2y ago

I work at an Unity-adjacent company - Here's what's happening

Per the CEO in today's meeting:

"This is a ploy to gather more people to use Level Play [advertising network]. The mediation provider [advertising network] makes a cut off every ad, and right now a lot of people are on AppLovin Max [not Unity's], so a big part of this is they want people to switch to Level Play, and by doing that they'll make way more than the install pricing they're suggesting. It's too early to panic, but it is a big change"

If that sounds like a ramble, it's because it was, but the tl;dr is it seems Unity is giving a secret pass to companies that switch to use Unity's advertising solution.

Also some quick fun facts:

Unity was never profitable
Unity gave up competing with Unreal over a year ago
Godot is a free and open source engine that competes with Unity professionally
The trash App Store/Play Store games spy on you extensively, although Apple and Google have significantly limited their spying ability over the last couple years (i.e we used to open your camera in the background, can't do that anymore)

Update:

CEO is in talks with some Unity folks. The impression is "this decision came from very high up in Unity" from an exec who "had no idea how bad of an idea it was". We're expecting a public revision shortly (next couple days)

41 comments

Unity the game engine wasn’t profitable or Unity the company? I cannot believe that Unity the company wasn’t raking in tons of money from their asset store.
- It was raking in tons of money, especially since 2020 (772 million for that year), but they somehow were spending way more than they were earning for most of their existence. Beats me how/where that money was being spent. https://investors.unity.com/financials/quarterly-results/default.aspx
  
  It seems Unreal that unity is in the red. They create a software platform and asset store, right? That should effectively print money; it's not like there's a manufacturing cost and profit margin to selling more copies.
- It seems absurd to me that even the game engine isn't profitable.
  The end of the free money is making quite a lot of incompetence very public.
So basically if you want to make an actual game and not a billboard/shitty money siphon then get fucked.
Well the CEO has open disdain for devs who don't enshittify their game so I guess I'm not surprised.
And yes I'm salty that I have to remake my project in a new engine.
- But now you can make it EVEN BETTER!
  Then you can make it again
  And again
  And again
Also, if you want to see how people feel on the forums: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
- tl;dr: they're quite displeased to the tune of 100+ forum pages.
  
  You love to see it
Unreal is better than unity? I know it's a loaded question, but in general how do they compare?
- On the surface level Unreal has it beat for features. However, Unity is generally considered more lightweight plus being easier and less clunky to code for.
  Over the years that's been changing though. With more half-finished bloat being added plus PR disaster's like this, open-source alternatives like Godot are becoming more popular for those who still don't want to use Unreal for whatever reason.
  
  I find unreal less clunky actually because you don't have to make a sub gameobject for everything. With unreal you can nest actor components within the same actor if it makes more intuitive sense to handle things that way.
  
  Thanks for the substantive reply!
- Very few AAA titles are made with Unity. Many are made with Unreal. I guess Unity never really made it into that market.
  
  Unity started off by appealing to hobbyist and indie developers, and that's remained their core audience. It's only been more recently that they've seen some larger studios embrace them.
  
  Then again, the AAA market never really made it into the mobile landscape. That's where you'll find the vast majority of Unity releases
  
  A lot of those AAA unreal games are plagued woth performance issues and shader stutter on PC. Unreal has a lpt of good in there, but it's not all good. Nanite will only contribute in making games even larger than they already are.
- Unreal has 3D features that no other (public) engine has, e.g. Lumen (relatively cheap global illumination) and Nanite (dynamic LOD system) and is miles ahead of unity in this area.
  
  It's also miles behind in development ease. Unreal as an environment is much more difficult and there's a reason most indie games aren't on Unreal.
  Yes, unreal has crazy tech, but it comes at a price. Unity basically gave up competing with them because they're basically totally different markets.
- Not to mention the assest store is huge for unreal - I see so many new title demo's and it's a game of "spot the store asset". Sure, it may look good to an average gamer, but it's super low effort. Unity gives back what you put into it - but Unreal can be a real slog.
  
  I expect Unity's asset store to be the main thing holding back a significant portion of developers. Now that Godot can open one, I expect a lot of non-exclusive stuff to show up once they open theirs.
- The general consensus I've heard is that Unreal is better for 3D, Unity for 2D, but this knowledge was from 2020-ish.
The impression is “this decision came from very high up in Unity” from an exec who “had no idea how bad of an idea it was”
Said exec is a crystal-clear case of the Peter Principle: being promoted to the point of incompetence.
Truly, a person who totally deserves their pay /s
What could you do opening the camera? Stream video to your servers?
- Measure your eye ball focus while playing.
- Audio capture, video was way too expensive (and not useful)
  
  But, was it sent to your servers?
  I am asking in case I need to buy an old nokia

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