decision had to be undone

And this doesn’t even begin to address the other issue of Unity stretching itself incredibly thin, offering passable at best versions of services that other companies already offer. This horizontal integration stuff is an absolute disaster and, were I to want to use community services, I would simply hire a community manager instead.

Because that’s their job.

@Murgilod

I have had dramatically better experiences on non-Unity dev forums, such as various subreddits and tigsource. Tigsource is a great example because they’re yet another bunch of people who do active community management. I’ll break it down. Here’s what you see when you land on the tigsource forums:

The first think you see is the community landing subform, Townhall. This is basically the tigsource equivalent to General Discussion. Next up, you have the WIP subforum. These are two simple things that dramatically change the way a community works. I’ll bring up the Unity forums next:

The first thing we’ve got are Announcements. This is… bad? And kinda ridiculous? Announcements should be a subforum of General Discussion (as should Meta-Forum Discussions, if I’m being real) because there’s not a lot of reason for an announcements forum to have top priority in the listings.

Next is Getting Started. I think this is actually a great place for that! In fact, I think a better place for it would be the first listing. The second listing should be General Discussion, because that’s going to be the general community landing. Immediately you present two things in doing this: you have created an immediate spot, first on the list, for new people to post inquiries; with General Discussion being the next one, you’ve fostered a sense that there is a community, instead of burying it all the way at the ass-end of nowhere.

Back to tigsource. Notice how high up their WIP forum is compared to Unity’s? If you want to foster a sense of community, another great thing to do is make it so that interaction with other members isn’t buried entirely. This is a game engine, yeah? We should probably have a higher priority showing what people are working on. Also, instead of tags, Asset Store WIP threads should get their own forum, or maybe a subforum of the Asset Store forum. Or, since a not insignificant amount of WIP assets are also on the asset store, maybe have a WIP tag in the Asset Store forum. There’s a dramatic difference between “game developer community looking at each other’s games” and "game developer community looking at each other’s tools."

Back to Unity. Let’s take a look at the next offender, Teaching and Certification. I single this out as a big offender because of this:

If I scroll down so that only the labels at the top of the Community Learning forum are on display, I can only see three unpinned threads (you may be able to see four, I have my tab bar at the bottom of the screen and it changes the real estate a bit). This is kinda messed up! That’s not a forum, that’s an LCD billboard. This is like the General Discussion issue from a couple years back where there were over a dozen pinned threads here. Some of these things shouldn’t be pinned at all and some of them should probably be archived somewhere. I don’t think anyone would lose any sleep if there was an Archived Threads (threads, not forums) forum for this sort of thing.

Okay, back to tigsource again. We can ignore Audio and Art because those two things are far more general than Unity as a forum should be. They’re not about technical implementations, they’re about the creative aspect. It’s important to note that tigsource is a generalist forum when it comes to gamedev, after all. Playtesting and Design could probably be merged into a Design forum and a Playtesting subforum. Right now the closest thing to playtesting is Feedback Friday in the Game Design forum, and that has to be directly run by community members.

If Game Design wasn’t totally buried, this may be less of an issue, but another couple things that might be nice is if there was any sort of Unity presence there and if there was a clear delineation between game design and game architecture. I swear, every time I go there I see something like how to paint a texture or what kind of architecture to use and these are more vague technical questions. Questions about vague technical things that don’t fall into Scripting, etc. should probably go somewhere like General Discussion or Getting Started.

And speaking of the Scripting forum, why is it halfway down the forum listings? It’s the most common way people will be engaging with Unity on a technical level outside of the Editor itself. This S***? This is all part of community building and management. Layout is more important than you can imagine because there is no justifiable reason for the forums to provide the level of friction they do when it comes to actual community interaction, and only slightly more justifiable reason for places like the Game Design forums and other less technical forums to have such a lacking presence from Unity.

Yeah, I’m not done. Back to tigsource because I want to talk about another one of their forums that’s great for community: Jams & Events. Now, should Unity be hosting game jams? Yeah, actually, that might be a pretty good thing! When I was an active member on gamedev.net a million billion years ago, before engines like Unity were even a thing, game jams were seasonal events, often having things like prizes people would actually want. New GPUs sometimes, software licenses, various books back when books were a thing, gift certificates, that sort of thing.

And you know what? Those jam threads were usually some of the most active on the forums because loads of people were getting involved. They usually lasted two weeks to a month, ran four times a year max, and brought out everyone. On top of that, another way to build a sense of community would be to allow people on the forums to promote their own jams, just like they do there. On top of that, tigsource also allows for user event posts, which can range from offline meetups to just, well, other forms of social stuff and general light competition.

What Unity does is not just take an exceptionally passive role with the community and it doesn’t work. If it did work, we’d see things like a lot more community growth instead of stuff like “user registers, makes two posts, leaves.” These forums are treated as a means to an end by Unity, which is one of many reasons I don’t really think they have any business in “building up safe and healthy game communities.”

tl;dr: why should I care about what Unity thinks about community building when they’re awful at it?

[hippocoder]

Well I doubt Unity are going to touch the forums. The forums are atm functional for a lot of people. What Unity is doing here is looking at being out in front of the indie and branding the indie’s customers. This isn’t a terrible thing in theory but it’s the wrong place to focus.

Unity needs to focus on getting democratised networking including ‘free’ BaaS for every Unity Customer. This sort of thing has legendary potential for growth and - yes - locking people in - but the point here is if Unity needs to grow, BaaS and networking stack is how.

I guess what I’m saying is there’s no such thing as a cheap customer acquisition at this stage in Unity’s life and they need to grow with retention instead aka hard work.

[hippocoder]

Real-time tools for 3D, AR, and VR development | Products I see, it’s probably related to this. 50/50 split