Welcome to the Unity User-Generated Content (UGC) Forum

Unity Services
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We are excited to announce that Unity’s User-Generated Content (UGC), a solution that enables game developers to integrate UGC workflows easily into their games, is now in Open Beta!

What does it mean that User Generated Content is an Open Beta product?
There are a few things to be aware of when using this Unity Beta service package:

  • We are working towards a full GA release in 2023, however, there is no set release date yet.

  • Know that breaking changes to the SDKs and APIs may be released as a result of feedback or discovered issues in the Open Beta; however, we do our utmost to ensure this is not the case once we release a product to Open Beta. Anything available in Open Beta will be supported for a minimum of 2 years, following the Unity Editor standards

Beta Services are defined under the Unity Terms of Service, and by using Unity User Generated Content you agree that you have read and agree to the Unity’s Terms of Service.

Key Features and Capabilities
UGC Core & SDK
Implement essential user-generated content workflows with ease. The UGC Core manages uploads, downloads, publishing, subscribing, and more, leveraging our CDN to distribute content quickly and efficiently to your players. Unity UGC can be used on any engine but we’ve also built a Unity SDK to make implementation into Unity games especially simple.

Use webhooks to extend the solution to fit your specific needs. Power actions such as notifying your discord server when you’ve got new content to review or integrating UGC with your analytics platform.

UGC Bridge
Empower your players to leverage the full power of the Unity Editor with the Editor Bridge. Customize the plug-in to meet your creators’ needs and let your community’s imagination run wild.

Extend the plugin to fit your needs by adding steps such as programmatic validation, tagging, and anything else your game needs.

Moderation
The API-accessible moderation functionality streamlines the review process for uploaded content. A full moderation center enables your team to view, download, and take action on all user-generated content and set specific moderation rules. Distribute moderation permissions to staff or dedicated community members to speed up content review.

Content discovery
Built-in search criteria help your players find relevant content. Display engaging, trending, popular, or top-rated content with just a few lines of code.

The included content viewer Prefab offers a comprehensive interface for players to engage with your game’s user-generated content, and you can adjust it to fit your game’s needs.

Creator Center
The Creator Center is a white-label web portal that allows creators to manage their content, understand its performance, and edit metadata. Accessible from anywhere, the web portal also guides your creators as they learn how to create content for your game.

Resources
To learn more about what you can do with UGC, take a look at the Solutions page.

Getting Started
Since this is a beta product, you need to sign up for the service in Unity Dashboard. Once you complete the signup process and agree to the Terms of Service, you will be able to access UGC. From the Unity Dashboard, you can follow the getting started guide to get set up or follow the instructions in our documentation.

What’s next
Our main priority during the Open Beta is to listen closely to your feedback and address the next set of challenges you may face when building a UGC game. We plan on adding some impactful new features over the year that will help development and improve moderation workflows.

Feedback & Support Forum Post
At Unity, we put the Users First so your feedback is extremely valuable to us. Our team is dedicated to improving these tools and your feedback is essential to where we will go next. Please share your comments in this forum so that we can continue improving our tools for you!

In terms of feedback, we’re especially looking for:

  • Use cases that are important to you and your projects
  • Workflows that are unclear or missing
  • Features you’d like to see in future releases
  • Questions or feedback on our documentation and educational content
  • Reflections on what has been challenging for you when it comes to implementing your game using these new Unity services.

How to report bugs with Unity UGC
If you have any issues or questions that require support, you can file a support ticket from your UGC dashboard or by submitting a request directly on the UGC support form. This will streamline the process as it automatically ensures your organization and project ID are associated with the support ticket.

Once you have submitted a bug report, please feel free to start a new post on it here in the forum.

Thanks for checking out Unity UGC and we can’t wait to see what you build!

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What is User Generated Content?

Are we the users, or are the players of our games the users, or third parties contributing content to our games?

What types of content? Audio, Video, Textures, Models, Mods, Scripts, Levels?

How is this content generated?

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You can see it in action here at GDC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK89XzUdgVU

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So we get to pay Unity to introduce our players to the Unity Editor?

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You can also choose not to use the UGC Bridge and make a run-time creation tool if you prefer :smile:

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What about Photoshop files? Blender files? .png files?

mp3 files?

gifs?

What sorts of things is your system going to be able to handle?

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I think this service should be completely free, or even pay a royalty, for games that push players towards Unity Editor usage.

This is asking a player to download several gigs of Unity, figure out how to deal with the extremely cantankerous Hub, and then repeatedly download updates to the Editor every couple of weeks, (more gigs) and learn to manage multiple installations, and deal with their being no autosave in Unity, and that backups after crashes get deleted if the user goes to restart Unity before finding the backup Scene, etc etc.

And we’ll have to teach our players how to use Unity’s Editor, to a pretty large extent, because the documentation and introduction materials are… you know… not the best.

Frankly… please think about this… your users (us Unity Editor users that make games with Unity) are extremely familiar with the foibles of Unity. Would we want to expose our players to that, and pay to do so?

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Good question.

The service is content agnostic so you can use it for anything. How you handle it will be up to you on the other side.

With regards to your point about the Unity Editor, you’re absolutely right that there is learning curve and we’re working to help reduce that. Other than that is there anything you feel we could improve on?

As noted above we’re listening closely to feedback and will react to best shape this solution to solve as many problems that arise when building UGC games so thank you for feedback.

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I have what might be several questions bundled into one. I’m currently just testing out uploaded/retrieving and deleting content on UGC. I’m running into some issues with Authentication.

Basically, I’ve managed to upload content to UGC as an anonymous user, but to delete content it appears that you need to be signed in. I went through the implementation of Unity Player Accounts to get authentication up and running, but every time I try to delete something using await UgcService.Instance.DeleteContentAsync(contentId) (or even a simple call to await UgcService.Instance.GetContentsAsync(new GetContentsArgs()); for that matter) I get an HTTP Bad Request error stating Project Hidden Could not retrieve content from disabled project (project-id).

My guess here is that I’m signing in as a Player and not a Content Creator ? Or perhaps my unity gaming services project is just in some nether state ? Either way I don’t know what the way forwards is here :confused: any pointers would be appreaciated !

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Okay, I ended up finding this answer to this problem after lots of clicking and digging around in the Dashboard. In the Web Portal Setup page, you have to set your site visibility to Visible, as it is set to hidden by default :slight_smile: veeeery sneaky.

This would merit some specification in the documentation somewhere, as there’s nothing stopping you from performing calls for creating content and listing tags, for example, but for listing content and deleting it doesn’t seem to work.

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Is there any documentation anywhere on how we might do this? I’m able to upload my content to UGC but how am I supposed to access that content from another project? I’m using Unity Player Accounts for Auth so the id’s are the same so i just need to know how to link two projects. I’m guessing in the cloud console somehow? To rephrase and be clear the question is, How to create organization-level UGC using Unity UGC.

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Turns out, to use the same instance of a unity service, auth, UGC or any other service across two separate unity projects, all you have to do is go to playersettings/services and make sure both projects share the same project ID. kicking myself for not trying that first.

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I’m using UGC for a short period of time and I realized that there is no way for us developers to delete content posted on the server, at some point will there be a way to do this in case abandoned content takes up unnecessary space? Or does the content that stays there not take up space that could cause problems in the future? For example, we are creating a game where there will be a list of maps created by players that can be published for others to play, but what if we as developers want or need to delete the content posted by the person, apparently only the creator of the content can delete it?

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2024 is almost over. Is there a new estimate for the full release date?